Too Many Cousins

Sansil? Where the country cousin works? No, it sticks out.”
“Fun for Cousin Mortimer. From what I hear of him, he won’t enjoy police inquiries. Very infra dig.” Mr. Tuke reached for his hat and sat up. “Well, good hunting, Wray. Having laid my little train, I will depart, leaving you to get on with it. I’ve done my duty, and I’ve done no more —so far.”
“Are you going to meddle again?” Wray asked sharply.
“I’m on holiday. And I have a sort of proprietory interest in the case.”
“If it is a case. I suppose you mean the Frenchwoman. Of course, though she’s alive at the moment, it’s no new thing for your friends to get murdered.”
Mr. Tuke got to his feet. “If you mean Norman Sleight,1 he was merely a member of one of my clubs. And you are still alive. I often wonder why.”
Wray uttered his little neigh of a laugh. “Perhaps she is stringing you along, Tuke. If one of these cousins is liquidating the others, it may be Mile Boulanger herself. She may be playing for the break. In the event of another death or two, she could say ‘I told you so’.”
“I had thought of that. But it would seem very rash of her to drag the matter into the light of day. So far as she is aware, no suspicions had been aroused. She can’t know about Parmiter. If she hadn’t confirmed his story, I doubt if I should have done anything about it. In which case, our conscientious but ill-co-ordinated police forces would never have begun to put two and two together.”
Wray threw up his hands. “The conceit of the man! It was your pal Parmiter who put two and two together, not you. And you often forget, Tuke, that other people may not share your high opinion of yourself.”
“Their mistake,” said Mr. Tuke blandly. “Well, bye-bye, Wray. Get on with it. Co-ordinate. Stir up the county constabularies of Beds, Herts and Surrey. Set the mills of God, and the teeth of chief constables, slowly grinding.” Wray had picked up a telephone. “Oh, go to the devil!” he said.
With a grin that made him look more than ever like that personage, Mr. Tuke took his departure.

CHAPTER VI
MRS. TUKE, who had obtained a few days’ permission to coincide with her husband’s holiday, met him with a slightly worried expression on her charming face when he returned to St. Luke’s Court to lunch.
“I told Cecile,” she said.
“About Cousin Raymond?”
“Yes. I pretended you had just heard of it by chance.”
“How did she take it?”
“I am sure she did not know about it. One could see what a shock it was to her. Harvey, she really is frightened now. I wish you had not asked me to tell her. You will have to do something to clear up this horror, for her sake.”
“I have made a beginning. Wray’s attention has been drawn to the sequence of fatal mishaps in the Shearsby family. Of course it was news to him. Not his department’s fault, actually, but it would never do to say so. Discipline must be maintained. The police are always wrong. Did you suggest to your Gecile that she should leave London?”
“She does not wish to leave London.”
“Oh, doesn’t she?”
Yvette smiled. “You need not be suspicious, Harvey. It is only because there is a man in the background. Or so I have heard. And then there was Gecile’s manner. She looked mulish and self-conscious.”
“Try to find out something about the man, will you?” Mrs. Tuke was looking curiously at her husband when the telephone rang in the hall. A minute later Chichester, the parlourmaid, announced that Mr. Tuke’s office was calling.
“My office? I’m on holiday. I’m in the Kyles of Bute.”
“It’s Mr. Chaffinch, sir,” Chichester said rather crushingly.
Mr. Tuke groaned, and went to the telephone. Chaffinch was his chief clerk, and would not telephone without good reason. When he rejoined his wife, several minutes later, he was smiling sardonically.
“Well, what do you know about that? The answer is, of course, nothing yet, but these Americanisms have a certain expressiveness. Another member of the persecuted Shearsby family is in my office. Mortimer, the chemist. With wife.”
“What do they want?”
“To see me, urgently. He refuses to say why. Very hot and bothered, according to Chaffinch.”
“But why you, Harvey? How does he know about you? I mean, it must be about these deaths.”
“I hope so. Perhaps he has been in touch with Mile Boulanger. She didn’t mention him, I suppose?”
“No, but it was two hours ago when I saw her. I did not stay in the office. I am on leave, too.”
“So you are. I’m sorry, my dear, if the Shearsby family are rather getting in our hair, to use another Americanism—I pick them up from Karnes—but you began it.”
“I was not complaining,” Yvette said. “Only do not allow Cecile and her family desagrements to take up all of my holiday, to say nothing of yours. What are you going to do about this Mr. Shearsby?”
Mr. Tuke smiled affectionately at his wife. “You are becoming quite English in your habit of understatement. Desagrements is good. I told Chaffinch I could spare a quarter of an hour here at half-past two.”
Lunch was over, and the Tukes were in the drawing-room with their coffee, when Chichester entered bearing two visiting cards on a tray.
“How formal they are in the provinces,” Harvey said. “I didn’t know anybody used cards in these days. Bless me, the fellow sticks his honours and awards on them, too. B.A., B.Sc. And his house is called ‘ Aylwynstowe’. I begin to see what Mile Boulanger meant.”
He finished his coffee and made his way to his study, where Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Shearsby stood at the window, looking out over the chimney-stacks of Westminster. They turned about at Harvey’s entry. Mortimer Shearsby was a tall man with a stoop and a vague and fussy air. According to his cousin Cecile he was only thirty-six, but his greying hair