She'd pretend to swim out after him.
But she'd arrive too late...
Nobody would ever suspect...
Had Hugo suspected?
Was that why he had looked at her in that queer far-off way...?
Had Hugo known?
Was that why he had gone off after the inquest so hurriedly?
He hadn't answered the one letter she had written to him...
Hugo...
Vera turned restlessly in bed.
No, no, she mustn't think of Hugo.
It hurt too much!
That was all over, over and done with... Hugo must be forgotten... Why, this evening, had she suddenly felt that Hugo was in the room with her?
She stared up at the ceiling, stared at the big black hook in the middle of the room.
She'd never noticed that hook before.
The seaweed had hung from that...
She shivered as she remembered that cold clammy touch on her neck...
She didn't like that hook on the ceiling.
It drew your eyes, fascinated you... a big black hook...
V Ex-Inspector Blore sat on the side of his bed.
His small eyes, red-rimmed and bloodshot, were alert in the solid mass of his face.
He was like a wild boar waiting to charge.
He felt no inclination to sleep.
The menace was coming very near now...
Six out of ten!
For all his sagacity, for all his caution and astuteness, the old judge had gone the way of the rest.
Blore snorted with a kind of savage satisfaction.
"What was it the old geezer had said?" "We must be very careful..."
Self-righteous smug old hypocrite. Sitting up in court feeling like God Almighty.
He'd got his all right... No more being careful for him.
And now there were four of them.
The girl, Lombard, Armstrong and himself.
Very soon another of them would go... But it wouldn't be William Henry Blore.
He'd see to that all right. (But the revolver... What about the revolver? That was the disturbing factor - the revolver!)
Blore sat on his bed, his brow furrowed, his little eyes creased and puckered while he pondered the problem of the revolver... In the silence he could hear the clocks strike downstairs.
Midnight.
He relaxed a little now - even went so far as to lie down on his bed.
But he did not undress.
He lay there, thinking.
Going over the whole business from the beginning, methodically, painstakingly, as he had been wont to do in his police officer days.
It was thoroughness that paid in the end.
The candle was burning down.
Looking to see if the matches were within easy reach of his hand, he blew it out.
Strangely enough, he found the darkness disquieting.
It was as though a thousand age-old fears awoke and struggled for supremacy in his brain.
Faces floated in the air - the judge's face crowned with that mockery of grey wool - the cold dead face of Mrs. Rogers - the convulsed purple face of Anthony Marston... Another face - pale, spectacled, with a small straw-coloured moustache... A face he had seen sometime or other - but when?
Not on the island.
No, much longer ago than that.
Funny, that he couldn't put a name to it...
Silly sort of face really - fellow looked a bit of a mug.