"I should think that yours was pretty easy to lose," said Mr.
Flexen dryly.
"I know it. It is very short, sir. It always was; and I can't help it," said Hutchings in an apologetic voice.
"Then you'd better set about learning to help it, my man," said
Mr. Flexen.
He took out his pipe and filled it slowly. The flush faded a little from
Hutchings' face. Mr. Flexen lighted his pipe and rose.
Then as he went to the door he said: "I should advise you to get that stupid temper well in hand. It makes a bad impression. Good afternoon."
Mr. Flexen drove back to the Castle, considering Hutchings carefully. There was no doubt that he was, indeed, badly frightened; but he had reason to be. Mr. Flexen could not decide whether he had worn the air of a guilty man or an innocent. He could not decide whether the butler had been too deeply absorbed in his own affairs to hear the snoring of Lord Loudwater as he went through the library. It was possible that Lord Loudwater was alive, asleep, and yet not snoring at the time. Snoring is often intermittent.
He considered Hutchings' violent outburst. Certainly such an outburst showed the man uncommonly unbalanced; it might, indeed, on occasion take the form of uncontrollable murderous fury. But it seemed to him that an actual meeting with Lord Loudwater would have been necessary to provoke that. But Lord Loudwater had been sitting in his chair when he died; and if he had not killed himself, he had been killed in his sleep. At any rate, there was probably sufficient evidence, seeing what juries are, to convict Hutchings. If he had been one of those not uncommon ministers of the law, whose only desire is to secure a conviction, he would doubtless arrest him at once. But it was not his only desire to secure a conviction; it was his very keen desire to find the right solution of the problem. He could not see where any more evidence against Hutchings was to come from. What Mr. Manley had told him about the knife, that it had been in general use, and that he had seen Hutchings cut string with it the day before the murder, greatly lessened its value as evidence, even if Hutchings' finger-prints were thick on it. He decided to dismiss Hutchings from his mind for the time being, and devote all his energies to discovering the mysterious woman with whom Lord Loudwater had had the furious quarrel between eleven and a quarter-past.
With this end in view, on his return to the Castle, he went straight to the library, where Mr. Carrington was engaged, along with Mr. Manley, in an examination of the murdered man's papers. They were uncommonly few, and Mr. Manley had already set them in order. Lord Loudwater seemed to have kept but few letters, and the papers consisted chiefly of receipted and unreceipted bills.
When he found that Mr. Flexen had come to confer with the lawyer, Mr.
Manley assumed an air of extraordinary discretion and softly withdrew.
"I want to know—it is most important—whether there was any entanglement between Lord Loudwater and a woman," said Mr. Flexen.