"Because she left the theatre with him, and happened to be in his house when the message came through. Two o'clock in the morning! I had it from a quarter that isn't usually wrong."
"And you believe it?"
Smeaton shrugged his shoulders. "My dear boy, I've given up guessing. Anybody that wants it can have the benefit of the doubt, now." Puff! puff! "I often think of poor Newstead, last time I saw him, at Guy's. They thought he was going to get well, and he was sitting up on the pillows reading one of those blasted Sunday papers that you write for. 'Well Newstead,' said I, as I was going, 'what am I to tell the boys?' 'Tell them,' he says, laying his poor claw of a hand on the paper, 'tell them I'm driven to my grave at last by the beauty and the horror of life!'" Puff! puff! "Why don't you go and see her? You can get there easy enough. She's interviewed once a week on an average."
"What good would it do?"
Smeaton rapped for his addition. "I dunno. I think if I were a friend of Ingram's I'd take a certain amount of malicious pleasure in letting her know what you saw to-day."
IV
SOMETHING LIKE CLOVES
As a matter of fact, I found no difficulty at all. Little Winstanley was pleased with my murder specials, and fixed up an interview over the 'phone in no time.
"You're getting rather heavy metal for this, Prentice," he said, puffing out his cheeks and regarding me with the benevolence a man keeps for the work of his own hands; "but toddle along and see what you make of her." One of Winstanley's illusions is that he has "formed" me.
Fenella had a very pretty little doll's house in the tiny square that is tucked away near Knightsbridge Barracks, whose gardens back upon the Park. The brickwork was very neatly pointed, and the window boxes were full of chrysanthemums, and a red door with brass appointments flew open to my rather timid ring with a disconcerting suddenness. But I was not prepossessed with the stunted little maid who opened it. Neither in manner nor appearance was she "up to" the house. There was a latent hostility, too, in the way she scanned me.