“I believe I was.”
“You said nothing else, Mr. Lee—nothing that would give any idea of the object of this visit?”
Again his host hesitated.
“I don’t know. I’m almost afraid that I did,” he confessed. “I remember telling the postmaster that I was going to talk to Mr. Poole about poor Barberton—Mr. Barberton was very well known in this neighbourhood.”
“That is extremely unfortunate,” said Leon.
He was thinking of two things at the same time: the whereabouts of the missing lawyer, and the wonderful cover that the wall between the window and the floor gave to any man who might creep along out of sight until he got back suddenly to send the snake on its errand of death.
“How many men have you got in the grounds, by the way, Meadows?”
“One, and he’s not in the grounds but outside on the road. I pull him in at night, or rather in the evening, to patrol the grounds, and he is armed.” He said this with a certain importance. An armed English policeman is a tremendous phenomenon, that few have seen.
“Which means that he has a revolver that he hasn’t fired except at target practice,” said Leon. “Excuse me—I thought I heard a car.”
He got up noiselessly from the table, went round the back of Mr. Lee, and, darting to the window, looked out. A flower-bed ran close to the wall, and beyond that was a broad gravel drive. Between gravel and flowers was a wide strip of turf. The drive continued some fifty feet to the right before it turned under an arch of rambler roses. To the left it extended for less than a dozen feet, and from this point a path parallel to the side of the house ran into the drive.