"Yes."
"Were they fresh tracks?"
"Yes, I'll swear they were. I noticed by the feathery condition of the snow. They'd been made very shortly before mine."
Masters studied him. "Fresh tracks, and you say the body was already cold then. Hurrum. So that the tracks couldn't have been made hours before you saw… Tut, young man Tut tut tut! I'm suspecting nobody, ha ha ha. Not Mr. Bohun, of course." His smile looked almost genuine. "But did anybody actually see him go in when he said he did? Eh? Eh?"
"Yes. As a matter of fact, a groom or somebody. I've forgotten his name."
* See The Plague Court Murders.
"Oh, ah," said Masters, nodding. He sat down his cup and got up urbanely. "Now, I shall want to know a great deal about the people in this house. Everything that happened; eh? Death of Marcia Tait!" said Masters. "Lummy, what a plum! First thing under my nose since-well, since. Excuse me if I'm interested. Mrs. M. and I go often to the pictures, Mr. Bennett." He seemed frankly surprised at his good or bad fortune in being so near Marcia Tait. "And why I came to you, Sir Henry tells me you know all this group? You've travelled with 'em, know what they're like… What? No?'
'I've travelled with them. I'm not at all sure I know what they're like."
Masters said that was better yet; he shook hands cordially, and said he must go to see how Inspector Potter was handling matters. When he had gone, Bennett considered Masters' suggestion about John Bohun, and knew that it was absurd. But it worried and depressed him. Finding a bell-cord beside the fireplace, he summoned a flurried Thompson and suggested that he would like to find his room.
After more crooked passages and one magnificent low staircase, he found himself sitting on the bed of a very large and very cold room opening off a broad gallery on the second floor of the house. The whole place had the usual disconsolate early-morning look. What was worse, as they passed along the dusky gallery he could have sworn he heard somebody sobbing in one of the rooms. Thompson had obviously noticed it, though he pretended otherwise. He said that there would be breakfast in half an hour. The man's swollen jaw (hadn't Bohun said something about a toothache?) was paining him, and the news of the murder must clearly have torn the last rags of his self-possession. When he heard that faint sobbing, he began speaking loudly as though to drown it out; stabbing his finger towards a door at the end of the gallery, and repeating, "King Charles's room, sir. King Charles's room. Now occupied by Mr. John!" in the fashion of a hysterical guide. The gallery ran the width of the house, and King Charles's room was just opposite the one to which Bennett had been shown.