“Well, I must be tiring you with all my questions,” he declared good-humouredly. “I’m going to ask you one more, though. Is it my fancy, or wasn’t this place—Market Ballaston—the scene of some sort of a tragedy some time ago? The name—Market Ballaston—seemed familiar to me directly I read the advertisement, but I couldn’t recall what it was. If it was anything serious, it must have been whilst I was abroad.”
They all looked at him incredulously. The innkeeper picked up a glass and began to wipe it. The grocer coughed nervously. Even the butler seemed at a loss for words.
“You’ll excuse us, sir,” Mr. Craske said at last. “This is a very small place, of course, and when a thing happens right in the midst of us like what did happen, it seems to us somehow as though the whole world ought to know about it. Still there was a lot of stir—a lot of stir in all the London newspapers.”
“I am a careless reader of the newspapers,” Mr. Johnson confessed. “Besides which, the last twenty years of my life, up to a few months ago, have been spent, not only abroad, but a very long way abroad. Fill up the glasses, Mr. Innkeeper. I have asked you so many questions that you must allow me to be host once more. Now tell me what it was that happened here.”
They all exchanged glances. As though by common but unspoken consent the butler became spokesman.
“There was a very terrible murder committed in this village, sir, just about twelve months ago. A gentleman was killed in the night—shot through the head, he was—and never a trace of the murderer from that day to this.”
“Good God!” Peter Johnson exclaimed, properly shocked. “I am beginning to remember something about it.”
“It was a gentleman of the name of Endacott, from foreign parts like you,” the butler continued, “own brother to Madame at the Little House. He hadn’t been here very long, but he was a harmless body and well liked. He had dined with us at the Hall—him and his niece, a very beautiful young lady—her as Mr. Pank spoke of, being also niece to Madame—and it seemed as though we were going to become quite friendly. One morning—there he was—seated at his desk where he used to work at nights—shot through the head and stone dead, and a box of papers that was by his side all scattered about anyhow. There was police come from Norwich, and there was police come from Scotland Yard in London, but from that day to this they do seem to have been fairly outwitted.”
“What a terrible thing,” Mr. Johnson exclaimed. “In a small place like this, too! Where did it happen? Where did you say he lived?”
There was another embarrassed silence. This time it was the grocer who intervened. There was a note of indignation in his tone.