“No,” she said at last. “I can think of nobody; indeed I’m quite sure there was nobody.”
He looked at his watch.
“I should like you to wait while I glance over the brief. It contains a précis of the Garlett case.”
He handed her an unopened daily paper.
“Try to forget what I am doing,” he said kindly. “Switch your mind right off it! We shall get along much better when I have mastered the principal points of the story.”
Deliberately he turned his back on her, and she did her best to follow his advice.
It seemed an eternity to Jean Bower, but it was not more than twenty minutes before Sir Harold Anstey put the wad of sheets he had been holding down on the table and turned toward her, an ugly, sneering frown on his broad, shrewd face.
How extraordinary that this simple country chit should have so bamboozled him! If angry with her, he was also angry with himself, and so, though he did not wish to frighten her, it was in a very cold cutting voice that he observed:
“I see, Miss Bower, that a witness, Lucy Warren by name, will be called by the Crown to prove that before his wife’s death you were in the habit of meeting Henry Garlett secretly at night in a wood close to his house.”
“Lucy Warren!” exclaimed Jean Bower, in a tone of utter surprise, as well as of dismayed horror.