“Mr. Shandon was to look after that part. I went back to my room, put on some clothes, and kept myself awake by reading till the morning. We hadn’t roused the rest of the people in the house.”
Sir Clinton turned to Ernest.
“Couldn’t you get through to the police-station, Mr. Shandon? I must see about this. It’s a serious matter for my subordinates.”
Ernest seemed completely taken aback by this view of the question.
“Well, Sir Clinton, I suppose I ought to have rung up the police; but it was very late, you know. I was awfully sleepy; and as I was walking along, I turned into my own bedroom. I was very shaken up by the whole affair. It hasn’t happened to me before, you see. And somehow, I must have begun to undress quite without thinking about it—you know how one does things unconsciously . . .”
Then, with disarming frankness, he admitted the truth:
“I went to bed. And after a minute or two, I remembered I ought to have rung up the police. But that would have meant getting out of bed again and putting on some clothes to go down to the ’phone. It would have been a lot of trouble. And it didn’t seem to me that it mattered very much really. So while I was thinking about it, I fell asleep. But I rang you up as soon as I got up this morning.”
Sir Clinton made no comment on Ernest’s methods. He had got all the information he needed apparently, for now he turned to Stenness and suggested that they should go upstairs and look at the scene of the burglary.
Neville Shandon’s room bore out Stenness’s description of it. Everything seemed to have been turned over and left higgledy-piggledy. The floor was littered with a confused mass of clothes, papers, contents of drawers, and other things. It seemed as though the whole place had been searched in frantic haste for some object or other; but whether the seeker had succeeded or not was apparently an insoluble problem.
Sir Clinton stepped over to the still open window and examined the sill.