"And in the meantime, I'll see that no one enters this room, I promise you. Inspector Petrie himself will be around presently. And Superintendent Narkom should be with us at twelve o'clock or thereabouts."
Left alone, therefore, in the early morning sunlight of that perfect June day, Cleek made his way into the still room, closed the door behind him, and then, glancing up, caught sight of the stolid back of the constable on duty outside of the courtyard window, and not being wishful to enter into conversation with him, began to poke about of his own accord.
But the room held little or no clues for him to go upon. Not in the first rough glance, at any rate. Over by the window, where it had stood upon the previous day, when Maud Duggan had shown it to him, stood the spinning wheel, innocently incongruous indeed in this room of Death. He gave it a casual glance, and then turned to the desk-top where a pile of papers lay scattered in some disarray upon its leather surface.
Cleek ran his fingers quickly through these, glancing at each of them in turn.
"He was just about to alter the will, was he? Well, if that were so, the will should be here now—and it isn't," he said to himself, with suddenly upflung brows. "Queer thing! Unless someone put it away. I'll try the drawers. There should be no secrets from a detective, my poor misguided friend, and if the drawers don't answer to my fingers, I'm going to search your pockets for the key—though to steal from the dead is a ghoulish business at the best of times.... Hello, hello! Locked, of course! Brrrh! I don't fancy the task at all, but I mean to have my little look-in before any of the other members of the family get downstairs for their breakfast. So here goes."
Still mentally talking to himself, Cleek went over to the Thing that had once been Sir Andrew Duggan, and plunged his hands in the trousers' pockets without more ado. A bunch of keys rewarded the search. He ran them over adroitly in his fingers; chose one which he thought would fit the lock of the drawers, found it didn't fit, chose another, and this time was more successful. For the top left-hand drawer of that handsomely carved desk slid noiselessly open for him, stopped automatically, and gave a funny little click. In a moment he had slid down on his knees beside that gruesome figure which so impeded his progress, and slipped his fingers up under the drawer (which was half full of papers and so allowed him to do so), touched something which felt like a button, and was a button. Then the drawer came forward in his hand, and revealed at back of it another one, which at a touch of that button had dropped its front panel so that it formed a pigeon-hole. As he peered into the recesses of this, he saw a bundle of yellowed papers tied about with a faded piece of pink ribbon, and immediately drew them forth into the light.
"Whew! What a beastly dust! Well, I've met this kind of a desk before, so fortunately you're no closed book to me, my friend," he apostrophized it, as a powder of dust flew over his fingers as he touched the packet. "Here's something which wants looking into, so I'll appropriate it now, and have a squint at it later. Secretive old chap he was, then! With his secret drawers and all! Looks like a bundle of old love-letters to all intents and purposes, but written on paper that one would hardly have called suitable for such tender epistles. Commonest kind of note-paper—village note-paper." He drew a sheet from the packet and held it up to the light. "And with a water-mark of a crown and anchor.... Hello! bit of an illiterate lady, wasn't she, who penned these lines! For the spelling's pretty shaky. And signed Jeannette.... H'm. Some pretty little amour which has held such savour as to be preserved in this form until after death—poor old fellow! Well, I'll look into it later. Couldn't have been from the first Lady Duggan, for her name was Edith. Miss Duggan herself told me that. And ... Jeannette! Now, I wonder...."
But what he wondered was never recorded at that time, for just then came the sound of a soft footstep upon the hall without, the rattle of a door-handle and the gentle opening of the door itself; and Cleek had just time to whisk away the packet, and assume an appearance of stolid nonchalance, when someone came into the room on silently shod feet, stepped a few paces forward, and then, seeing him, gave out a little shriek and shut her two hands over her breast spasmodically.
"Oh!—how you startled me!" gave out Lady Paula breathlessly, as she recognized who the intruder was. "What can you be doing here, Mr. Deland? The police ... this awful tragedy."
Cleek bowed and came toward her with outstretched hand.