“What’s the trouble?” said Reggie, with his head out of window: and slipped the catch and came out in a bundle.
The chauffeur’s face was the face of Lady Chantry. He saw it in the flash of a pistol overhead as he closed with her. “I will, I will,” she muttered, and fought him fiercely. Another shot went into the pines. He wrenched her hand round. The third was fired into her face. The struggling body fell away from him, limp.
He carried it into the rays of the headlights and looked close. “That’s that,” he said with a shrug, and put it into the car.
He lit a cigar and listened. There was no sound anywhere but the sough of the wind in the pines. He climbed into the chauffeur’s place and drove away. At the next crossroads he took that which led north and west, and so in a while came out on the Portsmouth road.
That night the frost gathered on a motor-car in a lane between Hindhead and Shottermill. Mr. Fortune unobtrusively caught the last train from Haslemere.
When he came out from a matinee with Joan Amber next day, the newsboys were shouting “Motor Car Mystery.” Mr. Fortune did not buy a paper.
It was on the morning of the second day that Scotland Yard sent for him. Lomas was with Superintendent Bell. The two of them received him with solemnity and curious eyes. Mr. Fortune was not pleased. “Dear me, Lomas, can’t you keep the peace for a week at a time?” he protested. “What is the reason for your existence?”
“I had all that for breakfast,” said Lomas. “Don’t talk like the newspapers. Be original.”
“‘Another Mysterious Murder,’” Reggie murmured, quoting headlines. “‘Scotland Yard Baffled Again,’ ‘Police Mandarins.’ No, you haven’t a ‘good Press,’ Lomas old thing.”
Lomas said something about the Press. “Do you know who that woman chauffeur was, Fortune?”