Chapter Four
Miss Patterdale let her monocle fall, and, picking it up as it swung on the end of its thin cord, began to polish it vigorously. “You don't think it can have been an accident, Charles?”
“How could it have been?”
She glanced rather vaguely round. “Don't understand ballistics myself. People do go out with guns, though, after rabbits.”
“But they don't aim at rabbits in private gardens,” said Charles. “What's more, rabbits aren't usually seen in the air!”
She looked fleetingly at the still figure on the seat. “He was sitting down,” she pointed out, but without conviction.
“Talk sense, Aunt Miriam!” Charles begged her. “Any fool could see he's been murdered! You don't even have to have a giant intellect to realise where the murderer must have been standing.” He nodded towards the rising common-land beyond the lane, where the gorse-bushes blazed deep yellow in the late sunshine. “Bet you anything he was lying up in those bushes! The only bit of bad luck he had was Mavis being in the lane at the time—and even that wasn't really bad luck, because she was too dumb to do him any harm.”
“Can't be surprised the girl was too much shocked to think of looking for him,” said Miss Patterdale fair-mindedly. “It isn't the sort of thing anyone would expect to happen! I suppose it wouldn't be any use going to search those bushes?”
He could not help laughing. “No, Best of my Aunts, it wouldn't! I don't know how long it took Mavis to assimilate the fact that Warrenby was dead, and to be sick, and to rush off in search of you, but it was quite long enough to give the unknown assassin ample time to make his getaway.”
She went on polishing her monocle, her attention apparently riveted to this task. Finally, screwing it into place again, she looked at Charles, and said abruptly: “I don't like it. I'm not going to say who I think might have done it—or, at any rate, wanted to do it!—but I shouldn't be surprised if it leads to a great deal of the sort of unpleasantness we don't want!”