“He might.”
“Well, I’m sorry to have troubled you. Good evening.”
Gordon had the definite impression that when Sullivan came to the door he was not simply answering the bell; there had been no time for him to hear the bell—he had been going out anyhow. There was a thick hedge at the end of the path which led to the Hatcheries; and behind this hedge, I am sorry to say, Gordon concealed himself. He was the most placid and regular of men, but the ardour of the hunt was beginning to lay hold of him. It was only about a minute and a half later that Sullivan came out, carrying a small bag, and took the path that led to the links. For a moment the watcher thought of shadowing him, then decided that it would be silly. If he went over the golf-links, the open ground would make it quite impossible to follow without being noticed; besides, the links would be full of people whom he knew, and he might easily get delayed. He resolved suddenly on a still more heroic course. Nobody else lived in the cottage—why not try to force an entrance while Sullivan was out, and satisfy himself on circumstantial evidence whether Davenant had really been in the cottage or not?
Breaking into a house is, as a rule, a difficult proceeding, even if it is your own and you know the ropes. To break into a stranger’s house, when you are not even certain whether a dog is kept; is a still more heroic affair. The door had locked itself; the ground-floor windows were shut and snibbed. The only chance seemed to be crawling up the roof of a little outhouse and through an open window on the first floor; a bathroom window, to judge by the ample sponge which was drying on the sill. With rubber on his shoes, Gordon made a fairly good job of the outhouse roof. The window was a more serious proposition; it was very narrow, and encumbered on the inside by an array of little bottles. It is easy to put your head and shoulders through such a window, but that means a nose-dive on to the floor. To put your legs through first is to court the possibility of promiscuous breakage. Very carefully Gordon removed all fragile objects out of range, and then with extreme discomfort squeezed his legs through the opening. Even so, there was a moment at which he felt his back must necessarily break, when he was just half-way through. Landing at last without misfortune, he set out quickly on a tour of the silent cottage.
It was only Davenant’s part of the house that interested him—the bathroom, a bedroom, a small dining-room, and a study. They all bore the marks of recent inhabitation; but was this anything to go by? Davenant, in any case, would not be expected back for a week, and Sullivan did not strike Gordon as the kind of man who would be inclined to tidy up on Monday when Friday would do just as well. The bed, indeed, was made; but the grate in the study had not been cleared of cigarette-ends; the dining-room table was bare, but Monday’s paper was still lying across a chair, as if thrown down at random. On the whole the evidence pointed to Monday as the day of departure; Monday, not Tuesday, appeared on a tear-off calendar; a letter which had arrived on Monday evening was still waiting in the hall; and there were no clothes left in the dirty-clothes basket. Such an authority did Gordon feel himself to be on the subject of washing since his experiences at Binver that he investigated equally the clothes which had come back from the wash, and the list which accompanied them. And here was a curious phenomenon; the list referred to two collars, two handkerchiefs, and a pair of socks as having been disgorged by the Binver authorities, but none of these seemed to have crystallized in real life. “Binver is doing itself proud,” murmured Gordon to himself, “or could it possibly be——” He went and looked in the bathroom again: there was the sponge all right, which seemed to insist that Davenant kept a duplicate series of what the shops call toilet accessories; but where was the razor, the shaving soap, the tooth-brush? It seemed, after all, as if Davenant had packed for the week instead of leaving a duplicate week-end set behind him. But—Good Lord! This was still more curious. There was no soap in the bathroom, although there were traces of its presence still discernible. Surely no one packing after a week-end in the country took the soap with him? The face-towel, too, was gone; yet the face-towel was distinctly mentioned in the washing-list. No, decidedly there was something wrong about Davenant’s exit.
Another curious thing—there was every evidence that Davenant was a smoker, and yet not a cigarette, not a pipe, not an ounce of tobacco left in the study. Of course, it was possible that Sullivan was very tidy and put them away somewhere, or that he was dishonest, and treated them as perquisites. But once more Gordon had the impression that Davenant had packed like a man who is leaving his base, not like a man who has just week-ended at a Saturday-to-Monday cottage. Like a man going abroad, even, or why did he take the soap with him? One piece of supplementary evidence was to be found in the study. A large and highly ornamented photograph frame stood on the writing-table there; but it had no photograph in it, and the back was unfastened, as if the portrait had been recently and suddenly removed. If circumstantial evidence went for anything, it seemed clear that when Davenant left the house last—apparently on Monday—he left it in the spirit of a man who does not expect to return immediately, and carries all his immediate needs with him.
So far the investigation had proceeded, when Gordon happened to look out of a front window, and was discomposed by observing that Sullivan was coming back already down the lane. There was no time to be lost; he hastily ran downstairs and out at the front door. It would be taking a considerable risk to trust to the mazes of the back garden, and he decided to make for the hedge. But before he could reach it, Sullivan turned the corner into the garden-path and confronted him.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, on the inspiration of the moment, “but could you tell me what Mr. Davenant’s address is? I shall have to write to him, and this is the only address they’ve got up at the Club.”
“Mr. Davenant left no address,” said Sullivan, and, try as he would, Gordon could not determine whether there was suspicion in his tone. However, the awkward corner was turned, and it was with some feeling of self-congratulation that he made his way back to the dormy-house.
He came back to find Reeves closeted with Marryatt and Carmichael, to whom he was explaining the whole story of their adventures. “I hope you won’t think it a breach of confidence,” was his explanation, “but the last disappointment I’ve had has made me feel that we must be on the wrong tack somewhere; and it’s no good for us two to try and correct each other. It’s like correcting the proofs of a book; you must get an outsider in to do it. So I thought, as Marryatt and Carmichael were with us at the start, it would be best to take them fully into our confidence, and make a foursome of it.”