"Fobbing me off with excuses!" muttered Baker. "If I had my way, I'd blow his brains out, the mealy scoundrel! That 'ud learn him to seduce innocent girls! But that's not going to help my sister, that's the way I've got to look at it!"
"Would it surprise you to learn that Mr. Carter was shot dead at five minutes to five this afternoon?" asked the Inspector.
"Shot dead?" Baker said numbly. "I didn't do it. I don't know a thing about it, as God's my witness!"
That was all the Inspector had managed to get out of Percy Baker, and it left him profoundly dissatisfied, for he could not quite bring himself to believe that the young man was acting a part. Nor did he believe that Baker had been acting when he so hotly denied having demanded five hundred pounds from Carter. It began to seem to the Inspector as though the murdered man's relations were playing some deep game, and had not scrupled to entangle Baker in its meshes. It might, he reflected, prove to be a difficult task for Baker to refute the accusation of blackmail.
When he reached the police station, it was to be met with the news that the rifle found in the shrubbery at the Dower House had been identified. It had been registered ten years previously by the late Mr. Fanshawe, and was the property of his relict, in whose name the licence had been kept up.
The Inspector drew a breath. "Someone living in the house," he said. "Well! I thought that from the start. And the whole lot of them combining to shift the blame on to young Baker, by spinning this yarn about him putting the black on Carter! It's that woman at the back of it, Superintendent: that screeching blonde, wanting to get rid of Carter, so that she can marry a foreign prince!"
"Go easy!" advised his superior. "If that was what she wanted, she could have divorced him, couldn't she? By all accounts, he gave her plenty of cause. The Chief Constable thinks this is a case for Scotland Yard."
The Inspector did not agree with him, but by the time he had interviewed Robert Steel next morning, and Dr Chester's housekeeper, he was forced to admit that he could not see his way through the maze. Robert Steel's scornful demand to be told how he could have known that Carter would be on the bridge at five minutes to five, seemed unanswerable. Steel stated that he had not known that Carter had meant to visit White, and if that were true, it did not seem possible that he could be the murderer. Whether it was true, remained, of course, to be proved; but the Inspector realised that it was not going to be an easy task to prove it.
Dr Chester's housekeeper was a little flustered, but she perfectly recalled the foreign gentleman's visit, and said without an instant's hesitation that he had arrived at a few minutes to five o'clock, before the doctor had got back from the call he had had to make.
The Inspector went next to Palings. He found Lady Dering sitting with Ermyntrude, having been brought over by Hugh, who was talking to Mary in the garden. When Peake announced the Inspector, Lady Dering at once got up to take her leave, and went out through the French window to join her son. She had exercised a most beneficial effect on Ermyntrude, who was both touched and gratified by her visit, and had unburdened her soul without much reserve. Ruth Dering's sympathetic goodsense had done much to calm her agitated nerves, and she was even able to greet the Inspector without any display of dramatic horror.