“Like those mysterious swans again, I suppose?” said Faith with an impish look.
Nigel again ignored the question. “Melissa was a fairly tough number. She admitted to me she was a selfish woman. Now I don’t think Melissa would ever have been so shocked and prostrated by her sister’s death—after all, Ianthe had threatened suicide—as the bogus Melissa gave herself out to be.”
“She would have been, if she’d committed the murders.”
“Certainly, Peter. But there was never any conceivable reason why Melissa should kill Ianthe. But if it was the other way round, as I believed it was, Ianthe would need all the respite and privacy she could get: so the bogus Melissa exaggerated the natural effects of shock. If I hadn’t been there to poke my nose in, I believe she’d still have got away with it, in spite of the Primrose complication.”
“If the Greek police are as susceptible as Nikki, she would,” Clare said.
“They’d not have pressed her hard. With any luck, she could rely on their accepting the theory that Ianthe had had a brainstorm, murdered Primrose, and then thrown herself off the ship. Ianthe had been playing up her nervous condition like mad for days, and——”
“Like the swans?” said Faith.
“What is all this about swans?” Peter demanded.
“I can tell you,” said Clare dreamily. “They had ants in their wing-pits.”
“Which of course explains everything,” Peter dryly remarked.
“It does, you know,” said Nigel. “From the start of the voyage, I was puzzled by Ianthe’s behaviour. She jumped out of her skin whenever the ship’s siren blew. She sat about the deck, looking like a lump of dough sodden with misery. She twitched and winced and flared up. She made a scene at Jeremy Street’s first lecture. She made a scene in the cave on Patmos; and she made yet another when I offered my sympathy over this. She was deliberately building up the impression of an unstable mind. Now, if she’d genuinely been as bad as all that, the doctors would never have allowed her out of the nursing home. Melissa told me, that day on Delos——”
“What a lot Melissa told you that day on Delos,” Clare remarked.
“Yes. She told me the doctors had said it was quite all right for Ianthe to go on a cruise: she was ‘well over the worst’. But Ianthe was now telling Melissa she had nothing worth living for, couldn’t go on any longer, etc. So I began to wonder, quite idly, what all this malingering was in aid of. Why should Ianthe give these public exhibitions of a suicidal tendency? But I dare say my mind would never have started working on this line, but for something that happened months before the cruise.”
“Ah, now we come to them at last,” said Faith.
“Yes. Clare and I were walking by the Serpentine, and we saw a mob of swans behaving in a very peculiar way.” Nigel described the scene in detail. “So Clare made some frivolous and heartless remark about their being afflicted with ants.”
“And you said they must be having a nervous breakdown,” Clare put in.
“And what did you say then, my love?”
“I can’t recollect. Something forceful and intelligent, I’ve no doubt.”
“It was. More so than you knew. You said, ‘Well, if they are, they’re overdoing it badly.’”
THE END
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