“I see. But you can’t say whether this is his.”
“No. It might be; but all I know is it’s the same pattern.”
“And that’s all you can tell me, is it?” Winter said nothing, and the inspector added, “Very well, that will do. Now I want to ask Morgan a few questions.”
Morgan had little light to throw upon the tragedy. He had been out all the previous evening, after helping his master to dress for dinner, when he had noticed nothing extraordinary. He had come back soon after 11.30, and had gone straight to bed. Where had he been? He had spent the evening with friends at Hammersmith, had come back by the Tube with two friends, who had only left him at the door of the house. There he had met Winter and had gone upstairs with him to bed.
Asked if he knew the walking-stick, he was quite sure that it was not his master’s, and that it had not been in the room on the previous day. About the knife he knew nothing, except that he had never seen it, or one like it, before.
The inspector had just finished his examination of Morgan when he was startled by a shout from the garden. Throwing up the window, he called to a constable who was running towards the house. The man’s answer was to ask him to come as quickly as possible. Calling another constable to keep guard in the study, Inspector Blaikie hastened to the garden, directed by Morgan to a private stairway which led directly to it from the back of the house. This, Morgan informed him, was Mr. Prinsep’s usual way of getting into the garden, and thence, by the private covered way, into the Piccadilly Theatre itself.
But before inspector Blaikie left the study, he did one thing. He ’phoned through to Scotland Yard, and made arrangements for the immediate arrest of George Brooklyn, who was probably to be found at the Cunningham Hotel.
Chapter IV.
What Joan Found in the Garden
Joan Cowper usually knew her own mind. And, in her view, knowing your own mind meant knowing when to stop as well as when to go on. She had made her position clear at the dinner, and Sir Vernon could no longer pretend, she said to herself, that her marriage with Prinsep was a foregone conclusion. Sir Vernon, indeed, had said nothing more about the matter when she took him to his room in the evening, and they had separated for the night apparently on the best of terms. But Joan had known that she must prepare for a stormy interview on the morrow; and, as she dressed in the morning, her thoughts were running on what she should say to Sir Vernon, in answer to the reproaches he was sure to address to her.
Just as she was ready for breakfast, her scared maid came to her door, and said that Morgan wished to speak to her for a moment. Joan looked at the girl’s face, and saw at once that something serious was amiss.