“No. All I can say is that one of them was injured, but not very seriously, as far as I can make out.”
“And how do you make that out?” asked Sir George.
“By the blood-stains on the grass at the side of the car.”
CHAPTER IV
Police-Sergeant Westaway sat in the sitting-room of Cliff Farm preparing an official report, with the assistance of his subordinate, Police-Constable Heather, whose help consisted in cordially agreeing with his superior on any point on which the sergeant condescended to ask his advice.
The constable was a short, florid-face, bullet-headed young man, and he whistled cheerfully as he explored the old farm-house. His superior officer was elderly and sallow, with hollow dark eyes, a long black beard streaked with grey, and a saturnine expression, which was the outward manifestation of a pessimistic disposition and a disordered liver.
Sergeant Westaway looked like a man who found life a miserable business. A quarter of a century spent in a dull round of official duties in the fishing village of Ashlingsea, as guardian of the morals of its eight hundred inhabitants, had deepened his natural bent towards pessimism and dyspepsia. He felt himself qualified to adorn a much higher official post, but he forebore to air his grievance in public because he thought the people with whom his lot was cast were not worth wasting speech upon. By his aloofness and taciturnity he had acquired a local reputation for wisdom, which his mental gifts scarcely warranted.
“Heather,” he said, pausing in his writing and glancing up irritably as his subordinate entered the room, “do not make that noise.”
“What noise, sergeant?” asked Constable Heather, who gathered his impressions slowly.