“No,” I replied, “for once I obeyed the golden rule.”
“Well, we ought to be looking for something to put them in. Do you think you could get a clothes-basket or something without Annie seeing you, and a bottle or can for the water?”
I returned to the house once more to try my luck, but Annie was in the hall, and though I racked my brains I could think of no reasonable excuse for getting her out of the way. Then my eyes happened to light on the garage key that hung on a hook in the hall, and I remembered having seen an old wooden box that I thought might serve our purpose. It was there, but I could find nothing for the water, so I took what I had found across to Janet hoping that she might be able to make some other suggestion.
But she had already solved the problem by finding the watering can, and to my dismay I returned to find her tipping the contents of the bird bath into it. I hated to see her handle the deadly stuff, remembering the doctor’s alarm when I had only touched the outside of the baby flagon.
“It’s all right,” she replied cheerfully to my protest. “I haven’t touched a drop, and I promise to disinfect.”
Then very gingerly we picked up the birds one by one and put them in the box, leaving one bird and the cat, so that the inspector might see exactly how they had lain when he arrived.
He was with us before we had completed our task, more gigantic and phlegmatic than ever, I thought he looked, in the little formal garden. Janet quickly explained the situation and bustled him away with a competence that only went to increase my admiration for her, but we were not to be left alone as I half hoped we might. She would have none of it, but insisted that we ought to get back to the house at once, that breakfast must be ready and that we should be missed, and that the less we were seen together the better, though I did my best to persuade her to stay.
Idiotic of me, perhaps, but it was—no, I can’t explain it—if you who read need explanations then you are beyond me. I was in love, I had never been in love before, and here was my darling alone among the roses. I wanted to stay with her and keep her to myself, not share her with the rest.
But it was not to be, for up the garden path came The Tundish whistling the Marseillaise, his chin stuck out in a way that he had when he whistled and felt jolly, or rather I should say when he was willing that others should know he was feeling jolly, for only once had I seen him really depressed, and that was the time when I had caught him frowning over Hanson’s case-book. He was amazing, The Tundish, and the more I saw of him the more my amazement grew. Here we were at the morning of the inquest, and he could whistle away light-heartedly, just like any boy at home from school on the first day of the holidays.
If I was amazed, Janet was alert. “Your knife, quickly, Mr. Jeffcock,” and she was cutting roses and asking me about their names—of which I knew exactly nothing—even as the doctor stood smiling happily under the arch.