夜雨聆风Still, nobody was likely to pay attention to Dora’s inconsistencies. Thereal blow to Charlotte’s security came, as I say, when she was recognizedand spoken to by Rudi Scherz at the Royal Spa Hotel.
“I think that the money Rudi Scherz used to replace his earlier defalca-tions at the hotel may have come from Charlotte Blacklock. InspectorCraddock doesn’t believe—and I don’t either—that Rudi Scherz applied toher for money with any idea of blackmail in his head.”
“He hadn’t the faintest idea he knew anything to blackmail her about,”
said Inspector Craddock. “He knew that he was quite a personable youngman—and he was aware by experience that personable young men some-times can get money out of elderly ladies if they tell a hard-luck story con-vincingly enough.
“But she may have seen it differently. She may have thought that it wasa form of insidious blackmail, that perhaps he suspected something—andthat later, if there was publicity in the papers as there might be after BelleGoedler’s death, he would realize that in her he had found a gold mine.