‘A woman,’ said the doctor.
‘Oh!’ said Merton.
‘I know what you mean,’ said the doctor. ‘You think, it suits your theory, that the marquis came to himself and—’
‘And squared the female watcher,’ interrupted Merton; ‘she would assist him in his crazy stratagem.’
‘Mr. Merton, you’ve read ower many novels,’ said the doctor, lapsing into the vernacular. ‘Well, your notion is not unthinkable, nor pheesically impossible. She’s a queer one, Jean Bower, that waked the corpse, sure enough. However, you’ll soon be on the spot, and can examine the case for yourself. Mr. Logan has no idea but that the body was stolen for purposes of blackmail.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We must be going to catch the train, if she’s anything like punctual.’
The pair walked in silence to the station, were again watched curiously by the public (who appeared to treat the station as a club), and after three-quarters of an hour of slow motion and stoppages, arrived at their destination, Drem.
The doctor’s own man with a dog-cart was in waiting.
‘The marquis had neither machine nor horse,’ the doctor explained.
Through the bleak late twilight they were driven, past two or three squalid mining villages, along a road where the ruts showed black as coal through the freezing snow. Out of one village, the lights twinkling in the windows, they turned up a steep road, which, after a couple of hundred yards, brought them
to the old stone gate posts, surmounted by heraldic animals.