“Oh, no; I meant that Crofts bought the place because I preferred it to any other we inspected. It was so out-of-the-way.” She drew the silk scarf about her shoulders closer, as if she were cold. “But that makes it all the more horrible now.”
“Who were the solicitors?”
Crofts told him.
“And by the way, Mr. Pendleton, what is your line of business? You, er, are in business, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” answered our host briefly. “Drugs. Manchester.”
I knew that after this preliminary survey, the Superintendent would interview us separately on the events of the fatal afternoon.
He chose to commence with Maryvale. Salt held the door open for the man of business to pass through, entered himself, and carefully closed the door. It was with a kind of misgiving that I watched them disappear, for now began the really crucial part of the investigation, the ascertainment of precise times and places, the attrition of fact against fact, and the weighing of hypotheses. And I was not at all sure that I fancied Salt, any more than I had last night in the beat of the rain.
The rain continued. The servants had gone, of course, and now the taciturn Coroner departed to catch up sleep in Crofts’ room; so we were an intimate group once more. But the blight of cheerlessness had fallen on us again, and mystery reached its wings of fear about us. The mutter and hiss of rain sometimes redoubled at the vast windows, sometimes sank to a whisper, and those windows from their very size, seemed to admit a darker darkness. Hardly a word was spoken, and that not always heeded.
It was a quarter of an hour before Salt appeared with Maryvale. The official tugged at his border of beard with somewhat dubious expression. It was not hard to imagine that Maryvale had proved an unsatisfactory answerer, now that this strange, detached fit was upon him. Salt nodded to Alberta Pendleton, who passed through the doorway. Maryvale without a word took the piano-seat she had vacated, and began softly to play his sequences of brooding, atonic chords.
The inquiry progressed behind the closed door. Some of us Salt detained only a couple of minutes, persons who could merely verify, but not add to the information already at his disposal; others were with him twenty minutes or more. Among these I was.