"Yes," answered Hetherwick. "I'm doing nothing. I'll go round there after a while. I'm interested naturally. It's a queer case."
"Queer! Seems so, rather," assented Kenthwaite. "Well—give Miss Hannaford my sympathy and all that, and tell her that if there's anything I can do when I get back—you know what to say."
"She said she'd relations here in London," remarked Hetherwick.
"Cousins—aunts—something or other—over Tooting way, I think," agreed Kenthwaite. "Twenty past eight!—Hetherwick, I'll have to rush for it!"
He swallowed the last of his coffee, seized the bag and darted away; Hetherwick went back to his own chambers and breakfasted leisurely. And all the time he sat there he was pondering over the event of the previous midnight, and especially upon the sudden disappearance of the man with the stained fingers. To Hetherwick that disappearance seemed to argue guilt. He figured it in this way—the man who ran away at Charing Cross had poisoned this other man in some clever and subtle fashion, by means of something which took a certain time to take effect, and, when that time arrived, did its work with amazing swiftness. Hetherwick, in his war service, had seen men die more times than he cared to remember. He had seen some men shot through the brain; he had seen others shot through the heart. But he had never seen any of these men—some of them shot at his very side—die with the extraordinary quickness with which Hannaford had died. And he came to a conclusion: if the man with the stained fingers had poisoned Hannaford, then he was somebody who had a rare and a profound knowledge of poisons.
He went round to Surrey Street at ten o'clock. Miss Hannaford, said the hotel proprietor, had gone with her aunt, a Mrs. Keeley, who had come early that morning, to see her grandfather's dead body—some police official had fetched them. But she had left a message for anyone who called—that she would not be long away. And Hetherwick waited in the little dingy coffee-room; there were certain questions that he wanted to put to Rhona Hannaford, also he wanted to give her certain information.
"Very sad case this, sir," observed the hotel proprietor, hovering about his breakfast-tables. "Cruel end for a fine healthy gentleman like Mr. Hannaford!"
"Very sad," agreed Hetherwick. "You said last night—or, rather, this morning—that Mr. Hannaford was in good health and spirits when he went out early in the evening?"
"The best, sir! He was a cheery, affable gentleman—fond of his joke. Joked and laughed with me as I opened the door for him—never thinking, sir, as I should never see him again alive!"
"You don't know where he was going?"