The lodge came quickly into view. It was well out of sight of the wood on the hill where the shots had been fired. I uttered an exclamation as I saw that the big white gate was shut. It was hardly ever shut.
Slowing down, I brought the car to a standstill within a few yards of the lodge, jumped out, and ran forward to open the gate.
It was fastened with a heavy chain, and the chain was securely padlocked.
Shouting failed to bring any one out of the lodge, so I clambered over the gate and knocked loudly at the door. But nobody answered, and, when I tried to open the door, I found it locked.
There seemed to be but one way out of the difficulty. I have said that I am strong, yet it needed all my strength to lift that heavy gate off its hinges. It fell with a crash back into the road, and I managed to drag it away to one side. Then starting the engine again, I set off once more for Oakham “all out.”
I went straight to the hospital, but a brief examination of the poor fellow sufficed to assure the doctors that the man was already dead. Then I went to the police-station and told them everything I knew—how a man giving the name “Smithson” had called at Houghton Park to see Sir Charles Thorold; how Thorold had repudiated all knowledge of the man; how Sir Charles and Lady Thorold and their daughter, and Lady Thorold’s maid, Judith—I did not know her surname—had suddenly left Houghton, and mysteriously disappeared; how I had, that afternoon, found the house shut up, though I had seen a man disappear from one of the windows; how I had discovered the butler’s body in the lake; how my driver had been shot dead by some one hidden in a wood upon a hill, and how other shots had been fired at me by the assassin.
At first the police seemed inclined to detain me, but when I had convinced them that I was what they quaintly termed “a bona fide gentleman,” and had produced what they called my “credentials,”—these consisted of a visiting card, and of a letter addressed to me at Houghton Park—and given them my London address and telephone number, they let me go. I found out afterwards that, while they kept me talking at the station, they had telephoned to London, in order to verify my statements that I had a flat in King Street and belonged to Brooks’s Club.
The coffee room of the Stag’s Head Hotel that night was crowded, for it was the night of the Hunt Ball, and every available bed in the hotel had been engaged some days in advance. Those dining were all strangers to me, most of them young people in very high spirits.
“I’ve kept this table for you, sir,” the head waiter said, as he conducted me across the room. “It is the best I could do; the other place at it is engaged.”
“And by a beautiful lady, I hope,” I answered lightly, for I knew this waiter to be something of a wag.