"Then Rainger knew you were married to Tait, hey?" "He guessed it. Anyhow, I admitted it when he said we had to work fast."
"Did John Bohun know it?"
"No."
"Now be careful, son: sure you got a grip on yourself? Take it easy. Didn't John Bohun know it?"
"She told me herself he didn't! She swore to me she'd never told him."
H. M. straightened up. "All right," he said in a colorless voice. "You might find your friend Rainger and see if you can sober him up. We're goin' down to the pavilion now. " He peered round, the corners of his mouth turning down. "Where's my nephew, hey? Where's James B. Bennett? Ah! Humph. You come along. I want to know just how she was lyin' on the floor when you found her. And some other things. Come on."
Bennett looked down at Katharine, who had not spoken or uttered a murmur since Emery's arrival. She did not even speak when she motioned him to go.
With H. M. lumbering ahead and Masters making swift scratches in his notebook, he followed them through the passages to the side-door, where Inspector Potter fought with the, Press. Bennett hurriedly picked up somebody's overcoat, not his own. "Stay behind," growled H. M. to Masters, "and give 'em a statement. Then come down. Nothing to say! Nothing to say!" He opened the door. "Get inside, boys, and talk to the Chief Inspector." He elbowed through the scramble, jealously and with sulphurous murmurs guarding an ancient rusty top-hat in the crook of his arm. Then the door slammed.
They stood for a time on the side-porch, breathing the bitter cold air. To their left the gravel driveway sloped and curved down, under the interlocking branches of the oaks, towards the highway some two hundred yards away. To their right the lawns sloped down again, and the sky was a moving flicker of snow. There was something insistent, something healing, about those silent flakes, that would efface all tracks in the world. They were a symbol and a portent, like one car in the driveway. Although the drive was now crowded with cars, the long Rolls with its drawn blinds stood black against the thickening snow: as though Death waited to take Marcia Tait away. Its presence was an absurdity, but it was not absurd. It looked all the more sombre by reason of Emery's gaudy yellow car, with CINEARTS STUDIO sprawled in shouting letters across it and the thin bronze stork above a smoking radiator: dwarfed by the black car, Life and Death waiting side by side. Bennett found himself thinking of symbols as clumsy as life, a stork or a sable canopy, and along mysterious roads the black car always overtaking the yellow. But most of all there rose in his mind the image of Marcia Tait.
He tried to shake it off as he tramped down the lawn beside H. M. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was nearly half-past one. At this time last night, also when the snow was falling.