Rapidly he scanned the score of lines of small type devoted to the baronet. They told him little that he had not known before. Fairfield was in his forty-third year, was the ninth baronet, and had great estates in Hampshire and Scotland. He was a traveller and a student. His town address was given as the Albany.
"You'd better go round to Fairfield's place, Green. Tell him what's happened and bring him here at once."
As the chief inspector, a grim, silent man, left, Foyle turned again to his work. He began a careful search of the room, even rummaging among the litter in the waste-paper basket. But there was nothing else that might help to throw the faintest light on the tragedy.
A discreet knock on the door preceded Waverley's entrance with a report of the examination of every one in the house. He had gathered little beyond the fact that Grell, when not concerned in social duties, was a man of irregular comings and goings, and that Ivan, his personal valet, was a man he had brought from St. Petersburg, who spoke French but little English, and had consequently associated little with the other servants.
Foyle subsided into his chair with his forehead puckered into a series of little wrinkles. He rested his chin
on his hand and gazed into vacancy. There might be a hundred solutions to the riddle. Where was the motive? Was it blackmail? Was it revenge? Was it jealousy? Was it robbery? Was it a political crime? Was it the work of a madman? Who was the mysterious veiled woman? Was she associated with the crime?
These and a hundred other questions beat insistently on his brain, and to none of them could he see the answer. He pictured the queer dagger, but flog his memory as he would he could not think where it might have been procured. In the morning he would set a score of men making inquiries at every place in London where such a thing was likely to have been obtained.
He was in the position of a man who might solve a puzzle by hard, painstaking experiment and inquiry, but rather hoped that some brilliant flash of inspiration or luck might give him the key that would fit it together at once. They rarely do come.
Once Lomont, Grell's secretary, knocked and entered with a question on his lips. Foyle waved him impatiently away.
"I will see you later on, Mr. Lomont. I am too busy to see you now. Mr. Waverley or Mr. Bolt will see to you."