“Paul Belden?”
“He’s the fellow Cecilia Warren is going to marry, if they can ever afford to get married.”
“If Mrs. Gregson dies, perhaps?”
Locke slowly raised himself to a sitting position. He asked: “What does that mean?”
“From what Mrs. Gregson tells me, it means something. She has told me a very curious story, which begins with grease on the cellar stairs.”
“Grease?” Locke, gazing fixedly at him, frowned. “Grease?”
“And then poison in a mackerel.”
Locke’s ice-blue eyes remained steadily on Gamadge’s greenish-grey ones. He said: “Oh.” And after a moment: “Those accidents last summer. I don’t know what you mean by poison—the mackerel was bad.”
“Very bad. Now she says that her gas oven was turned on one night, since she came to New York; and last week somebody sent her a fruit cak
