Between them they carried the slight figure without difficulty upstairs and into a room which the stout landlady, fluttering round them like a corpulent hen on the landing, indicated as the dead man’s bedroom. The doctor began to undress the body, the inspector helping him, and Roger, for once feeling himself in the way, retired to the sitting-room downstairs to await their verdict.
On the floor by the chair in which the dead man had been sitting lay his pipe, fallen no doubt from his nerveless hand. Roger was about to pick it up with aimless curiosity, when he remembered that nothing should be handled except by the official police. He sat down on a hard horsehair sofa of uninviting aspect and began to think furiously.
At the first shock this unexpected death had seemed completely to upset his carefully worked out theory, the success of which had seemed last night to be a foregone conclusion; but during his hurried mission to the doctor even this had fallen into its place in the scheme. Long before the word suicide had been mentioned at all Roger had arrived at the same conclusion. This explanation, he had realised, so far from upsetting the theory, comfortably confirmed it. Meadows must have got wind of the fact that the net was being drawn round him, and had taken in desperation the only way out. And how had he thus got wind? Even though he was alone, Roger wriggled a trifle guiltily.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Roger had betrayed the inspector’s confidence. It would be no exaggeration at all to say, putting it on its mildest possible terms, that he had been indiscreet. Actually in touch over the telephone with the editor of the Courier (that great man) himself, he had let slip something more than the demure “important developments are expected at any minute” of his official report; he had, in fact, so far given way to his temperamental volubility as to hint that the important developments were due entirely to the Courier’s own special correspondent and his remarkable acumen, the said correspondent having unearthed in the neighbourhood, by a cunning and perspicacity far exceeding that of his official colleague and rival, the presence of a notorious criminal whose past life had been discovered to be bound up with that of the deceased, who had ample motive for compassing her death, and who was actually going to be arrested, though not ostensibly on this account, the very next day—all of which had duly appeared, in a little laudatory article upon the special correspondent, as a preface to his own article that morning. It is true that Roger had imagined himself to be speaking in the strictest confidence, but he had certainly erred in overestimating a newsman’s sense of personal honour where his paper’s interests are concerned.
He glanced across at the Courier which had been taken from the dead man’s knees and wriggled again. Reading that little paragraph, Meadows could hardly fail to realise that his game was up; nobody else perhaps could see the personal application, but to the man concerned it must have been as clear as daylight. Roger ruefully anticipated a bad quarter-of-an-hour with the inspector. However leniently the latter might be disposed to treat the slip and however readily he might accept Roger’s own explanation, this must mean the end of even such meagre confidences as he had been cajoled into bestowing.
Roger began to compose a letter to the editor of the Courier in which he purposed to acquaint that great man with the precise and unvarnished state of his feelings toward him.
He was still in the middle of its vitriolic sentences when the inspector and the doctor reappeared.
“Yes,” the former was saying, “I’ll arrange all that with the Coroner, doctor. Ten o’clock to-morrow morning, the inquest (I don’t see that we can put it much earlier than that) so you’ll be able to get going by eleven.”
“Mr. Simpson—the Coroner—I’m afraid you’ll find him rather a fussy little man,” said the doctor doubtfully. “Very full of his own dignity and importance.”
“Oh, I won’t tread on his toes,” the inspector laughed. “I’m used to fussy coroners, I can tell you. I promise you he’ll call the inquest for ten all right, when I’ve done with him. And you’ll get in touch with the Sandsea man right away?”