She fled up the stairs, and I, full of musing, went into the dinner-room and tried to eat. But it was no use then. I excused myself from the group about the table (pale, they were, as if Death itself had taken a seat at the board) and slowly proceeded to my second-storey room.
I wrote in this diary, and while I wrote I heard slight sounds below. Not until a long time later, when hunger had at last made itself felt and I hoped to burgle the larder, and stole down near midnight—not until then did I realize the full import of those sounds. While I passed through the corridor to reach the dining-room door and thence the kitchen, the far entrance of the Hall opened, and an unusual glare of light burst forth. Doctor Aire stood on the threshold. He wore a cook’s white apron tied beneath his arms and pinned to his trousers below the knees. He was rubbing his fingers on the edge of it. Using the instruments of the tall, wordless Coroner, he had just performed the superfluous but required necropsy upon the body of Sean Cosgrove.
“The blow on the neck did it; nothing else the matter. He had a whale of a constitution.”
Aire, too, was hungry. But it almost robbed me of my appetite again to see him eating with those gruesome fingers.
As the Superintendent foresaw, it was well that the post-mortem was quickly done. After all, we were cut off from escape. The bridge was wholly gone; so we had already learned by telephone. Burial of the murdered man somewhere in the Vale might yet be necessary. The King-maker entombed alone, uncoffined, far removed from the odour of sanctity!
Aire, Salt, and I came up together at half-past eleven. Poor Crofts had been troubled enough about finding places for the two officials overnight. On the first floor the rooms were filled: the Belvoirs, Oxford, and Miss Lebetwood take up the left portion of the storey not part of the upper reaches of the Hall, and on the other side the Pendletons, the Aires, Bob Cullen, Ludlow, and Miss Mertoun have rooms. Above these the only habitable chambers are those of Maryvale, Mrs. Bartholomew, and Lib at the south end, and mine up the passage. Between my room and Lib’s are two chambers filled with stores of oddments anything up to a century old. The great rooms across the passage from me are also depositories and magazines of much that has been undisturbed since long before Crofts bought Highglen House.
I knew that our host took Salt and Niblett over the House in a sort of preliminary inspection about ten o’clock, for they arrived finally at my antique domicile. Crofts, thoughtless oaf, had given me no warning, and I was nearly caught in the exercise of pen and ink. I contrived, however, to thrust my writing-book underneath the table and to snatch a piece of notepaper. I was inditing a letter when the Superintendent looked in.
Then they stood in the doorway and discussed sleeping-quarters.
“Disadvantages every way,” complained Crofts, “whether you try the ground floor, the first, or the second—but of course I forgot—there’s no place available on the first.”
“The first floor will do us very well,” said Salt.