Cressida, looking up quickly, seemed to read the sympathy in Wendover's face, for she answered readily enough.
“It wasn't a very good light, you understand? He wore some sort of lounge suit, but I couldn't tell the colour of it. And when I got down to Neptune's Seat he was carrying a light coat of some kind over his arm; but as I came up he tossed that down on the rock beside him.”
“He didn't put it on again, did he?” Wendover demanded.
“Not so far as I can remember,” Cressida replied, after some effort to recall the point.
“You were caught in the rain before you got back to the hotel, weren't you?” Wendover pursued.
“Yes. It came down hard just after the car started.”
Wendover's satisfaction at these answers was too plain to escape Cressida's attention. She looked at him with a faint gleam of hope in her expression, as though expecting him to come to her help; but her face fell when he turned to the chief constable and indicated that he had nothing further to say. Sir Clinton took his cue.
“Now, Mr. Fleetwood,” he inquired, “you didn't stay by the car as you had arranged, did you?”
Stanley Fleetwood looked suspiciously at his interlocutor.
“As it happened, I didn't,” he admitted, rather with an ill grace. “It was bad enough to let my wife meet that scoundrel at all. You couldn't expect me to stand off at a distance, could you? I'd promised her not to interfere; but that didn't hinder me from getting as near them as I could, just in case of accidents. I went down to the shore, keeping behind a groyne that runs down towards Neptune's Seat.”