"You don't suppose the gun up and fired itself on its own, do you? If White's at the bottom of this, there must have been some kind of mechanism used, which, mark you, White disposed of before Cook reached the scene."
"Maybe you're right, sir. But the more I think about it the more it seems to me that if White was responsible, then the mechanism used was nothing more nor less than his son's hands. Now, you just consider! Wasn't it young White who spilled that story about his father's plan to buy up part of Frith Field? Very unnatural thing for a man's own son to do. I thought so at the time."
The Inspector accorded this suggestion his consideration. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I'm bound to admit there may be something in that. All a put-up job between father and son. No, I don't think there's so much in it, after all. Young White doesn't get on with his father. We'll see what Cook has to say."
Inspector Cook, delighted to be summoned to a conference, was much more impressed than Sergeant Wake had been by the disclosure that Harold White was now the heir to Clara Carter's fortune; and although, casting his mind back over all the circumstances of the murder, he said that he couldn't for the life of him see how White could have had any part in it, he was perfectly ready to work over every inch of the ground again.
"Though whether I'll be able to remember all that Miss White said, I doubt," he warned Hemingway. "There was precious little that seemed to have any bearing on the case, and you know how she talks!" He drew up a chair to the table, and sat down to refresh his memory with a glance through the folder that contained his own report. "Taking it from when Miss White came out of the house, there was her, and Samuel Jones, and White sitting round the tea-table outside the drawingroom.
"In full view of the bridge," interpolated Hemingway.
"That's right. The garden's pretty overgrown with flowering shrubs, but there's a strip of lawn running down to the bridge which has only a bed of dahlias in it.
Clear view of the bridge, and of the thicket on the Palings side, of course. I took note of that. You can catch a glimpse here and there of the paths they cut at Palings. And, of course, you can see the roof of Mrs. Carter's house, through the trees. Now you'll have to let me think ;i moment. Yes, here it is." His finger traced the typewritten words: "Miss White was the one that called attention to Carter. She caught sight of him, coming down one of the paths, where the bushes aren't so thick, and she got up, and said she'd go and make the tea."
"I remember that. The maid was out. White was sitting by the table all this time?"
"Yes, but according to Miss White, it was then that he asked her why she hadn't brought any cigarettes out."