Jenny, under Martin's arm, turned her head up to look at him uneasily, inquiringly, while a shiver went through her. He could think only of unshaped devilries against a lurid-glowing red sky.
"But, H.M.," Martin protested, "that's one of the things we do want to understand. How was Fleet killed?"
"You be quiet," H.M. ordered austerely. "I've got somethin’ else to tell you."
Before resuming, he also mentioned the fact that he was the old man.
"Honest," he said, "what bothered me most in that bundle of Masters’s testimonies was the boy. I mean the tow-headed twelve-year old boy, Richard Fleet The Scotland Yard bloke didn't take a statement from him; only the local police did. But he got into the other statements, and he worried me.
"Whatever else George Fleet was, he was dead-keen on sport and dead-keen on the Army. Take his own career! As Masters said, he'd been sent to boarding-school when he was a tiny ‘un — ten or even less — then to Harrow, and then to Sandhurst He couldn't finish Sandhurst because he had to take up his dad's business. Oh, my eye! Don't you see a man like Fleet would be dreamin' of a career for his son just like the interrupted one of his own? Dreamin'? He'd have had it planned in detail from the first cradle-squawk.
"But this son, at twelve, was still at home with a governess. Why?
"Was the boy delicate and rabbity? No: he was a pocket athlete. Thick-witted? That wouldn't have mattered at a school; but, anyway, he was very intelligent. Did the fond mother step in and say she couldn't have her darling away? No: George Fleet ruled that roost and his word was law. "Then why?
"Let's take the boy's governess, this Miss Upton. H’m. There were bits about her in the testimony that bothered me. But let's jump ahead and use what you all knew or heard for yourselves.
— "Miss Upton was the rummiest kind of governess I ever heard off She was sort of immense, with a build like Sandow the Strong Man; and she knew how to put on a real wrestlin-grip. She was with the family for four years. Correct?"