It was Sharpless who finished this for her. "But," he said rather wildly, "you're just as sure about the other thing. So am I. I've got eyes. I've got ears. I'll take my Bible oath, I’ll swear to my dying day, that nobody could have got in here either by the windows or by the door!"
And, as a matter of fact, he was perfectly right.
Six
In the library of a house not far away, Sir Henry Merrivale was beginning to dictate his memoirs.
It was an impressive moment. H.M., his spectacles down on his nose and his bald head glistening, was piled somehow into the desk chair in the room whose walls were hung with his host's collection of old weapons. H.M. had assumed what he believed to be an impressive posture: his elbow on the desk, and one finger at his temple like Victor Hugo. He tried to refrain from looking pleased with this, and merely succeeded in looking stuffed.
"I was born," he began, with suitable portentousness, "on February 6, 1871, at Cranleigh Court, near Great Yewborough, in Sussex."
This, Philip Courtney thought, was going to be easy.
Courtney had spent a lazy afternoon. He strolled along the Promenade. He had coffee at the Cavendish. He tasted the "waters," and visited the museum. Towards nine o'clock, after a late dinner, he boarded a number three bus at the Center and was put down by the conductor at the beginning of Fitzherbert Avenue.
Yet he remained uneasy.
There were only half a dozen houses in the avenue, each set back in its own grounds behind shoulder-high stone walls. As he passed the big white square house which must belong to Arthur Fane, he stopped and looked at it.