Explore "The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye" by Brian Flynn on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It seemed to "Pinkie" Kerr that her entire world had come tumbling hopelessly about her ears. That she had been relentlessly caught in the mesh of misery. The news that had awaited her upon her arrival at Tranfield had produced in her a species of mental paralysis. Her brain was numbed. The telegram that had summoned her from her Devonshire home and holiday had not told her all. Bannister had deliberately tempered the blow to her by partly preparing her for the inevitable shock.
She sat in the dining-room of "Rest Harrow" with the brilliant July sunshine pouring through the windows and tried hard to realise that she would never see her beloved Miss Sheila again in this transitory world of hopes, doubts and fears. And the mental paralysis that had so completely taken hold of her mercifully prevented her from experiencing this bitter realisation to its full poignancy. To her, representative as she was of her class, a telegram was always regarded as the harbinger of evil and when it had reached her on the evening of the previous day, she had felt instinctively and assuredly that this particular telegram would prove no exception to the sinister rule. She had obeyed its startling summons almost mechanically-dumbly as it were-making no articulate complaint against the bludgeoning of Fate and accepting the scroll of punishment with a bowed head and the better part of a contrite heart. As she sat in the comfortable chair in the room at "Rest Harrow" and faced Chief-Inspector Bannister, supported left and right by Anthony Bathurst and Sergeant Ross, her sixty-odd years weighed heavily upon her but she tried hard to collect the best qualities of her intelligence for the sake of her "bairn" that had been so foully struck down and so ruthlessly taken from her. The only real consciousness that she possessed was clamouring for vengeance.