"Yes, I'm not worrying about him. Nothing in the room been touched?"
"Nothing, barring the telephone-receiver, which I found hanging on the end of the wire, having apparently been dropped by the murdered man. It was replaced," said Inspector Pershore grandly, under my supervision, and has since been photographed for finger-prints."
"All right. Have the body taken away," said Hemingway. "Did Dr Yoxall say - No, never mind! I'll see him myself."
The Inspector relayed the order to remove the body, saw that Hemingway had pulled the heavy brocade curtain away from the window behind the telephonechair, and said: "There's no doubt the murderer was concealed behind that curtain, Chief Inspector."
"There's a lot of doubt," responded Hemingway tartly. "And if you go on calling me Chief Inspector every time you open your mouth, you and me will fall out. It's getting on my nerves. I don't say the murderer wasn't concealed: he may have been; but from the look of things it seems highly probably he wasn't concealed at all."
"You mean, Chief - you mean that the victim was not expecting the murderer to attack him?" said Pershore slowly.
"Well, I don't myself expect to be murdered when I sit down to a game of Bridge with a party of friends. It may have happened just like you think, but to my mind, the chair's too close to the window for anyone to hide himself behind the curtain without attracting his victim's attention when he came out. If there wasn't a rustle, anyone sitting there, at an angle to the window, would be bound to see the curtain move, out of the corner of his eye. In which case, he'd have had time to have put up a bit of a struggle, at the very least. No sign of any struggle here, not a vestige. A nice, neat job, that's what I call it."
"It is a cruel, wicked murder!" said Inspector Grant severely.
"You only say that because you don't like strangling cases. All murders are wicked. I've seen a lot more cruel than this one, and so have you." He watched the shrouded body of Seaton-Carew carried out of the room on a stretcher, and said: "That's better: now we can get on! What I want to know now, Pershore -"
"The suspected persons are being detained -"