“I'll leave the Inspector to see to things,” he explained. “I'll go with Dr. Ringwood, Inspector, and do the telephoning. You'd better stay here, of course, until someone relieves you. You'll find plenty to do, I expect.”
He bade good-night to his involuntary host and hostess and, followed by the doctor, left the house.
Chapter IV.
The Crime at Heatherfield
“That's a fine old turkey-cock,” Dr. Ringwood commented, as he and Sir Clinton groped their way down the drive towards the gate of Ivy Lodge.
The Chief Constable smiled covertly at the aptness of the description.
“He certainly did gobble a bit at the start,” he admitted. “But that type generally stops gobbling if you treat it properly. I shouldn't care to live with him long, though. A streak of the domestic tyrant in him somewhere, I'm afraid.”
Dr. Ringwood laughed curtly.
“It must have been a pretty household,” he affirmed. “You didn't get much valuable information out of him, in spite of all his self-importance and fuss.”
“A character-sketch or two. Things like that are always useful when one drops like a bolt from the blue into some little circle, as we have to do in cases of this sort. I suppose it's the same in your own line when you see a patient for the first time: he may be merely a hypochondriac or he may be out of sorts. You've nothing to go on in the way of past experience of him. We're in a worse state, if anything, because you can't have a chat with a dead man and find out what sort of person he was. It's simply a case of collecting other people's impressions of him in a hurry and discarding about half that you hear, on the ground of prejudice.”
“At least you'll get his own impressions this time, if it's true that he kept a diary,” the doctor pointed out.