“No?”
“Nor Nora Lepley.”
“No, I am sure of that. But the name doesn’t matter. Will you tell me why Miss Clevedon agreed to marry Sir Philip?”
“I will tell you nothing—nothing at all. You are a damned Paul Pry. What business is it of yours?”
“Very well, then I—but here comes Mr. Pepster, unsuccessful as I see and as I knew he would be. I will not worry you any more just now, Mr. Thoyne, but I will let you know how I go on.”
I nodded cheerfully and made my way to the side where our boat was moored, and, indeed, I think that if I had not moved out of his way just then he would have hit me.
In tackling a case of this sort, any case, indeed, I like to build up as I go along and leave no blank spaces. Very often I have spent much time over some detail that had eluded me, and occasionally I have found that time wasted. But far more frequently it has happened that the fitting in of one missing piece has straightened out much that followed. And I like to observe my chronology.
This question of Kitty Clevedon and her engagement to the baronet may seem trifling and I had no certainty myself of its relative importance, but I was quite assured in my own mind that I could make very little of what followed until I had straightened that. There was no reasonable doubt that Kitty Clevedon was the mysterious lady of the quarrel—she fitted so completely into the picture. That both these men wanted her was common gossip in the Dale and it seemed equally evident that her preference was for Ronald Thoyne. Yet, apparently, she had promised herself to the baronet. Why? And why should Thoyne quarrel with him over it? It was her right to choose. The only possible explanation was that the promise had been extracted from her by some means that had not left her a free agent. And there was my missing piece. Why had Kitty Clevedon promised to marry Sir Philip?
I received my first glimmer of light from Pepster, though it was quite unconscious on his part.
The inn at Ilbay was a delightful old place, full of odd, mysterious corners, quaint unexpected doorways and queerly shaped rooms that were always a step or two below or a step or two above the passage that led to them and thus constituted traps for the unwary visitor. Pepster and I had a small parlour to ourselves, a queer room with five walls and a couple of huge beams crossed on the ceiling. It had a wide, open fire-place but no grate, the pile of blazing logs resting on the hearth, while the flames roared and spluttered into the darkness of a capacious chimney. The room had only one small window that looked out over the jetty and the bay, and was shrouded at night by warm crimson curtains; and one had to climb three steps in order to reach the door which opened into the bar.