“No, I don't mind: very natural you should want to get rid of it,” said Hemingway, stepping into the study, and looking round.
“Every time I see it it reminds me!” said Mavis, shuddering. “My uncle very rarely sat out of doors. It was really my favourite seat, which seems to make it worse somehow. Doesn't it seem dreadful to think that if it hadn't been so terribly hot I don't suppose he ever would have taken his work out into the garden, and then none of this would have happened?”
The Chief Inspector, who was growing tired of these gentle inanities, agreed to this, and nodded to the constable who had been sitting in the room, reading a newspaper.
“I thought it best to leave a man on duty till you came, sir,” explained Sergeant Carsethorn. “We couldn't very well seal the room, on account of the telephone. It's the only one in the house.”
A slight twinkle was in the Chief Inspector's eye as his gaze alighted on the instrument, which stood on Sampson Warrenby's desk. It appeared to him that Miss Warrenby must have been obliged to enter the study a good many times since the murder of her uncle. As though she read his thought, Mavis said: “I've come to dread the sound of the telephone-bell.”
The room, which had obviously been swept and dusted, was very neat, the papers on the top of the desk, on which Sampson Warrenby had been working, having been collected into one pile, and tied up with red tape, and all the drawers in the desk sealed. The Sergeant explained that the papers had been scattered over the top of the desk, the fountain-pen, now lying tidily amongst several pencils in a little lacquer tray, uncovered beside them.
Hemingway nodded, and sat down in the chair behind the desk, an action from which Mavis averted her eyes. “Well, now, Miss Warrenby, I take it I have your permission to see if there's anything here that might have a bearing on the case?” he said, cutting the tape round the papers.
“Oh, yes! Though I'm sure there can't be anything. I should so like to feel that the whole thing was an accident, and the more I think about it the more I believe it was. People are always shooting rabbits here—in fact, I know my uncle several times complained to Mr. Ainstable about it, and said he oughtn't to allow it on the common. Poachers, too. Don't you think it might have been an accident?”
Hemingway, disinclined to enter into argument, said that it was too early for him to give an opinion. He ran quickly through the sheaf of documents, which concerned the efforts of a landlord to dislodge a tenant, and stretched over several months. Hemingway recalled that the letters which had been found, clipped together, at Sampson Warrenby's feet, had been written by this tenant, presumably before Sampson Warrenby had been called into the dispute, since the papers attached to them were copies of the landlord's own, acidly worded replies. It was the old story of a tenant protected by the Rent Restriction Acts, and the correspondence was increasingly acrimonious. But since Sampson Warrenby had merely acted in it in the role of legal representative to the landlord it was difficult to perceive what bearing it could have upon his murder. Hemingway laid the papers aside, and began to go through the contents of the drawers in the desk. One of these contained only such oddments as paper-clips, sealing-wax, spear nibs, and pencils, two others held virgin stationery; and another a collection of different-sized envelopes. Two other drawers were devoted to bills and receipts; below these, a third held nothing but account-books and used cheques; and the fourth, on that side, contained bank-sheets. Such private correspondence as Sampson Warrenby had preserved was found thrust into the long central drawer at the top of the desk. Unlike the other drawers, it was in considerable disorder. Before touching its contents Hemingway considered it with a look of birdlike interest. “Would you say your uncle was a tidy man, Miss Warrenby?”
“Oh, yes! Uncle hated things to be left about.”