29“Of course she’s always looked divine in black. But I suppose she’ll think it old-fashioned to wear it.”
Freddie Mollinson said that. We were downstairs in the drawing room, reduced to silent gnomes huddled unconsciously into a small close group in front of the fireplace—Ellery Seymour, Freddie, Bill Kent and I. Dorothy was still upstairs with Captain Lamb and the medical examiner they’d sent for immediately. Bill had come with Lamb, interrupted by Theodore’s last call as they were in his office.
At first I don’t think any of us heard what Freddie said. Then, as the heartless enormity of it seeped into our numbed brains, we all looked at him. He looked back at us, trying to keep up his pose of indifference to anything that unsettled the pleasant functioning of his own ego. But he could
