"Yes, if the party doesn't break up too late. I'll get my bags packed beforehand to be ready. -Anyway, there's the situation, sir." For a moment Bennett struggled between a feeling that he was making a fool of himself, and the feeling that a deadlier thing lay behind this. "I've taken up a lot of your time. I've talked interminably. Maybe for nothing "
"Or maybe not," said H. M. He leaned forward ponderously. "Listen to me, now."
Big Ben struck six-thirty.
CHAPTER THREE
Death at the Mirror
At six-thirty on the following morning, Bennett was studying a small and complicated map by the light of the dashboard lamps, and he was shivering. On a thirteen-mile drive out of the maze of London he had already lost his way and taken a bewildering variety of wrong roads. Two hours earlier, with the champagne still in his head, it had seemed an excellent idea to drive down to the White Priory and arrive at dawn of a snowy December morning. The reception was not to blame. But, in the course of a starched evening, he had fallen in with a group of Young England who also felt restive. Long before the awning was taken down and the lights put up at Something House, they had adjourned for a small party. Later he drove flamboyantly out of Shepherd's Market on his way to the depths of Surrey; but only the first hour had been pleasant.
Now he felt drowsy, dispirited, and chilled through, with that light-headed, unreal sensation which comes of watching car-lamps flow along interminably through a white unreal world.
It would shortly be daylight. The east was gray now, and the stars had gone pale. He felt the cold weighing down his eyelids; and he got out and stamped in the road to warm himself. Ahead of him, under a thin crust of unbroken snow, the narrow road ran between bare hawthorn hedges. To the right were built up ghostly-looking woods where the sky was still black. To the left, immense in half-light and glimmering with snow, bare fields sank and rose again into the mysterious Downs. Toy steeples, toy chimneys, began to show in their folds; but there was no smoke yet. For no reason at all, he felt uneasy. The roar of the engine as he shifted into gear again beat up too loudly in this dead world.
There was nothing to be uneasy about. On the contrary. He tried to remember what H.M. had said on the previous
afternoon years ago-and found that his fuddled brain would not work. In his wallet he had two telephone numbers. One was for H. M.'s private wire at Whitehall. The other was for extension 42 of the celebrated Victoria 7000: which would at any time reach Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters, recently promoted chief of the C. I. D. for his (and H. M.'s) work on the Plague Court murders. The numbers were useless. Nothing was wrong.