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Jasmine asked in that matter-of-fact way which comes at those times when the senses are numbed by tragedy. "You remember the needle Mr. Mappin's needle? I knew Adrian had it. He showed it to me. He could not keep the secret. He was too weak. The needle was in his pocket-book to kill me with some day perhaps. He certainly had not the courage to kill himself.... I went to see him. He was dressing.
At length the demand for his pens became so great that it was impossible to resist the urgent necessity for larger premises and increased labour. Mr. Gillott, accordingly, removed to Church Street, and subsequently took other premises, up the yard by Mr. Mappin's shop in Newhall Street.
Stafford's voice was civil and sympathetic. "Confidence breeds carelessness," was Mr. Mappin's enigmatical retort. "You were over-confident then?" "Quite clearly so. I thought that Glencader was beyond reproach." There was a slight pause, and then Stafford, flicking away some cigarette ashes, continued the catechism. "What particular form of reproach do you apply to Glencader?" "Thieving."
That was a day of tragedy, when you and Rudyard Byng won a hundred Royal Humane Society medals, and we all felt like martyrs and heroes. I had the most creepy dreams afterwards. One night it was awful. I was being tortured with Mr. Mappin's needle horribly by guess whom? By that half-caste Krool, and I waked up with a little scream, to find Tynie busy pinching me.
I was out of town when it happened a bad case at Leeds; but I returned early this morning." He paused, inquiringly but Ian said nothing, and he continued, "I have seen the body." "You were not at the inquest, I think," Ian remarked, casually. "No, I was not in time for that, but I got permission to view the body." "And the verdict you approve?" "Heart failure yes." Mr. Mappin's lip curled.
Then she withdrew them. "I think," she sighed, "you an' me could do with a cup of tea." And presently I was having tea with Mrs. Mappin. I was afterwards to learn that this practice of calling a halt in her labours for a cup of tea was a highly incorrect one on Mrs. Mappin's part, and that my share in the transaction was to the last degree reprehensible.
Opening the blotter, he took something up carefully and looked at it with a sardonic smile. "You did your work quite well," he said, reflectively. It was such a needle as he had seen at Glencader in Mr. Mappin's hand. He had picked it up in Adrian Fellowes' room. "I wonder who used you," he said in a hard voice. "I wonder who used you so well. Was it was it Jasmine?"
Had the Sister and her nurses not been occupied elsewhere, I doubt whether I should have been free to drink that cup of tea at all a circumstance of which perhaps Mrs. Mappin was more aware than I. At any rate the call of "Orderly!" from a patient summoned me from the kitchen and into the ward long before I had finished drying Mrs. Mappin's dishes.
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