“Any comments to make on them?” The Sergeant puffed out his cheeks and endeavored to look impressive.
“I have nothing against any of them.”
“You’ll forgive me, I hope, putting the question, Mr. Stewart—especially at a time like this—had your father any entanglements as you might say with the opposite sex?” The indelicacy of his query affected the Sergeant so profoundly as to produce a superfluous aspirate.
But once again he was destined to draw a blank.
“You can make your mind easy on that point, Sergeant. My mother died ten years ago when I was twelve. It was a great blow to my father—they idolized each other—I don’t think the thought of another woman since has ever entered my father’s mind.” He kept his gaze resolutely averted from the still figure at the desk. Doctor Gunner, before he had slipped out, had reverently laid a white towel over the head and face. But the boy’s nerves were rapidly getting on edge, and he felt he would be unable to endure this phlegmatic policeman very much longer. Clegg, however, was nothing if not “thorough.” His favorite philosophy was to contemplate the epic struggle of the hare and the tortoise and whenever he was tempted to hitch his personal wagon to a star he always took excessive care to see it was well secured. “I don’t believe in taking a lot of risks,” he was wont to say to his staff at Assynton. “Care may have killed the cat, but it’s never been known to have killed a policeman.”
This case that Fate had tossed so unexpectedly into his lap was beginning to worry him a trifle. It was so much bigger than anything he had previously handled. Once again the conviction was borne upon him that in all likelihood it would prove eventually to be too much for him. However, “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” might have been his uppermost thought as he squared his ponderous shoulders and walked across the room. As you entered, the desk stood on the left with its back to the left-hand wall. The leathern arm-chair in which the dead man sat was drawn up to the desk in the usual way. A person seated in this arm-chair would therefore show the left-hand side of his face to anybody entering by the door. Facing the door stood a bookcase—sectional. It was of many more sections than is usual. Stewart was evidently a lover of books—the “standard” authors jostled each other and Coventry Patmore rubbed shoulders with Renan, Baudelaire and Verlaine. On the right were French windows commanding the garden. No part of it, however, brought Sergeant Clegg his badly needed “inspiration.” Nothing in the room seemed to him to tell any story other than its natural one. He walked back to the door. That door worried him. “Key in the lock on the inside,” he muttered—“bolts on the French doors shot—top and bottom—and a dead man inside the room.”
He made his disconsolate way to the fireplace—on the bookcase’s right. Bending down, he stepped into the hearth and attempted to look up the chimney. The attempt proved completely unsuccessful as a source of inspiration. It was speedily made plain to the Sergeant that the murderer of Laurence P. Stewart had not escaped in that direction. Then an idea struck him.
“Have you communicated with your father’s solicitors, Mr. Stewart?”
Stewart shook his head. “No, my father’s solicitors are Crake and Ferguson—New York. I’m going to get Mr. Llewellyn to cable them as soon as possible.”
“New York’s a long way away. It’s a pity you haven’t somebody nearer.”