“Any assistance in my power I shall be only too happy to give to the London detective,” he said. “Of course, coming on the scene as a total stranger, he can’t be expected to do much without help.”
There was no need to point out that ghastly stain upon the carpet. The shaft of noonday sunshine seemed to concentrate its brightness on that grisly patch. Dark, dark, dark with the witness of a cruel murder—the murder of a man who had never done an unkindly act, or harboured an unworthy thought.
Theodore Dalbrook stood looking at that stain. It seemed to bring the fatal reality nearer to him. He looked at the low chair with its covering of peacock plush, and its Turkish embroidery draped daintily across the broad back and capacious arms—a chair to live in—a sybarite’s estate,—and then at the satinwood book-table filled with such books as the lounger loves—Southey’s “Doctor,” “Burton,” “Table Talk,” by Coleridge, Whateley, Rogers, “The Sentimental Journey,” “Rochefoucauld,” “Caxtoniana,” “Elia,” and thrown carelessly upon one of the shelves a handkerchief of cobweb cambric, with a monogram that occupied a third of the fabric, “J.C.” Her handkerchief, dropped there last night, as she arranged the books for her husband’s use—putting her own favourites in his way.
Lambert took up a book and opened it with a dismal smile, handing it to Mr. Dalbrook as he did so.
It was “Wider Horizons,” the volume he had been reading when the bullet struck him, and those open pages were spattered with his blood.
“Put it away for God’s sake, man,” cried Dalbrook, horrified. “Whatever you do, don’t let Lady Carmichael see it.”
“No, sir, better not, perhaps, sir—but it’s evidence, and it ought to be produced at the inquest.”
“Produce it if you like; but there is evidence enough to show that he was murdered on this spot.”
“As he sat reading, sir; the book is a great point.”
And then Lambert expounded the position of that lifeless form, making much of every detail, as he had done to the constable.