Too Many Cousins

Road. At the crossing at Warwick Way a convoy of lorries was going by—heavy traffic uses Warwick Way to get to Vauxhall Bridge—and I had to wait on the pavement. There was a little crowd there. Suddenly someone gave me a terrific push in the back. I was knocked right out into the road, and almost fell under one of the lorries. I don’t know how I saved myself.”
She shuddered at the recollection. Harvey rose to hand her a cup of tea.
“I take it you didn’t know who pushed you?”
“No. And it was so dark—there was no moon, and it was before double summer-time began—the people there were just blurs.”
“You referred to the affair as an accident. Did you think it was one at the time?”
Mile Boulanger sipped her tea. “Yes, of course,” she said. “Well, I thought it must be, naturally. I thought somebody must have stumbled against me. Though none of the people who were there, beside me, apologised. A man said, quite crossly, ‘You oughtn’t to have tried that on, miss. Gave me a turn, it did’—as if it was my fault. Of course, it happened very quickly, and then the last of the lorries went by, and we all crossed the road. I was feeling very angry,” Cecile added, with a tight little smile. “I suppose because I’d been frightened.”
“And very naturally,” Harvey said. “Have one of these things with jam on them. What, by the way, has made you alter your mind about the accidental nature of the episode?” Mile Boulanger took a jam tart abstractedly, her eyes on his face. Mrs. Tuke was watching him too, having an idea that he suspected what had caused Cecile to alter her mind. But the latter appeared to have no inkling of this.
“Spmething that happened a fortnight ago,” she said. “Another cousin of mine has been killed—by accident.”
“Your family is having a run of bad luck. Who was this other cousin?”
“A Mrs. Porteous. Blanche Porteous. She was a schoolteacher, and she took poison by mistake. Or they say so.”
“But you are not so sure?”
Cecile Boulanger’s rather thick dark eyebrows contracted in a frown of worry and perplexity.
“Oh, I don’t know what to think!” she exclaimed fretfully. “It would never have occurred to me that it was anything but an accident if it hadn’t been for what happened to me. And to Sydney. That was how he was killed. By a lorry, or a van. Of course, I don’t really mean that he was pushed. I just don’t know. But now. . . . I mean, three of us, in a few months, killed or nearly killed, by accidents. . . .” She shrugged, and went on more quietly: “Well, Mr. Tuke, one half of me, the English half, I suppose, tells me not to be a fool. Accidents are happening every day. But then the. other half, the French half, says I ought to think clearly and logically about it, and not be casual and woolly. And when I do think it out like that, it seems very queer. . . . ”
Mile Boulanger’s French half, Harvey reflected, would think it queerer still if it knew that not two, but three other members of her family had met with fatal accidents in those few months. But apparently Gecile had not yet learnt of the death of Raymond Shearsby. The possibility that he was not her relation occurred to Mr. Tuke, and was dismissed. There was a limit to one’s acceptance of coincidences. Altogether it seemed that the thorough-going methods of his club acquaintance, Parmiter, had in this instance unearthed a story which at least called for inquiry.
“So we come back,” was all Harvey said, “to the question I asked in the beginning. Why should anyone want to kill you and your cousins, Mile Boulanger?”
“We are heirs to a large sum of money,” Gecile replied.

CHAPTER III
PERHAPS it was the French half of Gecile Boulanger that animated her dark eyes and tightened her rather thin lips as she uttered the words, “a large sum of money”. But even among the casual and woolly English, money is at the root of ninety-nine per cent, of crime, and, with such a motive declared at the outset, this sequence of fatalities in her family took on an even more suggestive aspect. Mr. Tuke, who had been lying back in his chair, sat up, crossed his legs, and put the tips of his fingers together, a sort of forensic attitude which meant that his interest was aroused.
“As you speak of cousins in the present tense,” he remarked, “I take it that there are more of you.”
“There were six,” Gecile said.
“Of whom, to your knowledge, two have recently died?” She nodded, giving him a curious look, as though her undoubtedly sharp wits were slightly puzzled by the qualifying clause.
“What is the exact relationship between you?” Harvey went on. “And how do you come to be heirs to a large sum of money? In fact, tell me all about your family.”
“Give Cecile some more tea, Harvey, and something to eat, before she begins/’ Yvette put in. “These proces of yours are rather exhausting.”
The guest’s cup and plate were replenished, and Harvey resumed his attentive attitude. Fortified by a bite into a tomato sandwich, Gecile took up her tale.
“I had better give you a sort of family tree,” she said. “It will explain how the money comes into it.”
“By all means make it clear. May I smoke a cigar?”
“Please do. I used to wish my father smoked them, but he could not smoke at all, because of his profession.” Mile Boulanger finished her sandwich, and continued: “It all begins with my great-grandfather on my mother’s side. His name was Rutland Shearsby.”
Again Yvette noted an all but imperceptible shade of expression on her husband’s face which implied that this name held some meaning for him. He was lighting a Larranaga with his usual care, rotating it between his lips so that the flame of