“What’s that, sir?”
“Has Miss Martin any other suitors?”
“Lots of ’em ’ud be after her like wasps round a plum-tree if she’d give ’em ’alf a chance. But you put a stopper on ’em.”
Bates was blunt of speech, though a philosopher withal.
“Elkin is my only serious rival, then?” laughed Grant, passing off as a joke a thrust which was shrewder than the gardener knew.
“’E ’as plenty of brass, but I reckon nowt on ’im,” was the contemptuous answer.
“Well, he is not a likely person to kill a woman he had never before seen. Miss Martin will marry whom she chooses, no doubt. The present problem is to find out who murdered Miss Melhuish. Now, had I been the victim you would be thinking hard, Bates.”
“I tell ’ee, sir, it wur a loony.”
Nor was Bates to be moved from that opinion. He held to it, through thick and thin, for many days.
Grant wandered into the front garden. His eyes rose involuntarily to the distant post office, and he noticed at once that the dormer window was closed. Yet Doris shared his own love of fresh air, and that window had always been open till that very hour. Somehow, this simple thing seemed to shut him out of her life. He walked to the river, and gazed at the spot where the body was drawn ashore. In the absence of rain the water ran clear as gin, and the marks made by the feet of Adelaide Melhuish’s murderer were still perceptible. If only those misshapen blotches could reveal their secret! If only some Heaven-sent ray of intuition would enable him to put the police on the track of the criminal! Theoretically, a novelist and essayist should be a first-rate detective, yet, brought face to face with an actual felony, here was one who perforce remained blind and dumb.