At Sonning Lock he managed to get through without drowning himself or upsetting his boat. It was the first time he had negotiated a lock, and he was not sorry when his cockle-shell was safely moored to the landing-stage of the White Hart Hotel.
There were several people in the gardens, men in flannels and girls in boating costumes, seated in the arbours.
He passed them and entered the hotel by the backway.
There was no one in the hall, and he took a cane-bottomed easy chair by the bar window, put his butterfly net in a corner and called for a stone ginger-beer.
He intended to make a thorough examination of Sonning, and his plan would be very much simplified by the fact that he could eliminate all residents, all people who kept servants. What he was looking for was a man living in a cottage alone.
“Had good sport?” asked the young lady who served him, speaking in a perfunctory manner and twisting a hairpin straight that had somehow got loose, whilst she gazed over Freyberger’s head at the sunlit garden as if she were addressing some one there.
“Oh, the butterfly net?” said he, “it’s not mine. I brought it down for a friend, he promised to meet me here, a Mr Rogers—you haven’t seen anything of him, I suppose?”
“What was he like?” asked the lady behind the bar in a disinterested voice.
Freyberger drew a word picture of Klein.
She shook her head and settled herself down behind the bar to resume the perusal of a Trumper’s penny story, a compound of love, murder, arson and religion wonderfully mixed.