“Yes. Yes,” Reggie lay back and blew smoke. “That’s the sort of reasoning that got you this verdict. Look here, Finch. That smashed head would have killed him all right, but it shouldn’t have killed him so quick. He ought to have lingered unconscious a long while. And he had been dead hours when they found him. We have to begin again from the beginning. I want an order for exhumation.”
“Better ask for a subpoena for his soul.”
“That’s rather good, Finch,” Reggie smiled. “You’re beginning to take an interest in the case.”
“If you could take the evidence of the murdered,” said Lomas, “a good many convictions for murder would look rather queer.”
Mr. Finchampstead was horrified. “I conceive,” he announced with dignity, “that a trial in an English court is a practically perfect means of discovering the truth.”
Reverently then they watched him go. And when he was gone, “He’s a wonderful man,” said Reggie. “He really believes that.”
The next morning saw Mr. Fortune, escorted by Superintendent Bell, arrive at Carwell Hall. It stands in what Mr. Fortune called a sluggish country, a country of large rolling fields and slow rivers. The air was heavy and blurred all colour and form. Mr. Fortune arrived at Carwell Hall feeling as if he had eaten too much, a sensation rare in him, which he resented. He was hardly propitiated by the house, though others have rejoiced in it. It was built under the Tudors out of the spoils and, they say, with the stones of an abbey. Though some eighteenth-century ruffian played tricks with it, its mellow walls still speak of an older, more venturous world. It is a place of studied charm, gracious and smiling, but in its elaboration of form and ornament offering a thousand things to look at, denies itself as a whole, evasive and strange.
Reggie got out of the car and stood back to survey it. “Something of everything, isn’t it, Bell? Like a Shakespeare play. Just the place to have a murder in one room with a children’s party in the next, and a nice girl making love on the stairs, and father going mad in the attics.”
“I rather like Shakespeare myself, sir,” said Superintendent Bell,
“You’re so tolerant,” said Reggie, and went in.