"I'll come with you," said Cotherstone. He waited, staring at the fire until the superintendent had been into the adjacent police-station and had come back to say that he and his men were ready. "What do you mean to do?" he asked as the four of them set out. "Take them?"
"Question them first," answered the superintendent. "I shan't let them get out of my sight, any way, after what you've told me, for I expect you're right in your conclusions. What is it?" he asked, as one of the two men who followed behind called him.
The man pointed down the Market Place to the doors of the police-station.
"Two cars just pulled up there, sir," he said. "Came round the corner just now from the Norcaster road."
The superintendent glanced back and saw two staring headlights standing near his own door.
"Oh, well, there's Smith there," he said. "And if it's anybody wanting me, he knows where I've gone. Come on—for aught we know these two may have cleared out already."
But there were thin cracks of light in the living-room window of the lonely cottage on the Shawl, and the superintendent whispered that somebody was certainly there and still up. He halted his companions outside the garden gate and turned to Cotherstone.
"I don't know if it'll be advisable for you to be seen," he said. "I think our best plan'll be for me to knock at the front door and ask for the woman. You other two go round—quietly—to the back door, and take care that nobody gets out that way to the moors at the back—if anybody once escapes to those moors they're as good as lost for ever on a dark night. Go round—and when you hear me knock at the front, you knock at the back."
The two men slipped away round the corner of the garden and through the adjacent belt of trees, and the superintendent gently lifted the latch of the garden gate.
"You keep back, Mr. Cotherstone, when I go to the door," he said. "You never know—hullo, what's this?"