He got into his car and slammed the door. "If you did it," he informed her pleasantly, "you're such a damned little fool the police will precious soon find you out for themselves. Good night."
The car moved forward, was backed again a few feet, straightened, and driven away down the lane the way it had come.
The girl was left standing irresolutely beside the Austin. She watched the Bentley's tail-lamp disappear round the bend in the road and blinked rather dazedly.
She felt in her pocket for her torch and drew it out. Switching it on she turned once more to the car. The blood had stopped oozing some time ago and had congealed in the chill evening air. The girl directed her torch at the body and cautiously put her hand in at the open window and felt in the dead man's outer pockets. There was a cheap tobacco pouch in one, and a pipe; some matches in the other. She tried to insinuate her hand into his trousers pockets, but she could not do it without moving the body. She drew back with a shiver and glanced up and down the deserted lane.
The mist, though it was still patchy, was growing thicker. The girl gave her shoulders a shrug and turned away. Her torch, flashing over the ground at her feet, revealed her handkerchief lying where she had dropped it. She picked it up, all wet with blood as it was, and screwed it up in her hand.
The torchlight made the mist look like a blank wall ahead, but served to show where the ditch ran beside the lane. The girl began to walk back along the road in the direction of Pittingly. At the top of a slight rise the fog was no more than a wisp of white smoke, and a gap in the hedge, some few yards farther, was easily distinguishable. There was a stile and a footpath leading across the fields. She swung herself up and over and strode out briskly, eastward. The path led to another stile and on, cutting across a beechwood to more fields, and ahead, the twinkling lights of Upper Nettlefold.
Instead of turning north, through the village, the girl set off down the road to the south, following it for some five hundred yards till a rough lane, hardly better than a cart-track, was reached. A board nailed to a weatherbeaten gatepost bore the legend "Ivy Cottage' in somewhat crooked letters, and a little way down the lane a white gate gleamed.
The girl opened it and trod up the roughly flagged path to the door. It was not locked and she went in, shutting it behind her. Immediately before her stairs rose sharply between two walls to the upper floor. On either side was a door, one leading into the kitchen and the other, on the right, into the living room of the cottage.
It stood ajar. The girl pushed it wide and stood on the threshold, leaning against the wall. Her dark scornful eyes rested on the one occupant of the room, a young man sprawling in a chair by the table, blinking owlishly across at her.
She gave a hard little laugh. "Sobered up yet?"