“There’s all about Mr. Parrish,” said the boy, “’im as they found dead up at ’Arkings las’ night. And the noospapers ’asn’t ’arf been sendin’ down to-day ... reporters and photographers ... you oughter seen the crowd as come by the mornin’ train ...”
“I wonder what they’ll get out of Manderton,” commented Robin rather grimly to himself as his train puffed leisurely, after the habit of Sunday trains, into the quiet little station.
In the solitude of his first-class smoker he unfolded the newspapers. None had more than the brief fact that Hartley Parrish had been found dead with a pistol in his hand, but they made up for the briefness of their reports by long accounts of the dead man’s “meteoric career.” And, Robin noted with relief, hitherto Mary Trevert’s name was out of the picture.
He dropped the papers on to the seat, and, as the train steamed serenely through the Sunday calm of the country towards London’s outer suburbs, he reviewed in his mind such facts as he had gleaned regarding the circumstances of his late host’s death.
He would, he told himself, accept for the time being as facts what, he admitted to himself, so far only seemed to be such. Hartley Parrish, then, had been seated in his library at his desk with the door locked. The fire was smoking, and therefore he had opened the window. According to Horace Trevert, the window had not been bolted when he had entered the library, for, after smashing the pane in the assumption that the bolt was shot, he had had no difficulty in pushing up the window. Hartley Parrish had opened the window himself, for on the nail of the middle finger of his left hand Robin had seen, with the aid of the magnifying-glass, a tiny fragment of white paint.
Who had closed it? He had no answer ready to that question.
Now, as to the circumstances of the shooting. The suicide theory invited one to believe that Hartley Parrish had got up from his desk, pushing back his chair, had gone round it until he stood between the desk and the window, and had there shot himself through the heart. Why should he have done this?
Robin had no answer ready to this question either. He passed on again. Bude had heard loud voices a very few minutes before Mary had heard the shot. That morning’s experiments had shown that Bude could have heard these sounds only by way of the open window of the library and the open doors of the garden and the library corridor. Additional proof, if Bude had heard aright, that the library window was open.
Leaning back in his seat, his finger-tips pressed together, Robin Greve resolutely faced the situation to which his deductions were leading him.
“The voice heard at the open window,” he told himself, “was the voice of the man who murdered Parrish and who closed the window, that is, of course, if the murder theory proves more conclusive than that of suicide.”