CHAPTER XXXI
When they reached Riversbrook they entered the carriage drive and traversed the plantation until they stood on the edge of the Italian garden facing the house. The gaunt, irregular mansion stood empty and deserted, for Miss Fewbanks had left the place after her father's funeral, with the determination not to return to it. The wind whistled drearily through the nooks and crannies of the unfinished brickwork of the upper story, and a faint evening mist rose from the soddened garden and floated in a thin cloud past the library window, as though the ghost of the dead judge were revisiting the house in search of his murderer. The garden had lost its summer beauty and was littered with dead leaves from the trees. The gathering greyness of an autumn twilight added to the dreariness of the scene.
"Kemp didn't say how far he stood from the house," said Crewe, "but we'll assume he stood at the edge of the plantation—about where we are standing now—to begin with. How far are we from that library window, Chippenfield?"
"About fifty yards, I should say," said the inspector, measuring it with his eye.
"I should say seventy," said Rolfe.
"And I say somewhere midway between the two," said Crewe, with a smile. "But we will soon see. Just hold down the end of this measuring tape, one of you." He produced a measuring tape as he spoke, and started to unwind it, walking rapidly towards the house as he did so. "Sixty-two yards!" he said, as he returned. He made a note of the distance in his pocket-book. "So much for that," he said, "but that's not enough. I want you to stand under the library window, Rolfe, by that chestnut-tree in front of it, and act as pivot for the measuring tape while I look at that window from various angles. My idea is to go in a semicircle right round the garden, starting at the garage by the edge of the wood, so as to see the library window and measure the distance at every possible point at which Kemp could have stood."
"You're going to a lot of trouble for nothing, if your object is to try and prove that he couldn't have seen into the window," grunted Inspector Chippenfield, in a mystified voice. "Why, I can see plainly into the window from here."
Crewe smiled, but did not reply. Followed by Rolfe, he went back to the tree by the library window, where he posted Rolfe with the end of the tape in his hand. Then he walked slowly back across the garden in the direction of the garage, keeping his eye on the library window on the first floor from which Kemp, according to his evidence, had seen Sir Horace leaning out after Holymead had left the house. He returned to the tree, noting the measurement in his book as he did so, and then repeated the process, walking backwards with his eye fixed on the window, but this time taking a line more to the left. Again and again he repeated the process, until finally he had walked backwards from the tree in narrow segments of a big semicircle, finishing up on the boundary of the Italian garden on the other side of the grounds, and almost directly opposite to the garage from which he had started.
"There's no use going further back than that," he said, turning to Inspector Chippenfield, who had followed him round, smoking one of Crewe's cigars, and very much mystified by the whole proceedings, though he would not have admitted it on any account. "At this point we practically lose sight of the window altogether, except for an oblique glimpse. Certainly Kemp would not come as far back as this—he would have no object in doing so."
"I quite agree with you," said Inspector Chippenfield. "He would stand more in the front of the house. The tree in front of the house doesn't obstruct the view of the window to any extent."