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VII

Tony Marston, roaring down into Mere, thought to himself:

‘The amount of cars crawling about the roads is frightful. Always something blocking your way. And they will drive in the middle of the road! Pretty hopeless driving in England, anyway… Not like France where you really could let out…’

Should he stop here for a drink, or push on? Heaps of time! Only another hundred miles and a bit to go. He’d have a gin and ginger beer. Fizzing hot day!

This island place ought to be rather good fun—if the weather lasted. Who were these Owens, he wondered? Rich and stinking, probably. Badger was rather good at nosing people like that out. Of course, he had to, poor old chap, with no money of his own…

Hope they’d do one well in drinks. Never knew with these fellows who’d made their money and weren’t born to it. Pity that story about Gabrielle Turl having bought Soldier Island wasn’t true. He’d like to have been in with that film star crowd.

Oh, well, he supposed there’d be a few girls there…

Coming out of the hotel, he stretched himself, yawned, looked up at the blue sky and climbed into the Dalmain.

Several young women looked at him admiringly—his six feet of well-proportioned body, his crisp hair, tanned face, and intensely blue eyes.

He let in the clutch with a roar and leapt up the narrow street. Old men and errand boys jumped for safety. The latter looked after the car admiringly.

Anthony Marston proceeded on his triumphal progress.

VIII

Mr Blore was in the slow train from Plymouth. There was only one other person in his carriage, an elderly seafaring gentleman with a bleary eye. At the present moment he had dropped off to sleep.

Mr Blore was writing carefully in a little notebook.

‘That’s the lot,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Emily Brent, Vera Claythorne, Dr Armstrong, Anthony Marston, old Justice Wargrave, Philip Lombard, General Macarthur, CMG, DSO, Manservant and wife: Mr and Mrs Rogers.’

He closed the notebook and put it back in his pocket. He glanced over at the corner and the slumbering man.

‘Had one over the eight,’ diagnosed Mr Blore accurately.

He went over things carefully and conscientiously in his mind.

‘Job ought to be easy enough,’ he ruminated. ‘Don’t see how I can slip up on it. Hope I look all right.’

He stood up and scrutinised himself anxiously in the glass. The face reflected there was of a slightly military cast with a moustache. There was very little expression in it. The eyes were grey and set rather close together.

‘Might be a Major,’ said Mr Blore. ‘No, I forgot. There’s that old military gent. He’d spot me at once.’

‘South Africa,’ said Mr Blore, ‘that’s my line! None of these people have anything to do with South Africa, and I’ve just been reading that travel folder so I can talk about it all right.’

Fortunately there were all sorts and types of colonials. As a man of means from South Africa, Mr Blore felt that he could enter into any society unchallenged.

Soldier Island. He remembered Soldier Island as a boy… Smelly sort of rock covered with gulls—stood about a mile from the coast. It had got its name from its resemblance to a man’s head.