It came away in his hand, revealing a thin, oval face, a firm mouth and chin, the face of a man not over forty. The jerk had parted the lips, and these sent out a mocking grin, suggesting that it was nothing to Blunt what they did now. Derrick’s breath nearly stopped. A new shadow fell across the body. He looked up and saw Martin. There was a grim satisfaction in the gardener’s dark eyes. It shot through Derrick’s mind that this would free Martin from further suspicion. Burke stared at him, too, then at Derrick. He did not speak, but the same thought was in his mind. He turned again to the limp figure in the grass.
“It looks as though your friend were done for this time, Martin. I’ll not ask you anything now. Your opportunity will come later. Better give Peters a hand and take this chap to the cottage.”
The peddler was carried away, his slight frame sagging limply between gardener and constable. Derrick, watching this, yielded to a vivid realization of the immutability of fate. Ten minutes ago this man was charged with life, throbbing with a desire that he hugged to his soul, and for which he had journeyed from a mysterious country, forgetting all else in one supreme ambition. Now the thing that had driven him thus far had struck its own ambassador, the next appointed to die, and the thing itself leered up from the ground at his feet, malevolent, devilish, and seemingly yet unsatiated. Derrick picked up a stone and was about to splinter the sneering jade when something flickered in the green eyes, mocking and immune, warning him that the time was not yet. Presently he felt that Burke was regarding him with broad amusement.
“If I may say so, sir, I wouldn’t smash it yet. We’ll need it for evidence, and if possible I’d like to hear what Perkins and your gardener have to say about the thing. Shall I take it to the station?”
Derrick stiffened. “No, thanks,” he said abruptly. “I’ll look after it till it’s needed. I think perhaps it feels more at home at the Lodge.”
He picked up the jade god from the ground, dropped it in his pocket as though the touch burned him, and went slowly across the lawn beside Burke. Passing the house, he saw Edith at a bedroom window and waved her a cheery greeting. She signaled back, and he noticed that she smiled with relief. What a standby she had been, he reflected. In a flash his thoughts sped to Jean. He had not seen Perkins, but the woman was at the study window, her hands at her thin breast, a sort of ecstatic joy in her sallow face. So on to the cottage, where the peddler’s body had been deposited on the kitchen floor. Derrick regarded it silently, and again that recurrent sense of unreality came over him.
“What next?” He turned to the sergeant.
“Nothing at the moment, sir, till we get hold of Dr. Henry. It will be queer to have him here once more in the same matter. Had this man any possessions, Martin?”
The gardener gave an odd smile and picked out of the corner a tightly knotted pack.
“This was all I saw. It’s trinkets and such like, but he didn’t show them to me.”