"I wonder if you would be so good, sir, as to replace the body as you found it?"
Stephen hesitated, distaste in his face. Joseph said pleadingly: "Inspector, this is terribly painful for my nephew! Surely -"
"Shut up!" Stephen said roughly, and went to Nathaniel's body, and arranged it. "More or less like that."
"Do you agree with that, sir?" the Inspector asked Joseph.
"Yes, yes!" Joseph said. "His head was on his arm. We never dreamed - we thought he had fainted!"
The Inspector nodded, and asked who slept in the next bedroom, which lay beyond Nathaniel's bathroom. He was told that it was a single spare-room which Roydon had been put into, and took a note of this. Having scrutinised the windows, both in the bedroom and in the bathroom, and looked meditatively at the halfopen ventilator, he ascertained that these had not been tampered with since the finding of Nathaniel's body, and at last suggested that further questions might best be answered in some other room.
Both Joseph and Stephen were glad to get away from the scene of the crime, and they led the Inspector downstairs to the morning-room, leaving the photographer, the finger-print experts, and the ambulance-men in possession.
The morning-room fire had been allowed to go out, and the room felt chilly. The Inspector said that it was of no consequence, and he would be obliged to question everyone in the house. Joseph gave a groan, and ejaculated: "Those poor young people! If they could have been spared this horror!"
The Inspector did not waste his breath answering this; he knew his duty, and he had no time to spare for irrelevancies. He should have been filling his children's stockings by right, not taking depositions at Lexham Manor. It wasn't as though the case was likely to do him much good, he reflected. He wasn't the Detective Inspector, but merely deputising for that gentleman, who was in bed with influenza. The Chief Constable, a nervous man, would be bound to call in Scotland Yard, he thought, and some smart London man would get all the credit for the case. He waited for Joseph to lower the hand with which he had covered his eyes before saying: "Now, sir, if you please! I understand you have a number of guests staying in the house? If I might have their names?"
"Our Christmas party!" Joseph said tragically.