Mystery at Lynden Sands

by

J. J. Connington

Contents

Chapter I.
The Death at Foxhills

Paul Fordingbridge, with a faintly reproachful glance at his sister, interrupted his study of the financial page of The Times and put the paper down on his knee. Deliberately he removed his reading-glasses; replaced them by his ordinary spectacles; and then turned to the restless figure at the window of the private sitting-room.

“Well, Jay, you seem to have something on your mind. Would it be too much to ask you to say it—whatever it is—and then let me read my paper comfortably? One can't give one's mind to a thing when there's a person at one's elbow obviously ready to break out into conversation at any moment.”

Miss Fordingbridge had spent the best part of half a century in regretting her father's admiration for Herrick. “I can't see myself as Julia of the Night-piece,” she complained with a faint parade of modesty; and it was at her own wish that the hated name had been abbreviated to an initial in family talk.

At the sound of her brother's voice she turned away from the sea-view.

“I can't imagine why you insisted on coming to this hotel,” she said, rather fretfully. “I can't stand the place. Of course, as it's just been opened, it's useless to expect everything to go like clockwork; but there seems a lot of mismanagement about it. I almost burned my hand with the hot water in my bedroom this morning—ridiculous, having tap-water as hot as that! And my letters got into the wrong pigeon-hole or something; I had to wait ever so long for them. Of course the clerk said he was sorry—but what good does that do? I don't want his sorrow. I want my letters when I ask for them.”

“No doubt.”

“And there was a wasp in my room when I went up there a few minutes ago. If I'd wanted a double-bedded room with a wasp as a room-mate, I would have asked for it when we booked, wouldn't I? And when I rang the bell and told them to put the thing out, the chambermaid—so it seems—was afraid of wasps. So she had to go and get hold of someone else to tackle it. And meanwhile, of course, I had to wait about until my room was made habitable. That's a nice kind of hotel!”

“Oh, it has its points,” Paul Fordingbridge advanced soothingly. “One can get quite decent wine; and this chair's not uncomfortable.”

“I don't sit in a chair and drink wine all day,” his sister retorted, querulously. “And that jazz band downstairs is simply appalling—I can feel my ear-drums quiver whenever it starts playing.”

“It amuses the children, at least. I haven't heard Stanley or Cressida complaining about it yet; and they seem to dance most of the time in the evenings.”

“So like the younger generation! They get married—and they dance. And that's almost all you can say about them.”

“Oh, no. Let's be fair,” her brother corrected her mildly. “They both play bridge a good deal; and Cressida's not bad at golf. I can't say, taking her over all, that I'm ashamed of her as a niece. And Stanley's a great improvement on her first husband—that fellow Staveley.”

Miss Fordingbridge made a gesture of irritation.

“Oh, of course, everything's simply splendid, by your way of it. A fascinating niece, a nice-looking nephew-in-law, and a wonderful hotel to live in for a month or so; what more could one want? The only thing I can't understand is what this family party is doing in an hotel just now, when we've got Foxhills standing empty almost within a stone's-throw. You know how I hate hotels; and yet you won't reopen Foxhills and let us live there. What's the use in coming to Lynden Sands at all, if we don't stay at our own house and get privacy at least?”

Her brother's brows contracted slightly.

“Foxhills isn't going to be reopened. You know quite well the size of staff you'd need to run it properly; and I don't propose to pay on that scale merely in order to stay at Foxhills for a month or so and then shut it up again. Besides, Jay, this new golf-course has changed things a bit. I'm trying to let Foxhills; and if I got a tenant, we might have to clear out of the place before we'd got well settled down in it. This hotel and the new course between them are going to make Lynden Sands more popular before long. There's a fair chance of getting Foxhills leased.”

Miss Fordingbridge was manifestly taken aback by this information.

“You're trying to let Foxhills—our old house? Why, it isn't yours to let! It belongs to Derek.”

Paul Fordingbridge seemed to be flicked on the raw. There was a certain asperity in his tone as he replied.

“Whether it belongs to Derek or merely belonged to Derek is an open question. He hasn't turned up to let us decide the point one way or the other.”

He glanced at his sister's face and apparently read something in her expression, for he continued with a faint rasp in his tone.

“I thought I'd made the position clear enough to you already, but, as you don't seem to grasp it even yet, I'll go over it once more. But this must be the last time, Jay. I'm really tired of making the thing clear to you when you evidently won't take the trouble to understand how I'm placed.”

He paused for a moment, as though to put his facts in order before stating his case.

“Since this is the last time I'm going to discuss the thing with you, I'll go right back to the beginning; and you'll be good enough to give me your attention, Jay. I'm tired of the subject; and specially tired of explaining it to you, as you never listen.

“Under our father's will, the major part of the family property—including the Foxhills estate—went to his eldest son, brother John, on a life-tenancy. After John died, it was all to go without restrictions to the next eldest—brother Rufus, out in Australia—or to his son, Derek. Failing Derek, it was to go to the next eldest—Cressida's father; or, if he died first, then to Cressida. If she didn't live to come into it, then it fell to my share; and, finally, if we all died off, then you were to get it. Of course, he'd left each of us enough to keep us going comfortably in any case. Foxhills and the investments that went along with it were extras, over and above that. You see that part clearly enough, I suppose?”

Miss Fordingbridge nodded; but it seemed doubtful if she had given the narrative much attention. She appeared to be treasuring up some thought which made her brother's statement of little real interest to her. Paul glanced again at her face and seemed to hesitate slightly. He decided to continue.

“None of us had seen Derek until just before the war. Then he came to Foxhills for a while with us. You took to him more than I did. He seemed to me a very ordinary young fellow. Meanwhile, John came into his life-rent of the estate and the rest of the property, after our father died.

“Then came the war. Derek had a commission in some Australian regiment. We saw little of him, naturally. I wish we'd seen less. He brought home that friend of his, Nick Staveley, on leave; and he got round Cressida and married her—the worst day's work our family's done for a good while. Lucky for her that he got wiped out, that day when Derek was captured.”

Miss Fordingbridge winced at the name of her niece's first husband. Even after all these years, the very thought of Staveley had its sting for the family. Apart from this, however, she showed no interest in her brother's narrative, which was obviously an old tale to her, and important only as it concerned her brother's motives of action.

“Meanwhile, Rufus had a paralytic stroke out in Australia and died. Then, a little later, John got killed in that motor accident. Under the will, that left Derek in possession of the estate. I can't claim that I foresaw that exact state of affairs; but I'd been afraid of something of the sort happening. During the war, things needed a careful eye on them; and I didn't care to see Foxhills in the hands of lawyers. So before Derek went off to the Front, I got him to give me a power of attorney to deal with all his affairs. Are you listening, Jay?”

Miss Fordingbridge nodded absently. She still had the air of reserving a surprise for her brother.

“You know what happened next,” Paul Fordingbridge went on. “Derek was captured and sent to Clausthal. Almost immediately, he got away from there, and nearly scraped over the Dutch frontier. The Germans caught him there; and as a result he was sent on to Fort 9, at Ingolstadt. We know he got away from there—it must have been almost immediately, as we got no letters from him—and after that all trace of him was lost. Whether he got shot in trying to get over the frontier, or whether he lost his memory, or what happened to him, no one can tell. He's vanished, so far as we're concerned.”

Miss Fordingbridge repressed a faint smile, evidently with some difficulty; but her brother failed to notice the fleeting expression on her face.

“Now I want you to see the position that I'm left in, with all this muddle,” he went on. “Derek may be alive, or he may be dead, for all we know. If he's alive, then Foxhills belongs to him; and, until we have evidence of his death, that's the state of affairs. Meanwhile, with his power of attorney, I have to manage things, fix up the investments, get the best return I can on his money, and look after the up-keep of Foxhills. I daresay we could go to the Courts and ask leave to presume his death; but I think it's fairer to wait a while yet, before doing anything in that direction. He might turn up, in spite of everything.”

It was evident from his tone that he thought this contingency a most unlikely one, though not altogether impossible.

“In any case, I've got to do the best I can for his interests. That's why I propose to let Foxhills if I can find someone to take it on a short lease. We can't afford to let Derek's property stand idle—if it is his property. Besides, a place of that size is far better occupied. It's more or less all right just now, with old Peter Hay looking after it and living in the cottage; but it would be far better if we had someone living there permanently and keeping it heated. I'm afraid of dry-rot setting in sometime or other. Now, do you understand the state of affairs, Jay? Can't you see that's the best course to take?”

Miss Fordingbridge paid no attention to either query.

“I've listened to you,” she said, perhaps with a slight lapse from strict accuracy, “and now it's your turn to listen to me, Paul. It's no use your trying to persuade me that there's any doubt about Derek at all. I know perfectly well he's alive.”

Paul Fordingbridge made no effort to restrain his involuntary gesture of annoyance. Quite evidently he saw what was coming.

“Now, Julia, it's no use bringing up this stuff of yours again. I've told you fifty times already that I don't believe it in the slightest. Since you went in for this table-turning, and spirit-rapping, and planchette, and all the rest of the wretched business, you've hardly been sane on the subject. I daresay you adored Derek when he was here. No doubt you think you're justified in all this séance business, trying to get in touch with him, and the rest of it. But frankly, it leaves me as it leaves every other sensible person—completely sceptical.”

Miss Fordingbridge was evidently well-accustomed to this kind of reception when she broached the topic. She ignored her brother's protest and continued as though he had not interrupted her.

“I remember quite well how you laughed at me when I came back from that wonderful séance and told you how I had been assured that Derek was still alive. That was five years ago, but I can recall it perfectly. And I know it was true. And if you had been there yourself, and had heard it with your own ears, you'd have believed it too. You couldn't have disbelieved. It was far too convincing. After the medium went into a trance, the control spoke to me. And it told me all about Derek—what regiment he'd been in; when he was captured; how he'd disappeared; how anxious I'd been about him; and how we'd lost all trace of him. You'd have been quite convinced yourself, if you'd been there and heard it all.”

“I am quite convinced,” her brother replied drily. “That's to say I'm quite convinced that they'd looked up Derek's name in the casualty lists and got together all the data they could gather beforehand. I expect you gave away a good deal yourself by your questions, too. You're about the easiest person to pump, if one goes about it in the right way.”

Miss Fordingbridge smiled in a superior fashion, as though she knew that she held a trump card still.

“Would it convince you if I said that I'd seen Derek?”

“Some more of their confounded mummery? No, it wouldn't convince me. A child could deceive you, Jay. You want to be deceived. You can't bear the idea that Derek's dead—that's what vitiates this stuff that you dignify by the name of evidence.”

“Vulgar abuse never hurts a spiritualist. We're used to it,” Miss Fordingbridge replied with simple dignity. “But you're wrong as usual, Paul. It wasn't at a séance that I saw Derek. It was here, at Lynden Sands. And it was last night.”

From the expression on her brother's face it was clear that he hardly knew how to take this news.

“You saw him here, last night? In a dream, I suppose?”

“No, not in a dream. I met him by appointment down at that rock on the beach—the one we used to call Neptune's Seat. And I saw him close enough to make no mistake—as close as I am to you this moment. And I talked to him, too. It's Derek; there's no doubt about it.”

Paul Fordingbridge was evidently taken aback. This latest tale of his sister's seemed to have something more solid behind it than her earlier ventures.

“You said nothing to me about this. Why was that?”

Miss Fordingbridge recognised that she had scored a point and had startled her brother out of his usual scepticism. She had her answer ready.

“Naturally you'd hardly expect me to discuss a thing like that over the breakfast-table, with half-a-hundred total strangers sitting round and craning their necks so as to hear better? If you will insist on staying at hotels, you must put up with the results. This is the first time I've been alone with you since I met him.”

Paul Fordingbridge acknowledged the justice of her view with a nod.

“Quite so,” he admitted. “And you had a talk with this fellow, had you?”

Miss Fordingbridge's temper showed unmistakably in her tone as she replied.

“Kindly don't call Derek ‘this fellow,’ if you please. It's Derek himself. He talked to me for quite a long time—all about things that had happened at Foxhills when he was here before the War, and other things that happened at the times he was home on leave. And part of the time he told me about Clausthal and Fort 9, too.”

Her brother's scepticism again made itself evident.

“Plenty of people were in Fort 9 and at Clausthal besides Derek. That proves nothing.”

“Well, then, he mentioned a whole lot of little things as well. He reminded me of how Cressida dropped her bouquet when she was signing the register after her wedding. And he remembered which wedding march they played then.”

“Almost anyone in Lynden Sands could have told him that.”

Miss Fordingbridge reflected for a moment or two, evidently searching her memory for some crucial piece of evidence.

“He remembered that we used to bring up some of the old port from Bin 73 every time he went off to the Front. He said often he wished he could have had some of it just before zero hour.”

Paul Fordingbridge shook his head.

“One of the servants might have mentioned that in the village and he could have got hold of it. If you've nothing better than this sort of tittle-tattle to prove it's Derek, it won't go far.”

He reflected for a moment, then he asked:

“You recognised his face, of course?”

A flicker of repulsion crossed his sister's features.

“I saw his face,” she said. “Paul, he's horribly disfigured, poor boy. A shell-burst, or something. It's dreadful. If I hadn't known it was Derek, I'd hardly have recognised him. And he was so good-looking, in the old days. But I know it's Derek. I'm quite sure of it. That medium's control never makes a mistake. If Derek had passed over, she'd have found him and made him speak to me at that séance. But she couldn't. And now he's come back in the flesh, it shows there is something in spiritualism, in spite of all your sneers. You'll have to admit it, Paul.”

Her words had evidently started a fresh train of thought in her brother's mind.

“Did you recognise his voice?” he demanded.

Miss Fordingbridge seemed to make an effort to recall the tones she had heard:

“It was Derek's voice, of course,” she said, with a faint hesitation in her manner. “Of course, it wasn't quite the voice I'd been expecting. His mouth was hurt in those awful wounds he got. And his tongue was damaged, too; so his voice isn't the same as it used to be. It's husky instead of clear; and he has difficulty in saying some words, I noticed. But at times I could quite well imagine it was Derek speaking just as he used to do, with that Australian twang of his that we used to tease him about.”

“Ah, he has the twang, has he?”

“Of course he has. Derek couldn't help having it, could he, when he was brought up in Australia until he was quite grown-up? Last night he laughed over the way we used to chaff him about his accent.”

“Anything more about him that you can remember?”

“He's been dreadfully hurt. Two of his fingers were blown off his right hand. It gave me such a start when he shook hands with me.”

Paul Fordingbridge seemed to reflect for a moment or two on the information he had acquired.

“H'm!” he said at last, “It'll be difficult to establish his identity; that's clear. Face unrecognisable owing to wounds; voice altered, ditto; two fingers gone on right hand, so his writing won't be identifiable. If only we had taken Derek's fingerprints, we'd have had some sort of proof. As it is, there's very little to go on.”

Miss Fordingbridge listened scornfully to this catalogue.

“So that's all the thanks you give Derek for suffering so horribly for us all in the war?”

“Always assuming that this friend of yours is Derek. Don't you understand that I can't take a thing of this sort on trust? I'm in charge of Derek's property—assuming that he's still alive, I can't hand it over to the first claimant who comes along, and then, if Derek himself turns up, excuse myself by saying that the first fellow had a plausible yarn to tell. I must have real proof. That's simply plain honesty, in my position. And real proof's going to be mighty hard to get, if you ask me, Jay. You must see that, surely.”

“It is Derek,” Miss Fordingbridge repeated, obstinately. “Do you think I can't recognise my own nephew, when he's able to tell me all sorts of things that only we in the family could know?”

Her brother regarded her rather ruefully.

“I believe you'd go into the witness-box and take your oath that it's Derek,” he said, gloomily. “You'd made up your mind that Derek was coming back sooner or later; and now you're prepared to recognise anything down to a chimpanzee as your long-lost nephew, rather than admit you're wrong. Damn this spiritualism of yours! It's at the root of all the trouble. It's led you to expect Derek; and you mean to have a Derek of some sort.”

He paused for a moment, as though following out a train of thought; then he added:

“And it's quite on the cards that if it ever came before a jury, some chuckleheads would take your word for it. ‘Sure to know her nephew,’ and all that sort of stuff. They don't know your little fads.”

Miss Fordingbridge glanced up at the note of trouble in her brother's voice.

“I can't see why you're trying to throw doubt on the thing, Paul. You haven't seen Derek; I have. And yet you don't wait to see him yourself. You come straight out with a denial that it is Derek. And you say I've got a preconceived idea about the affair. It seems to me that you're the one with a preconceived notion. One would think you'd made up your mind already on the subject.”

Paul Fordingbridge acknowledged the counter-thrust.

“There's something in what you say, perhaps, Jay. But you must admit the whole business is a trifle unexpected. It's hardly taking the line one might expect, if everything were square and above-board. Let's assume that it is Derek, and then you'll see what a lot's left unexplained so far. First of all, it's years since the war. Why hasn't he turned up before now? That's a strange affair, surely. Then, when he does reappear, why doesn't he come to me first of all? I'm the person he left in charge of his affairs, and I should think his first step would be to communicate with me. But no, he comes down here unannounced; and he fixes up some sort of clandestine meeting with you. That's a rum go, to my mind. And there's more than that in it. He meets you last night and has a talk with you; but he doesn't suggest coming to see me. Or did he give you any message for me?”

“He didn't, as it happens. But you seem to think we were talking as if it was all a matter of business, Paul. It was a shock to me to have him back again. And I daresay I did most of the talking, and he hadn't time to give me any message for you. I was very shaken up by it all, and he was so kind to me.”

Her brother seemed to find little pleasure in the picture which she drew.

“Yes, I expect you did most of the talking, Jay. He wouldn't interrupt you much. But, aside from all that, it's getting near lunch-time now. He's had the whole morning to break into the family circle; and yet he hasn't come near. From what I remember of him, shyness wasn't one of his defects. Whatever you may think about it, that seems to me a bit fishy. Damned strange in fact. I'm not taking up any definite stand in the matter; but there are things that need a bit of explaining.”

Miss Fordingbridge seemed for a moment to be staggered by her brother's analysis; but she recovered herself almost at once and fastened upon his last point.

“Didn't I tell you that he was horribly disfigured? Even in the moonlight he was a dreadful sight. Do you expect him to come marching into this hotel in broad daylight this morning, so that everyone can stare at him? You really have very little common sense, Paul. I think it shows that he wants to spare us all the tittle-tattle he can. You know what hotels are, and how the people in them are simply on the look-out for something to chatter about. And when they got a chance like this—missing heir returns, and so forth—you can guess for yourself what it would be like. We'd have no life of it, with people staring at us and whispering behind our backs as we passed. And I think Derek has shown a great deal of tact and common sense in behaving as he has done. Naturally he asked to see me first. He knows how fond of him I was.”

Her brother seemed to consider this fresh view of the affair for a longer time than he had devoted to any of her other statements. At last he shook his head doubtfully.

“It might be as you say, of course,” he conceded grudgingly. “We must wait and see what turns up. But you can take it from me, Jay, that I shan't be satisfied unless I get something a good deal better in the way of evidence. It looks very like a parcel from a shop in Queer Street, so far as it's gone.”

Miss Fordingbridge seemed content to drop that side of the matter, at least for the time. But she had something further to say.

“Of course you'll drop this absurd idea of letting Foxhills now, Paul?”

Her brother seemed irritated by this fresh turn given to their conversation.

“Why should I? I've told you often enough that it's my business to do the best I can for Derek; and the rent of Foxhills would be worth having, even if Derek did come back. You're not suggesting that he should stay there, are you? It's far too big a place for a single man, even if he wanted to live down here at Lynden Sands.”

Miss Fordingbridge was plainly put out by this suggestion.

“Of course he would stay there. When he went away, didn't I keep his rooms in order, just as he left them? He could go back to-morrow and find his study exactly as it was when he left us. Everything's there just as it used to be: his books, his pipes, his old diary, his ash-trays—everything. When we shut up Foxhills, I wanted to have everything ready so that when he came back from the war he'd find everything in its usual place. He could walk straight in and feel that things were just the same and that we hadn't forgotten him. And now you want to let Foxhills just at the moment when he comes back again—rob the poor boy of the only place on this side of the world that he can call a home. I won't have it, Paul!”

“Whether you have it or haven't it, Jay, is a matter of total indifference. Until the power of attorney is revoked, I shall do exactly as seems best to me; and letting Foxhills is one of the things I shall certainly do.”

“But I know Derek doesn't want it,” cried Miss Fordingbridge. “Last night I told him all about how I'd kept his things for him so carefully; and if you'd seen how touched the poor boy was! He said it was the thing that had touched him most. And he was ever so grateful to me. And now you propose to spoil it all, after those years!”

She switched off on to another subject.

“And what do you propose to do about poor old Peter Hay? If you let Foxhills, it won't need a caretaker; and I suppose you'll turn poor Peter adrift? And, if you remember, Peter was one of the people that Derek liked best when he was here before. He was always going about with Peter, and he said he found him companionable. And he's learned a lot from Peter about beasts and so on—all new to him—since he came from Australia. But I suppose Peter's to go at a week's notice? That's a nice way to serve people.”

Her brother seemed to consider things before replying.

“I'll try to find something for Peter. You're quite right, Jay. I didn't mean to turn Peter adrift, though. If I have to sack him from the caretaker business, I'll pay him out of my own pocket till something else turns up. Peter's too decent a man to let down, especially after he's been at Foxhills all his life. If it had been that last valet we had—that fellow Aird—I'd never have thought twice about throwing him out at a day's notice. But you can trust me to look after Peter.”

Miss Fordingbridge seemed slightly mollified by this concession on her brother's part; but she stuck to her main point.

“Well, you can't let Foxhills in any case. I won't have it!”

But apparently her brother had wearied of argument, for he made no reply.

“I shall be going up to Foxhills some time to-day. I always go up to dust Derek's rooms, you know,” she continued.

“What on earth do you do that for?” her brother demanded in an exasperated tone. “Are you training for a housemaid's place? I hear there's a shortage in that line, but you hardly seem to be a useful kind of recruit, Jay.”

“I've always looked after Derek's rooms. When he was here at Foxhills in the old days, I never allowed anyone to lay a finger on his study. I knew just how he liked his things kept, and I wouldn't have maids fussing round, displacing everything.”

“Oh, of course you doted on the boy,” her brother retorted. “But it seems a bit unnecessary at this time of day.”

“Unnecessary? Just when Derek has come back?”

Paul Fordingbridge made no attempt to conceal his gesture of annoyance; but he refrained from reopening the sore subject.

“Well, if you come across Peter, you can send him down to me. I haven't seen him since we came here, and I may as well have a talk about things. Probably there are one or two repairs that need considering. Perhaps you could go round by his cottage and make sure of getting hold of him.”

Miss Fordingbridge nodded her assent.

“I'll be quite glad to have a talk with Peter. He'll be so delighted to know that Derek's back at last. It was only the other day that we were talking about Derek together. Peter thinks there's no one like him.”

“All the more reason for saying nothing, then. If it turns out that it isn't Derek, it would disappoint Peter badly if you'd raised his hopes.”

Then, seeing that his scepticism had again roused his sister's temper, he added hastily:

“By the way, how's Peter keeping? Has he had any more of these turns of his—apoplexy, wasn't it?”

“He seemed to be quite well when I saw him the other day. Of course, he's got to be careful and not excite himself; but he seemed to me as if he'd quite got over the slight attack he'd had in the spring.”

“Still got his old squirrel?”

“It's still there. And the rest of the menagerie too. He insisted on showing me them all, and of course I had to pretend to be frightfully interested. Poor old man, they're all he has now, since his wife died. It would be very lonely for him up there, with no one within a mile of him. His birds and things are great company for him, he says.”

Paul Fordingbridge seemed relieved that the conversation was edging away from the dangerous subject. He led it still further out of the zone.

“Have you see Cressida and Stanley this morning? They'd finished breakfast and gone out before I came on the scene.”

“I think they were going to play golf. They ought to be back presently.”

She went to the window and gazed out for a moment or two without speaking. Her brother took up The Times and resumed his study of the share market, with evident relief.

“This hotel spoils Lynden Sands,” Miss Fordingbridge broke out after a short silence. “It comes right into the view from the front of Foxhills—great staring building! And, wherever you go along the bay, you see this monstrosity glaring in the middle of the view. It'll ruin the place. And it'll give the villagers all sorts of notions, too. Visitors always spoil a small village.”

Her brother made no reply, and when she halted in her complaints he rustled his newspaper clumsily in an obvious effort to discourage further conversation. Just then a knock at the door was heard.

“Come in!” Miss Fordingbridge ordered.

A page-boy appeared.

“Message on the telephone for you, sir.”

Paul Fordingbridge rose reluctantly and left the room. He was absent for a very short time; and when he came back his sister could see that he was disturbed.

“That was a message from the doctor. It seems poor old Peter's gone.”

“Gone? Do you mean anything's happened to him?”

“He's had another attack—some time in the night or earlier. They didn't find out about it until the morning. The doctor's just been up at the cottage, so there's no doubt about it.”

“Poor Peter! He looked so well when I saw him the other day. One would have thought he'd live to see eighty. This will be a dreadful disappointment for Derek. He was so fond of the old man.”

She paused for a moment, as though she could hardly believe the news.

“Are you sure there's no mistake, Paul?”

“None whatever. It was the doctor himself who rang up. Peter had no relations, you know, so naturally we'll need to look after things. He served us well, Jay.”

“I remember when he came to Foxhills, and that's years and years ago. The place won't seem quite the same without him. Did the doctor tell you anything about it, Paul?”

“No details. He just rung up to let us know, he said, as we seemed to be the only people who had any real connection with the old boy. Now I come to think of it, that sawbones seemed a bit stuffy over something. A bit abrupt in his manner over the 'phone. He's a new man, apparently. I didn't know his name. Perhaps that was what put him out.”

Chapter II.
A Bus-Driver's Holiday

Sir Clinton Driffield, after a careful examination of the lie, deliberately put down a long putt on the last green of the Lynden Sands course. His opponent, Stanley Fleetwood, stooped and picked up his own ball.

“Your hole and match,” he said, handing his putter back to his caddie.

Sir Clinton nodded.

“Thanks for the game,” he said. “We seem to be fairly even. Much more fun when the thing's in doubt up to the last green. Yes, you might clean 'em,” he added in reply to his caddie's inquiry. “I shan't want them until to-morrow.”

A girl had been sitting on one of the seats overlooking the green; and, as the caddie replaced the pin in the hole, she rose to her feet and came down towards the players. Stanley Fleetwood waved to her, and then, in response to her mute question, he made a gesture of defeat.

“This is Sir Clinton Driffield, Cressida,” he explained, as they met.

Sir Clinton had trained himself to observe minutely without betraying that he was doing so; and he had a habit of mentally docketing the results of his scrutiny. Mannerisms were the points which he studied with most attention. As Cressida Fleetwood came slowly towards them, his apparently casual glance took in mechanically the picture of a dark-haired girl still in her twenties, slim and graceful; but his attention fastened mainly on a faint touch of shyness which added to her charm; and in the expression of her eyes he believed he read something more uncommon. It seemed as though a natural frankness had been overlaid by a tinge of mistrust in the world.

“I hope I didn't rob you of a game this morning by taking your husband away, Mrs. Fleetwood,” he said, as they turned up the path leading to the hotel.

Cressida reassured him at once.

“As it happened,” she explained, “I didn't feel inclined to play to-day, so he was left at a loose end; and when you took pity on him, I was very glad to have my conscience cleared.”

“Well, it was lucky for me,” Sir Clinton answered. “The friend who's staying with me just now wouldn't come out this morning. He strained his foot slightly yesterday. So I was left in the lurch, and I was very fortunate in finding Mr. Fleetwood free to take me on.”

They entered the grounds of the hotel, and, at a turn in the path, Cressida Fleetwood bowed to a girl who passed their group. The new-comer was handsome rather than pretty; and there was a hint of hardness in her face which detracted a little from her charm. She was dressed with a finish rather unusual at that time of day in a golfing hotel; and her walk lacked the free swing characteristic of the athletic English girl. Written fairly plainly on her were the signs of a woman who has had to look after her own interests and who has not always come out a winner in the game.

When she had passed out of earshot, Cressida turned to her husband.

“That's the French girl I told you about, Stanley—Mme Laurent-Desrousseaux. I found her in some difficulty or other at the hotel desk—her English isn't quite perfect—so I helped her out a little.”

Stanley Fleetwood nodded without comment; and Sir Clinton had little difficulty in seeing that he had no desire for his wife to extend her acquaintance with Mme Laurent-Desrousseaux. He could not help speculating as to the cause which had brought the Frenchwoman into this quiet backwater, where she had no amusements, apparently, and no acquaintances.

Before he had time to turn the matter over in his mind, however, his train of thought was interrupted by the appearance of a fresh figure.

“How's the strain, squire?” he greeted the newcomer; and, as Wendover came up to the group, he introduced him to his two companions.

“I hope you enjoyed your round,” said Wendover, turning to Stanley Fleetwood. “Did he manage to work off any of his special expertise on you this morning?”

“He beat me, if that's what you mean.”

“H'm! He beats me usually,” Wendover confessed. “I don't mind being beaten by play; but I hate to be beaten by the rules.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Wendover? You seem to have a grievance,” Cressida asked, seeing a twinkle in Wendover's eye.

“The fact is,” Wendover explained, “yesterday my ball rolled up against a large worm on the green and stopped there. I'm of a humane disposition, so I bent down to remove the worm, rather than putt across its helpless body. He objected, if you please, on the ground that one may not remove anything growing. I don't know whether it was growing or not—it looked to me remarkably well grown for a worm, and had probably passed the growing age. But, when I urged that, he simply floored me by quoting a recent decision of the Royal and Ancient on the point.”

“If you play a game, you must play that game and not one you invent on the spur of the moment, squire,” Sir Clinton warned him, with no sign of sympathy in his tone. “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”

“Hark to the chief constable!” Wendover complained. “Of course, his mind dotes on the legal aspect of things, and he's used to keeping all sorts of rules and regulations in his head. His knowledge of the laws of golf is worth a couple of strokes on his handicap on any average round.”

Cressida glanced at Sir Clinton.

“Are you really a chief constable?” she asked. “Somehow you aren't like the idea I had of chief constables.”

“I'm on holiday at present,” Sir Clinton answered lightly; “perhaps that makes a difference. But I'm sorry to fall below your ideal—especially in my own district. If you could tell me what you miss, perhaps I could get it. What's wanted? Constabulary boots, or beetle-brows, or a note-book ready to hand, or a magnifying glass, or anything of that sort?”

“Not quite. But I thought you'd look more like an official somehow.”

“Well, in a way that's a compliment. I've spent a fair part of my existence trying hard not to look like an official. I wasn't born a chief constable, you know. I was once a mere detective sort of person at the other end of the world.”

“Were you really? But, then, you don't look like my idea of a detective, either!”

Sir Clinton laughed.

“I'm afraid you're hard to please, Mrs. Fleetwood. Mr. Wendover's just as bad. He's a faithful reader of the classics, and he simply can't imagine anyone going in for detective work without a steely eye and a magnifying glass. It jars on his finer feelings merely to think of a detective without either of them. The only thing that saves me is that I'm not a detective nowadays; and he salves his conscience by refusing to believe that I ever was one.”

Wendover took up the challenge.

“I've only seen you at work once in the detective line,” he confessed, “and I must admit I thought your methods were simply deplorable, Clinton.”

“Quite right,” Sir Clinton admitted: “I disappointed you badly in that Maze affair, I know. Even the success in the end hardly justified the means employed in reaching it. Let's draw a veil, eh?”

They had reached the door of the hotel, and, after a few words, Cressida and her husband went into the building.

“Nice pair they make,” Wendover remarked, glancing after them as they went. “I like to see youngsters of that type. They somehow make you feel that the younger generation isn't any worse than its parents; and that it has a good deal less fuss about it, too. Reinstates one's belief in humanity, and all that sort of thing.”

“Yes,” Sir Clinton concurred, with a faint twinkle in his eye. “Some people one takes to instinctively. It's the manner that does it. I remember a man I once ran across—splendid fellow, charm, magnetic personality, and so on.”

His voice died away, as though he had lost interest in the matter.

“Yes?” Wendover inquired, evidently feeling that the story had stopped too soon.

“He was the worst poker-sharp on the liner,” Sir Clinton added gently, “Charm of manner was one of his assets, you know.”

Wendover's annoyance was only half-feigned.

“You've a sordid mind, Clinton. I don't like to hear you throwing out hints about people in that way. Anyone can see that's a girl out of the common; and all you can think of in that connection is card-sharps.”

Sir Clinton seemed sobered by his friend's vexation.

“You're quite right, squire,” he agreed. “She's out of the common, as you say. I don't know anything about her history, but it doesn't take much to see that something's happened to her. She looks as if she'd taken the world at her own measure at first, trusted everybody. And then she got a devil of a shock one day. At least, if that isn't in her eyes, then I throw in my hand. I've seen the same expression once or twice before.”

They entered the hotel and sat down in the lounge. Wendover glanced from the window across the links.

“This place will be quite good when the new course has been played over for a year or two. I shouldn't wonder if Lynden Sands became fairly popular.”

Sir Clinton was about to reply when a page-boy entered the lounge and paraded slowly across it, chanting in a monotonous voice:

“Number eighty-nine! Number eighty-nine! Number eighty-nine!”

The chief constable sat up sharply and snapped his fingers to attract the page-boy's attention.

“That's the number of my room,” he said to Wendover, “but I can't think of anyone who might want me. Nobody knows me in this place.”

“You number eighty-nine, sir?” the page-boy demanded. “There's somebody asking for you. Inspector Armadale, he said his name was.”

“Armadale? What the devil can he be wanting?” Sir Clinton wondered aloud. “Show him in, please.”

In a minute or two the inspector appeared.

“I suppose it's something important, inspector,” Sir Clinton greeted him, “otherwise you wouldn't have come. But I can't imagine what brings you here.”

Inspector Armadale glanced at Wendover, and then, without speaking, he caught Sir Clinton's eye. The chief constable read the meaning in his glance.

“This is a friend of mine, inspector—Mr. Wendover. He's a J. P. and perfectly reliable. You can speak freely before him, if it's anything official.”

Armadale was obviously relieved.

“This is the business, Sir Clinton. This morning we had a 'phone message from the Lynden Sands doctor. It seems the caretaker at a big house hereabouts—Foxhills, they call it—was found dead, close to his cottage. Dr. Rafford went up to see the body; and at first he thought it was a case of apoplexy. Then he noticed some marks on the body that made him suspicious, and he says he won't give a death certificate. He put the matter into our hands at once. There's nobody except a constable hereabouts, so I've come over myself to look into things. Then it struck me you were staying at the hotel here, and I thought I'd drop in on my way up.”

Sir Clinton gazed at the inspector with a very faintly quizzical expression.

“A friendly call?” he said. “That's very nice. Care to stay to lunch?”

The inspector evidently had not expected to find the matter taken in this way.

“Well, sir,” he said tentatively, “I thought perhaps you might be interested.”

“Intensely, inspector, intensely. Come and tell me all about it when it's cleared up. I wouldn't miss it.”

Faint signs of exasperation betrayed themselves in the inspector's face.

“I thought, perhaps, sir, that you'd care to come over with me and look into the thing yourself. It seems a bit mysterious.”

Sir Clinton stared at him in well-assumed amazement.

“We seem to be rather at cross-purposes, inspector. Let's be clear. First of all, I'm on holiday just now, and criminal affairs have nothing to do with me. Second, even if I weren't on holiday, a chief constable isn't specially attached to the find-'em-and-grab-'em branch of the service. Third, it might cause professional jealousy, heart-burnings, and what not, if I butted into a detective's case. What do you think?”

“It's my case,” Armadale said, abandoning all further attempt at camouflage. “The plain truth is, from all I heard over the 'phone, that it seems a rum business; and I'd like to have your opinion on it, if you'd be so good as to give me it after you've examined things for yourself.”

Sir Clinton's face relaxed.

“Ah,” he confessed. “Now I seem to have some glimmerings of what you're after; and, since there's no question of my having interfered without being asked, I might look into the affair. But if I'm doing you a favour—as you seem to think—then I'm going to lay down one condition, sine qua non. Mr. Wendover's interested in detective work. He knows all the classics: Sherlock Holmes, Hanaud, Thorndyke, etc. So, if I come in, then he's to be allowed to join us. Agree to that, inspector?”

The inspector looked rather sourly at Wendover, as though trying to estimate how great a nuisance he was likely to prove; but, as Sir Clinton's assistance could evidently be secured only at a price, Armadale gave a rather ungracious consent to the proposed arrangement.

Sir Clinton seemed almost to regret his own decision.

“I'd hardly bargained for a bus-driver's holiday,” he said rather ruefully.

A glance at the inspector's face showed that the expression had missed its mark. Sir Clinton made his meaning clearer.

“In the old horse-bus days, inspector, it was rumoured that when a bus-driver got a holiday he spent it on somebody else's bus, picking up tips from the driver. It seems that you want me to spend my holiday watching you do police work and picking up tips from your methods.”

Inspector Armadale evidently suspected something behind the politeness with which Sir Clinton had turned his phrase. He looked rather glumly at his superior as he replied:

“I see I'm going to get the usual mixture, sir—help and sarcasm, half and half. Well, my hide's been tanned already; and your help's worth it.”

Sir Clinton corrected him with an air of exactitude.

“What I said was that I'd ‘look into the affair.’ It's your case, inspector. I'm not taking it off your shoulders, you understand. I don't mind prowling round with you; but the thing's in your hands officially, and I've nothing to do with it except as a spectator, remember.”

Armadale's air became even gloomier when he heard this point of view so explicitly laid down.

“You mean it's to be just the same as the Ravensthorpe affair, I suppose,” he suggested. “Each of us has all the facts we collect, but you don't tell me what you think of them as we get them. Is that it, sir?”

Sir Clinton nodded.

“That's it, inspector. Now, if you and Mr. Wendover will go round to the front of this place, I'll get my car out and pick you up in a minute or two.”

Chapter III.
The Police at the Caretaker's

Wendover, scanning his friend's face, could see that all the carelessness had vanished from its expression. With the prospect of definite work before him, Sir Clinton seemed to have dropped his holiday mood completely.

“I think the first port of call should be the doctor,” he suggested as he turned the car into the road leading to Lynden Sands village. “We'd better start at the beginning, inspector; and the doctor seems likely to have been the earliest expert on the spot.”

They found Dr. Rafford in his garden, tinkering at a spotless motor-cycle; and Wendover was somewhat impressed by the obvious alertness of the young medico. Armadale introduced his companions, and then went straight to the point.

“I've come over about that case, doctor—the caretaker at Foxhills. Can you give us something to go on before we start to look into it up there?”

Dr. Rafford's air of efficiency was not belied when he told his story.

“This morning, at about half-past eight, young Colby came hammering at my door in a great state. He does some of the milk delivery round about here; and Peter Hay's house is one at which he leaves milk. It seems he went up there as usual; but when he got to the gate of the cottage he saw old Hay's body lying on the path up to the door. I needn't describe how it was lying; you'll see for yourself. I didn't disturb it—didn't need to.”

Inspector Armadale's nod conveyed his satisfaction at this news. The doctor continued:

“Young Colby's only a child; so he got a bit of a fright. His head's screwed on all right, though; and he came straight off here to get hold of me. Luckily I hadn't gone out on my rounds as early as that, and he found me just finishing breakfast. I got my bike out and went up to Foxhills immediately.

“When I heard young Colby's tale, I naturally concluded that poor old Hay had had a stroke. I'd been doing my best to treat him for high blood-pressure, off and on; but I hadn't been able to do much for him; and once or twice he'd had slight attacks. He was bound to go, some time or other; and I concluded that he'd had a final attack through over-exertion or something of the sort.”

He paused in his narrative for a moment and glanced from face to face in the group.

“You'll see, from this, foul play was the last thing that entered my mind. I got up to his cottage and found him, just as young Colby had said, lying face down on the garden path. From the look of him he'd obviously died of congestion. It seemed all plain sailing. In fact, I was just going to leave him and hunt up some assistance when my eye caught something. His arms were stretched out at full length above his head, as if he'd gone down all of a piece, you know; and his right sleeve had got rucked up a little, so that it showed a bit of his arm. And my eye happened to catch a mark on the skin just above the wrist. It was pretty faint; but there had evidently been some compression there. It puzzled me—still puzzles me. However, that's your affair. It struck me that I might as well have a look at the other arm, so I pushed up the coat-sleeve a little—that's the only thing I did to alter things in any way around the body—and I found a second mark there, rather like the first one.”

He paused, as if to give the inspector the chance of putting a question; but, as none came, he went on with his story.

“The impression I got—of course, I may be wrong—was that marks of that sort might be important. Certainly, after seeing them, I didn't care to assert that poor old Hay's death was due entirely to natural causes. He'd died of congestion, all right. I'm dead sure that a P. M. will confirm that. But congestion doesn't make marks on a man's wrists. It seemed to me worth ringing you up. If it's a mare's nest, then it's a mare's nest, and I'll be sorry to have troubled you. But I believe in having things done ship-shape; and I'd rather trouble you than get into hot water myself, if there's anything fishy about the affair.”

Inspector Armadale seemed rather dubious about how he should take the matter. To Wendover it almost looked as though he was regretting the haste with which he had brought Sir Clinton into the business. If the whole thing turned out to be a mare's nest, quite evidently Armadale expected to feel the flick of his superior's sarcasm. And obviously a couple of marks on a dead man's wrists did not necessarily spell foul play, since the man had clearly died of cerebral congestion, according to the doctor's own account.

At last the Inspector decided to ask a question or two.

“You don't know of anyone with a grudge against Hay?”

Rafford made no attempt to restrain a smile.

“Hay?” he said. “No one could possibly have a grudge against Peter. He was one of the decentest old chaps you could find anywhere—always ready to do a good turn to anyone.”

“And yet you assert that he was murdered?” demanded the inspector.

“No, I don't,” the doctor retorted sharply. “All I say is that I don't feel justified in signing a death certificate. That ends my part. After that, it's your move.”

Armadale apparently realised that Rafford was not the sort of person who could be bluffed easily. He tried a fresh line.

“When do you think the death took place?”

The doctor considered for a moment.

“It's no good giving you a definite hour,” he said. “You know as well as I do how much the symptoms vary from case to case. I think it's quite on the cards that he died some time about the middle of the night or a little earlier. But you couldn't get me to swear to that in the box, I warn you.”

“I've often heard it said,” the inspector commented in a disconsolate tone, “that you scientific people make the worst witnesses. You never will say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ plainly like ordinary people. You're always hedging and qualifying.”

“Had a training in accuracy, I expect,” Rafford replied. “We don't feel inclined to swear to things until we're convinced about them ourselves.”

Armadale evidently decided not to pursue the subject further.

“What about the body?” he asked.

“I sent Sapcote up to look after it—the village constable. He's up at Foxhills now. If it was to be left for your examination somebody had to be there to see it wasn't disturbed.”

The inspector nodded approvingly.

“Quite right. And I suppose I can get hold of this youngster—Colby's his name, isn't it?—any time I need him?”

Rafford gave him the boy's address, which he took down in his note-book.

“Anything else you can think of that might be useful?” he inquired, putting the book back into his pocket.

The doctor shook his head.

“Nix. I suppose the coroner will want a look in?”

“I expect so,” Armadale replied.

He glanced at Wendover and Sir Clinton to indicate that he now left the field to them. Wendover took advantage of the tacit permission.

“You didn't see anything that suggested poison, did you?” he asked the doctor.

Rafford's faint smile put an edge on his reply:

“I believe I said that if it hadn't been for the marks on the wrists, I'd have certified congestion of the brain. I don't think poison marks the wrists.”

Wendover, feeling that he had hardly shone by his interposition, refrained from further questions and glanced at Sir Clinton. The chief constable appeared to think that further inquiries could be allowed to stand over for a time.

“I think we'd better be moving on,” he suggested. “Thanks for your help, Dr. Rafford. Once we've seen the body, perhaps something fresh may turn up, and we may have to trouble you again. By the way,” he added, “did you notice if there was a heavy dew last night? I was playing bridge at the hotel and didn't go out after dinner; but perhaps you were out and can tell me.”

“The dew did come down fairly heavy,” Rafford said, after a pause for recollection. “I happened to be out at a case, and I noticed it. Are you thinking about the possibility of Hay's death being due to exposure?”

“Not exactly,” Sir Clinton answered, with a faintly ironical smile. “As you would say, doctor, exposure doesn't mark a man's wrist—at least not so quick as all that.”

Rafford acknowledged the dig good-humouredly and accompanied them to the garden gate as they went out.

“I hope I haven't started you on a wild-goose chase, inspector,” he said on parting. “But I suppose that sort of thing's all in your day's work, anyhow.”

Armadale digested this in silence as the car spun along towards Foxhills; then at last he uttered his views in a single sentence:

“That young fellow strikes me as uncommonly jaunty.”

And having liberated his soul, he kept obstinately silent until they had reached their destination.

“This is the place, I think,” Sir Clinton said a few minutes later, pulling his car up on the Foxhills avenue at a point where a side-road led off towards a little cottage among some trees. “I can see the constable in the garden.”

Getting out of the car, they made their way along the by-lane for a short distance, and, as they came to the garden gate, Armadale hailed the constable. Sapcote had been sitting on a wooden chair beside the body, reading a newspaper to while away the time; but at the sound of the inspector's voice he rose and came forward along the flagged path.

“Things have been left just as they were, I suppose?” Armadale demanded.

Sapcote confirmed this and at once fell into the background, evidently realising that he had nothing to report which would interest the inspector. He contented himself with following the proceedings of his superior with the closest interest, possibly with a view to retailing them later to his friends in the village.

Armadale stepped up the paved path and knelt down beside the body, which was lying—as the doctor had described it—face downwards with the arms extended above the head.

“H'm! Looks as if he'd just stumbled and come down on his face,” the inspector commented. “No signs of any struggle, anyhow.”

He cast a glance at the paved path.

“There's not much chance of picking up tracks on that,” he said disparagingly.

Wendover and Sir Clinton had come round to the head of the body and the chief constable bent down to examine the wrists. Armadale also leaned over; and Wendover had some difficulty in getting a glimpse over their shoulders. Constable Sapcote hovered uncertainly in the rear, evidently anxious to see all he could, but afraid to attract the inspector's attention by pushing forward. Wendover inferred that Armadale must have a reputation as a disciplinarian.

“There seem to be marks of a sort,” the inspector admitted grudgingly, after a brief study of the skin. “Whether they mean anything in particular's another matter. He might have had a fall at the gate and banged his wrists against a bar; and then he might have got up and staggered on until he fell here and died.”

Sir Clinton had been studying the marks with more deliberation. He shook his head at the inspector's suggestion.

“The gate-bars are rounded, if you look at them. Now at one point this mark—see it?—shows a sharp line on the flesh. It's only at one place, I admit; the rest of the marking is more like something produced by general pressure. But still, you can't mistake that bit there.”

Armadale re-examined the mark with more care before replying.

“I see what you mean,” he admitted.

“Then go and try your own arm against the gate-bars and I think you'll admit it won't work.”

The inspector moved off to the gate, slipped his sleeve up, and pressed his forearm hard against the most convenient bar. While he was thus engaged, Wendover stooped down to examine the markings for himself.

“What made you so ready with gate-bars, Clinton?” he inquired. “I never noticed what sort of a gate it was when I came in.”

“Obvious enough. Here's a man been falling. Marks on his wrists. We learned that from the doctor. Naturally when I heard it, I began to wonder if he hadn't fallen against something; and as soon as we got out of the car, I kept my eye open for anything that Hay could have bruised himself on. The gate-bars seemed a likely thing, so I noted them in passing. One keeps one's eyes open, squire. But as soon as I saw this”—he indicated the edge on the marking where the indentation in the flesh was almost straight—“I gave the gate-bars the go-by. They couldn't have done it.”

He glanced up.

“Satisfied, inspector?”

Armadale removed his arm from the bar, examined the mark left on it by the pressure, and nodded gloomily.

“This didn't do it. It leaves a mark deep in the middle and fading out on each side.”

He came back to the body and scanned the mark once more.

“This thing on the wrist hasn't got any middle. It's fairly even, except for that sharp section.”

A thought seemed to strike him and he pulled a magnifying glass from his pocket, adjusted the focus, and made a minute inspection of the dead man's wrist.

“I thought it might have been a rope,” he explained as he put away his lens with a disappointed air. “But there's no regular pattern there such as a rope leaves. What do you think of it, Sir Clinton?”

“Got a piece of chalk in your pocket, inspector?” the chief constable inquired.

Armadale's face showed some astonishment, which he endeavoured to conceal as well as he could.

“No, Sir Clinton, I haven't.”

“Are you thinking of bringing a photographer up here to take a souvenir picture?”

The inspector considered for a moment or two.

“No,” he said at last. “I don't see much use in that. The body's lying quite naturally, isn't it?”

“It looks like it; but one never knows.”

Sir Clinton's fingers went mechanically to his waistcoat pocket.

“No chalk, you said, inspector?”

“No, I haven't any.”

“Ah, and yet some people tell you that playing pool is a waste of time; and that the habit of chalking your cue and then pocketing the chalk is reprehensible. We now confound them.”

He produced a cube of billiard-chalk as he spoke and, taking out a penknife, trimmed the paper away.

“Just chalk around the outline of the body, please, inspector. This paved path will show the marks excellently. If we need the marks later on, we can always lay some boards over them to keep the rain off.”

While the inspector, obviously much against the grain, was chalking his lines, Sir Clinton turned to the constable.

“Perhaps you could give us some help, constable. Did you know Peter Hay?”

“Knew him well, sir.”

“You can't throw any light on this business?”

“No, sir. It's amazing to me, sir, if there's anything in what the doctor says.”

“Ah! And what does the doctor say?”

“Swears it's foul play somehow, sir.”

“Indeed? He didn't go so far as that when he spoke to me about it.”

The constable seemed rather confused to find himself taken so literally.

“Didn't quite mean that, sir. What I meant was I could see from his manner that something's amiss.”

Sapcote, conscious that he had let his tongue run away with him, glanced anxiously at Sir Clinton's face. The expression on it reassured him. Evidently this wasn't the kind of a man who would eat you if you made a slip. The chief constable rose considerably in his subordinate's estimation.

“Nice little garden, this,” Sir Clinton remarked, casting his eyes round the tiny enclosure. “A bit on the shady side, perhaps, with all these trees about. Did you ever come up here to visit Peter Hay, constable?”

“Often and often, sir. Many's the time we've sat on that seat over there when I've been off duty; or else in the house if it got too cold for my rheumatism.”

“Suffer from rheumatism, constable? That's hard lines. One of my friends has some stuff he uses for it; he swears by the thing. I'll write down the name for you and perhaps it'll do you some good.”

Sir Clinton tore a leaf out of his pocket-book, jotted a name on it, and handed the paper over to the constable, who seemed overwhelmed by the attention. Decidedly this superior of his was a “real good sort.”

“Peter Hay was getting on in like,” Sir Clinton went on, with a glance at the silvering hair of the body before him. “I suppose he had his troubles too. Rheumatism, or something like that?”

“No, sir. Nothing of the kind. Barring these strokes of his, he was sound as a bell. Used to go about in all weathers and never minded the rain. Never seemed to feel the cold the way I do. Kept his jacket for the church, they used to say about here. Often in the evenings we'd be sitting here and I'd say to him: ‘Here, Peter, shirt-sleeves must keep you warmer than my coat keeps me, but it's time to be moving inside.’ And then in we'd go and he'd begin fussing about with that squirrel of his.”

“What sort of a man was he?” Sir Clinton asked. “Stiff with strangers, or anything like that? Suppose I'd come wandering in here, would he have been grumpy when he came to turn me out?”

“Grumpy, sir? That's the last thing you'd have called him. Or stiff. He was always smiling and had a kind word for everyone, sir. One of the decentest men you could ask for, sir. Very polite to gentlefolk, always; and a nice kindly manner with everyone.”

“Not the sort of man to have a bad enemy, then?”

“No, indeed, sir.”

Inspector Armadale had finished his work with the chalk and was now standing by, evidently impatient to get on with the task in hand. His face betrayed only too plainly that he thought Sir Clinton was wasting time.

“Finished?” the chief constable inquired.

“Quite,” Armadale replied, in a tone which hinted strongly that there was much more to be done.

“In that case, we can turn the body over.” Sir Clinton said, stepping forward as he spoke and beckoning to the constable.

Handling him gently, they turned the dead man on his back; and, before rising, Sir Clinton ran his hand over the front of the body. As he stood up, he motioned to Armadale to follow his example.

“His waistcoat and trousers are a bit damp,” the inspector said, after he had felt them. “Is that what you mean?”

Sir Clinton nodded in confirmation. An expression of comprehension flitted across the inspector's face.

“So that was why you asked about the dew last night?” he observed. “I wondered what you were after, sir.”

“Something of the sort was in my mind,” the chief constable admitted. “Now have a look at the face, inspector. Has there been any bleeding at the nose? Or do you see anything else of any interest?”

Armadale bent down and inspected the dead man's face closely.

“Nothing out of the common that I can see,” he reported. “Of course, the face is congested a bit. That might be the stroke, I suppose.”

“Or else the settling of the blood by gravity after death,” Sir Clinton pointed out. “Well, I hadn't expected to find any nose-bleeding. If he'd bled at the nose it might have saved him from apoplexy.”

Armadale looked up inquiringly.

“You think it's merely apoplexy, sir?”

“I'm afraid this is a ‘place’ within the meaning of the Act, inspector; otherwise I'd be quite ready to bet you a considerable sum that if Dr. Rafford carries out a post mortem, he'll report that death was due to congestion of the brain.”

The inspector seemed to read some hidden meaning into Sir Clinton's words, for he nodded sagely without making any vocal comment.

“What next, sir?” he asked. “Shall we take the body into the cottage and go over it there?”

Sir Clinton shook his head.

“Not yet. There's just one thing I'd like to be sure about; and it may not be easy to see. There's a better light out here. Turn up the trousers from the ankle, inspector, and have a good look for marks—probably on the front of the shins. It's a long shot, but I've a notion you'll find something there.”

Armadale did as he was bidden.

“You're right, sir. There's a very faint mark—far fainter than the ones on the wrists—on the front of each shin, just as you said. It's more like a very faint bruise than a mark made by stumbling against anything. The skin's not broken. Of course it shows up after death, otherwise I'd hardly have seen it.”

Sir Clinton nodded without making any comment. He was stooping over the dead man's face, examining it closely. After a moment or two, he signed to Wendover to come to his side.

“Smell anything peculiar, squire?”

Wendover sniffed sagaciously once or twice; his face lighted up; and then a look of perplexity came over his features.

“I know that smell, Clinton. I recognise it well enough; but I can't put a name to it somehow.”

“Think again,” the chief constable advised. “Go back to your early days and you'll probably recall it.”

Wendover sniffed several times, but remained baffled. A look of interest passed over Sapcote's face. He came forward, bent down, and sniffed in his turn.

“I know what it is, sir. It's pear-drops—these sweets the children eat. Peter always had a bag of sweets in the place for youngsters that came to see him.”

“That's it,” Wendover exclaimed with some relief. “I knew I hadn't smelt that perfume for ages and ages; and yet it used to be familiar once upon a time.”

Sir Clinton seemed to have passed to an earlier line of thought. He turned to the constable.

“Peter Hay suffered from apoplexy, the doctor told me. Had he any other troubles? Bad digestion? Asthma? Anything you can think of?”

Sapcote shook his head decidedly.

“No, sir,” he said without hesitation. “Peter was as sound as a bell, barring these turns of his. I never heard tell of his having anything else wrong with him these last ten years.”

The chief constable nodded, as though the information had satisfied him, but he refrained from comment.

“I think we'd better get him carried into his own bed now,” he suggested with a glance at the body. “After that, we can look round the place and see if there's anything worth noting.”

They carried the remains of Peter Hay into the cottage and laid the body on the bed, which had not been slept in.

“You'd better examine him, inspector,” Sir Clinton suggested.

As the inspector set to work, the chief constable invited his companions to come into the second room of the cottage; and he left the bedroom door open, so that the inspector could hear anything of interest while he made his examination.

To Wendover, the tiny room seemed to offer little of interest. It was obviously kitchen and living-room in one. An oil cooking-stove; a grate; a sink; a dresser; two chairs and a table—these made up the more obvious contents. His eye wandered upwards and was caught by the movement of a tame squirrel in its cage on one of the walls.

“I heard he kept some pets,” he remarked to the constable who had gone across to inspect the squirrel with a rather gloomy expression on his face.

“Yes, sir,” Sapcote answered. “He took a lot of pleasure in the beasts. Some of them are in cages out behind the cottage.”

He reflected for a moment, then added:

“Somebody'll have to look after the poor beasts, now he's gone. Would there be any objection to my taking them away, sir? They'll have to be fed.”

Sir Clinton, to whom the question was obviously addressed, gave permission at once.

“We mustn't let the beasts starve. You'll have to take the cages too, of course?”

“Yes, sir. I can put them in my backyard at home.”

The constable paused for a moment, then, a little shamefacedly, he added:

“Peter was a good friend to me; and I wouldn't like to see his pets fall into anybody's hands that might be cruel to them or neglect them. He was real fond of them.”

Wendover's eye fell upon a small white paper bag on one of the dresser shelves. He stepped across, opened the parcel, sniffed for a moment, and then handed the thing to Sir Clinton.

“Here's where the perfume comes from, Clinton—a bag of pear-drops, just as the constable said. He must have been eating some just before he died.”

The chief constable looked at the crumbled paper.

“Not much chance of getting any fingerprints on that, even if we wanted them. You'd better hand the bag over to the inspector. We may as well get them analysed. Poison's always a possibility—— Ah, inspector, you haven't been long over that.”

Inspector Armadale emerged from the bedroom and stolidly made his report.

“Nothing that I can see on the body, sir, except the marks we noted already. No wounds of any sort, no bruises—nothing suspicious whatever. It almost looks like a mare's nest, except for these four marks.”

Sir Clinton nodded as though he had received confirmation of some very doubtful hypothesis. He moved across the room and seemed to become engrossed in a study of the squirrel's antics. In a few moments he turned to the constable.

“You knew Peter Hay well, constable. I want some notions about his habits and so forth. What did he do with himself all day?”

The constable scratched his ear, as though to stimulate his memory by the action.

“To tell you the truth, sir, he didn't do much. He was only caretaker here, you understand? When the weather was fine, he'd go up to Foxhills and open some of the windows in the morning, to air the rooms. Then he'd take a look round the grounds, likely, just to see that all was as it should be. He might have to go down to the village for tea, or butter, or something like that. Then he'd come home and take his dinner. In the afternoon he'd have a bit of a sleep for a while—he was getting on in years—and then perhaps he'd dig a while in his garden here; look after his flowers; then he'd have his tea. Some time or other, he'd go up and look round Foxhills again and shut any windows he'd opened. And then he'd come back here; water his garden, most likely, if it needed it. And perhaps some of us would drop in for a chat with him. Or else he might take a walk down to see me or somebody else in the village. Or sometimes he'd read.”

Sir Clinton threw a glance round the barely furnished room.

“He had books, then? I don't see any.”

“He read his Bible, sir. I never saw him read anything else.”

“There's a Bible in the bedroom, Sir Clinton,” Armadale confirmed.

“An uneventful life, apparently,” the chief constable commented, not unkindly. “Now I want to hear something about what sort of man he was. Polite in his manners, you said?”

“Very polite,” Sapcote insisted. “I remembered hearing some visitor once saying that Peter was a natural gentleman, sir.”

“They do exist, here and there, even nowadays,” Sir Clinton admitted. “Now let's come down to dots, constable. I want to get a picture of him in my mind and you seem to have known him well enough to help. Let's see, now. Suppose I'd met him somewhere and offered to come and see him—or that he'd asked me here. What would happen? I suppose I'd knock at the door and he'd come and let me in. Which chair would he give me?”

“Whichever you liked best, sir. They're much the same. If there'd been any difference he'd have given you the best one.”

“Quite so. I'm beginning to see him better. Now go on, constable. He'd have been easy and natural, too, if I can gauge him. He'd just have met me in his shirt-sleeves as he used to meet you? No fuss?”

“He'd have made no fuss, sir. But he'd have put on his jacket for you, you being a strange gentleman coming to his house on a special visit; and perhaps he'd have offered you a cup of tea if the time was right for it.”

“And if it was later in the evening? Some whiskey, if he had any?”

“No, sir. Peter was a strong teetotaller.”

Sir Clinton glanced over the dresser on which all the dishes were neatly stacked.

“He was a tidy man, I see?”

“Very, sir. Always had everything ship-shape. He never could bear to have things lying about. Sometimes he used to anger me because he'd wash up his tea-things when I wanted to talk to him. Of course, if it had been you, I expect he'd wait till you'd gone. It wouldn't have been polite to wash up with a stranger there.”

“You're helping me a great deal, constable,” said Sir Clinton encouragingly. “Now, another thing. I suppose he must have saved some money. He seems to have lived very simply—no expenses to speak of?”

“That's right, sir. He put all he could spare into the savings-bank at the post office. All he kept in the house was what he needed to buy things in the village.”

“So I expected. You see how well you've pictured him, constable. Now where did he keep his money—his loose cash?”

“In that drawer in the dresser,” the constable said, pointing to one of the larger drawers which had a lock on it. “He carried the key about with him.”

“See if you can get the key, inspector, please. You'll find it in his pocket, I expect.”

Armadale produced the key almost at once, and Sir Clinton opened the drawer. As he did so, the constable uttered a cry of astonishment. Wendover, leaning forward, saw that the drawer held more than a little money—some silver articles were in it as well.

Sir Clinton warned them back with a gesture.

“Don't touch. We may have to look for fingerprints here. These things seem to have a crest on them,” he continued, after scrutinising them.

“That's the Foxhills' mark, sir,” the constable hastened to explain. “But it beats me what Peter Hay was doing with these things. That one there”—he pointed it out—“comes from the Foxhills' drawing-room. I remember seeing it, one time Peter and I went round the house when he was shutting the windows for the night. It's valuable, isn't it, sir? Peter told me these things were worth something—quite apart from the silver in them—and I suppose he'd learned that from somebody or other—one of the family, most like.”

Sir Clinton left the silver articles alone and picked up the money which lay in one corner of the drawer.

“One pound seven and four pence ha'penny. Would that be more or less what you'd expect to see here, constable?”

“Somewhere round about that, sir, seeing it's this time in the week.”

Sir Clinton idly picked up the savings-bank book, looked at the total of the balance, and put the book down again. Evidently it suggested nothing in particular.

“I think you'd better take charge of these ornaments, inspector, and see if you can make anything out of them in the way of fingerprints. Handle them carefully. Wait a moment! I want to have a look at them.”

The inspector moved forward.

“I may be short of chalk, sir, but I've a pair of rubber gloves in my pocket,” he announced with an air of suppressed triumph. “I'll lift the things out on to the table for you, and you can look at them there.”

Slipping on his gloves, he picked up the articles gingerly and carried them across to the table. Sir Clinton followed and, bending over them, subjected them to a very careful scrutiny.

“See anything there?” he demanded, giving way at last to the inspector.

After Armadale had examined the silver surfaces from every direction, Wendover had his turn. When he raised himself again, he shook his head. Sir Clinton glanced at the inspector, who also made a negative gesture.

“Then we all see the same,” Sir Clinton said finally. “One might assume from that, without overstraining probability, one thing at least.”

“And that is?” demanded Wendover, forestalling the inspector.

“That there's nothing there to see,” Sir Clinton observed mildly. “I thought you'd have noticed that for yourself, squire.”

Behind Wendover's back the inspector enjoyed his discomfiture, thanking providence the while that he had not had time to put the question himself. The chief constable turned to Sapcote.

“I suppose Peter Hay kept the keys of Foxhills—those that he needed, at any rate—somewhere handy?”

“He kept them in his pocket, always, sir; a small bunch of Yale keys on a ring, I remember.”

“You might get them, inspector, I think we'd better go up there next and see if we can find anything worth noting. But, of course, we can't go rushing in there without permission.”

He turned back to Sapcote:

“Go off now, constable, as soon as we've locked up this place, and get hold of some of the Foxhills people who are staying at the hotel. Ask them to come up here. Tell them we want to go over Foxhills on account of something that's been taken from the house. Explain about things, but don't make a long yarn of it, remember. Then leave a message for Dr. Rafford to say that we'll probably need a P. M. When you come up here again, you'd better bring a cart to take away these beasts in their cages.”

He gave Sapcote some further instructions about the disposal of Peter Hay's body, then he turned to the inspector.

“I suppose, later on, you'd better take Peter Hay's fingerprints. It's only a precaution, for I don't think we'll need them; but we may as well have them on record. There's nothing more for us to do here at present so far as I can see.”

He led the way out of the cottage. The constable locked the door, pocketed the key, produced a bicycle from behind the house, and cycled off in haste down the avenue.

Sir Clinton led his companions round to the back of the cottage; but an inspection of the dead man's menagerie yielded nothing which interested any of them, so far as the matter in hand was concerned.

“Let's sit down on the seat here,” the chief constable suggested, as they returned to the front garden. “We'll have to wait for these people from the hotel; and it won't do any harm to put together the facts we've got, before we pick up anything further.”

“You're sure it isn't a mare's nest then?” Armadale inquired cautiously.

“I'm surprised that Dr. Rafford didn't go a bit further with his ideas,” Sir Clinton returned indifferently. “In any case, there's the matter of that Foxhills' silver to be cleared up now.”

Chapter IV.
What Happened in the Night

Sir Clinton took out his cigarette-case and handed it to his companions in turn.

“Let's have the unofficial view first,” he suggested. “What do you make of it all, squire, in the light of the classics?”

Wendover shook his head deprecatingly.

“It's hardly fair to start with the amateur, Clinton. According to the classical method, the police always begin; and then, when they've failed ingloriously, the amateur steps in and clears the matter up satisfactorily. You're inverting the order of Nature. However, I don't mind telling you what I think are the indisputable points in the affair.”

“The very things we want, squire,” declared Sir Clinton gratefully. “Indisputable points will be no end of use to us if the case gets into court. Proceed.”

“Well, to begin with, I think these marks on his wrists and round about his ankles show that he was tied up last night. The wrist-marks are deeper than the marks on the shins; and that's more or less what one would expect. The ligatures would rest on the bare flesh in the case of the wrists; but at the ankles the cloth of his trousers and his socks would interpose and make the pressure less direct.”

Inspector Armadale nodded approvingly, as though his opinion of Wendover had risen a little.

“Suppose that's correct, then,” Wendover continued, “it gives the notion of someone attacking Peter Hay and tying him up. But then Peter Hay wasn't a normal person. He suffered from high blood-pressure, the doctor told us; and he'd had one or two slight strokes. In other words, he was liable to congestion of the brain if he over-exerted himself. Suppose he struggled hard, then he might quite well bring on an attack; and then his assailant would have a corpse on his hands without meaning to kill him at all.”

Armadale nodded once more, as though agreeing to this series of inferences.

“If the assailant had left the body tied up, then the show would have been given away,” Wendover proceeded, “so he untied the bonds, carried the corpse — outside, and arranged it to look as if death had been caused by a heart attack.”

He paused, and Sir Clinton put a question.

“Is that absolutely all, squire? What about the silver in the drawer, for instance.”

Wendover made a vague gesture.

“I see nothing to connect the silver with this affair. The assailant may have been after it, of course, and got so frightened by the turn things took that he simply cleared out without waiting for anything. If I'd gone to a place merely to rob a man, I don't think I'd wait to rob him if I saw a chance of being had up on a murder charge. I'd clear out while I was sure I was safe from discovery.”

“Nothing further, then? In that case, inspector, it's your turn to contribute to the pool.”

Armadale had intended to confine himself strictly to the evidence and to put forward no theories; but the chance of improving on the amateur's results proved too much of a temptation, as Sir Clinton had anticipated.

“There's not much doubt that he was tied up,” the inspector began. “The marks all point that way. But there was one thing that Mr. Wendover didn't account for in them. The marks on the legs were on the front only—there wasn't a mark on the back of the legs.”

He halted for a moment and glanced at Wendover with subdued triumph.

“So you infer?” Sir Clinton inquired.

“I think he was tied up to something so that his legs were resting against it at the back and the bands were round the legs and the thing too. If it was that way, then the back of the legs wouldn't have any marks of the band on them.”

“Then what was he tied up to?” asked Wendover.

“One of the chairs inside the cottage,” the inspector went on. “If he'd been sitting in the chair, with each leg tied to a leg of the chair, you'd get just what we saw on the skin.”

Sir Clinton acquiesced with a nod.

“Anything more?” he asked.

“I'm not quite through,” Armadale continued. “Assume he was tied up as I've explained. If it had been a one-man job, there would have been some signs of a struggle—marks on his wrists or something of that sort. Peter Hay seems to have been a fairly muscular person, quite strong enough to put up some sort of show if he got a chance; certainly he'd have given one man enough trouble to leave some marks on his own skin.”

“More than one man, then?” Sir Clinton suggested.

“Two, at least. Suppose one of them held him in talk while the other took him by surprise, and you get over the difficulty of there being no struggle. One man would pounce on him and then the other would join in; and they'd have him tied up before he could put up any fight that would leave marks on him.”

“That sounds all right,” Wendover admitted.

Sir Clinton put an innocent question.

“If it had been a one-man affair and a big struggle, then surely Peter Hay would have had his attack while the fight was going on, and if he'd died during the struggle there would have been no need to tie him up? Isn't that so, squire?”

Wendover considered the point and grudgingly agreed that it sounded probable.

“Go on, inspector,” Sir Clinton ordered, without taking up the side-issue any further.

“I can't quite see what they did when they'd got him tied up,” the inspector acknowledged. “They don't seem to have done much in the way of rummaging in the cottage, as far as I can see. Whatever it was that they were after, it wasn't the cash in the drawer; and it wasn't the two or three bits of silver, for they left them intact, although they could easily have got them if they'd wanted them. That part of the thing beats me just now.”

Wendover showed a faint satisfaction at finding the inspector driven to admit a hiatus in his story.

“However it happened, Peter Hay died in his chair, I think,” Armadale went on. “Perhaps it was the excitement of the affair. Anyhow, they had a dead man on their hands. So, as Mr. Wendover pointed out, they did their best to cover their tracks. They untied him, carried him outside, laid him down as if he'd fallen unconscious and died there. But they forgot one thing. If he'd come down all of a heap, as they wanted to suggest, his face would have been smashed a bit on the stones of the path. They arranged him with his hands above his head, as if he'd fallen at full length. In that position, he couldn't shield his face as he fell. Normally you fall with your hands somewhere between your face and your chest—under your body, anyhow. But his hands were above his head; and yet his face hadn't a bruise on it. That's not natural.”

“Quite clear, inspector.”

“Then there's another point. You called my attention to the moisture on the front of his clothes, under the body. Dew couldn't have got in there.”

“Precisely,” Sir Clinton agreed. “That dates the time when they put the body down, you think?”

“It shows it was put down on top of the dew, therefore it was after dew-fall when they brought him out. And at the other side you've got the fact that his bed wasn't slept in. So that limits the time of the affair to a period between dew-fall and Peter Hay's normal bed-time.”

“Unless he'd sat up specially late that night,” Wendover interposed.

Armadale nodded a rather curt acknowledgment of this suggestion, and continued:

“Two points more. They've just occurred to me, sir. The silver's the first thing.”

“Yes,” Sir Clinton encouraged him, since the inspector seemed to feel himself on doubtful ground.

“I'm not sure, sir, that robbery can be ruled out, after all. It may be a case of one crime following on another. Suppose Peter Hay had been using his position as caretaker to get away with any silver left at Foxhills, and had got it stored up here for removal at a convenient time. The men who did him in last night might quite well have nailed the main bulk of it and overlooked those stray bits that he'd put away in his cash-drawer. For all we can tell, they may have made a good haul.”

“And the next point, inspector?”

“The next point's the marks on the skin. They weren't made by ropes. Well, you can tie a man up with other things—strips of cloth, handkerchiefs, or surgical bandages. The edge of a surgical bandage would leave a sharp line on the flesh if it was pulled tight enough, or if the man struggled against it once he'd been tied in the chair. You understand what I mean?”

Wendover interposed:

“You mean a rope leaves its mark mainly at the middle, because it's a cylinder and the convex curve cuts into the flesh; whereas a flat bandage gives even pressure all over except at the edge, where the flesh can bulge up alongside the fabric?”

“That's what I mean,” the inspector confirmed.

Sir Clinton volunteered no immediate criticism of either of the inspector's points. Instead, he seemed to be considering his course of action. At last he made up his mind.

“We've got a bit away from our original agreement, inspector. But, since you've put your cards on the table, I'll do the same, so that we're still level. But you're not to take this as a precedent, remember. I don't care about expounding airy theories formed as we go along. It's much better to go on the old lines and consider the evidence as we pick it up, each of us from his own point of view. Pooling our views simply means losing the advantage of three different viewpoints. You and Mr. Wendover came to slightly different conclusions about the basic factor in the business; and, if you hadn't put your ideas into words, then he'd have gone forward looking for one criminal, whilst you'd have been after two or more men; and so we'd have had both possibilities covered. Now, I think, the chances are that you've come round to the inspector's view, squire?”

“It seems to fit the facts better than mine,” Wendover admitted.

“There you are!” Sir Clinton said. “And so we've lost the services of one man keeping his eye on the—always possible—case that it was a single-handed job. That's why I don't like pooling ideas. However, inspector, it wouldn't be fair to take your views and to say nothing about my own, so I'll give you mine. But it's no precedent, remember.”

Armadale made a gesture of grudging agreement.

“Then here's what I make of things, so far,” Sir Clinton continued. “First of all, one at least of the men mixed up in this affair was a better-class fellow. And he, at any rate, did not come on Peter Hay unexpectedly. He was paying a friendly call, and Peter knew he was coming.”

“How do you make that out?” Wendover demanded.

“Easy enough. Hasn't the body a jacket on? I knew that when the doctor told us he had to push up the sleeves to see the marks; and, of course, when we saw the body, there was the coat, right enough. Now men of Peter Hay's class don't wear jackets as much as we do. They like to feel easy when they sit down after work's done—take off their collars and ties and so forth in the evening. The question was, whether Peter Hay varied from type. Hence my talk with the constable, inspector. I saw your disapproving eye on me all through it; but out of it I raked the plain fact that Peter Hay would never have had a jacket on unless he expected a visitor—and, what's more, a visitor of a class higher than his own. See it now?”

“There might be something in it,” the inspector conceded reluctantly.

Sir Clinton showed no particular sign of elation, but went on with his survey.

“The next point that struck me—I called your attention to it—was the nature of the marks: the sharp edge. There's no doubt in my mind that some strip of cloth was used in tying him up. Now, one doesn't find strips of cloth on the spur of the moment. A handkerchief would answer the purpose; but here you had each leg tied to the chair and a fetter on the wrists as well. Unless there were three people in the attack, they'd only be able to rake up two handkerchiefs on the spur of the moment, since most people normally content themselves with a handkerchief apiece. Strips torn off a bed-sheet might answer; but I can't quite see Peter Hay standing idly by while they tore up his sheets in order to tie him up later on. Besides, his bedclothes were intact, so far as I could see—and he doesn't use sheets.”

“I see what you're driving at, Clinton,” Wendover interrupted. “You want to make out that it was a premeditated affair. They brought the apparatus in their pockets ready for use, and didn't tie the old man up on the spur of the moment with the first thing that came handy?”

“Things seem to point that way, don't they?” Sir Clinton continued. “Then there's the question of how it was done. I agree with you, inspector, that it was a job for more than one man. Quite evidently they had force enough to pin Peter Hay almost instantaneously, so that he hadn't a chance of struggling; and it would take two men—and fairly powerful fellows—to do that successfully. Also, if there were two of them, one could hold him in talk whilst the other sauntered round—perhaps to look at the squirrel—and got into position to take him unawares from the rear.”

Armadale's face showed a certain satisfaction at finding the chief constable in agreement with him on his point.

“Now we'll assume that they had him overpowered. If it was a case of simple robbery, the easiest thing to do would be to tie his hands together and fetter his ankles, and then leave him on the floor while they looted the place. But they tied him in a chair—which isn't so easy to do, after all. They must have had some reason for that, or they wouldn't have gone to the extra trouble.”

“Even if you tie a man's hands and feet, he can always roll over and over and make himself a nuisance,” the inspector suggested. “If you tie him in a chair you have him fast.”

“Quite true,” Sir Clinton admitted. “But would you go to the extra trouble yourself, inspector, if the case happened to be as I've stated it? No? Neither should I. It seems as if there might be a likelier solution. Ever visit a sick friend?”

“Yes,” said Armadale, obviously puzzled by the question.

“Did you ever notice, then, that it's easier to talk to him if he's sitting up in bed and not lying down?”

“There's something in that,” the inspector admitted. “I've never paid any attention to it; but, now you mention it, sir, I believe you're right. One gets more out of a talk with a man when he's not lying down in bed. I suppose one's unaccustomed to it.”

“Or else that when he's sitting up you can follow the play of expression on his face,” Sir Clinton supplied, as an alternative.

Wendover evidently saw the drift of the chief constable's remark.

“So you think he was tied up that way, Clinton, because they wanted to talk to him; and they wanted to see his face clearly while they talked?”

“Something of that sort might account for things. I don't press the point. Now we come to the next item—the smell of pear-drops.”

“But that's accounted for all right, surely. I found the bag of sweets on the dresser myself,” Wendover protested. “Peter Hay had been eating them. There's nothing in that, Clinton.”

Sir Clinton smiled a little sardonically.

“Not so fast, squire. You found a bag of pear-drops, I admit. But who told you that Peter Hay bought them and put them there?”

“It stands to reason that he did, surely,” Wendover protested. “The constable told you he kept a bag of sweets in the house for children.”

“Quite so. And there wasn't a second bag there, I'll admit. But let's confine ourselves to the pear-drops for a moment. One can't deny that they've got a distinctive perfume. Can you think of anything else that smells like that?”

Inspector Armadale's face lighted up.

“That stuff they use for covering cuts—New-Skin, isn't it? That stuff smells like pear-drops.”

The look of comprehension faded slowly as he added:

“But I don't see how New-Skin comes into the affair, sir.”

“No more do I, inspector,” Sir Clinton retorted blandly. “I should think New-Skin had nothing whatever to do with it.”

“Then what's the point?” Armadale demanded.

“It's plain enough, if you'd keep your ears open. When I encouraged the constable to babble at large about Peter Hay, I was on the look-out for one thing. I found out that he didn't suffer from asthma.”

“I don't see it yet, sir,” the inspector admitted in perplexity.

Wendover had the information which Armadale lacked.

“Now I see what you're after, Clinton. You're thinking of amyl nitrite—the stuff asthmatics inhale when they get a bad turn? You wanted to know if Peter Hay ever used that as a drug? And, of course, now I come to think of it, that stuff has the pear-drop odour also.”

“That's it, squire. Amyl nitrite for asthma; the solvent that evaporates and leaves the collodion behind when you use New-Skin; and the perfume of pear-drops—they're all derived from a stuff called amyl alcohol; and they all have much the same smell. Eliminate New-Skin, as it doesn't seem to fit into this case. That leaves you with the possibilities that the body smelt of pear-drops or of amyl nitrite.”

Inspector Armadale was plainly out of his depth.

“I don't see that you're much further forward, sir. After all, there are the pear-drops. What's the good of going further? If it's poison you're thinking of—— Is this amyl nitrite poisonous, and you think it might have been used in the pear-drops so that their perfume would cover its smell?”

“It's a bit subtler than that, inspector. Now I admit quite frankly that this is all pure hypothesis; I'm merely trying it out, so to speak, so that we can feel certain we've covered all the possibilities. But here it is, for what it's worth. I'll put it in a nutshell for you. Amyl nitrite, when you inhale it, produces a rush of blood to the brain.”

“And Peter Hay suffered from high blood-pressure in any case,” Wendover broke in, “so an extra flood of blood rushing to the head would finish him? Is that what you mean?”

“Well, it's always a possibility, isn't it?” Sir Clinton returned. “Even a slight dose—a couple of sniffs—will give you a fair headache for the rest of the afternoon. It's beastly stuff.”

Inspector Armadale ruminated for a moment or two.

“Then you think that when they'd done with him they dosed him with this stuff and gave him an apoplectic stroke, sir?”

“It could be done easily enough,” Sir Clinton said cautiously. “A teaspoonful of the stuff on a bit of cotton-wool under his nose would do the trick, if he was liable to a stroke. But they didn't do it in the cottage. They must have carried him out here, chair and all, and dosed him in the open air, or else we'd have smelt the stuff strongly in the room, even after this time. Perhaps that's what suggested leaving him outside all night, so that the stuff would evaporate from him as far as possible. We'll know for certain after the P. M. His lungs ought to have a fair amount of the nitrite in them, at any rate, if that notion's correct.”

He paused for a time, then continued:

“Now I don't say that it is correct. We don't know for certain yet. But let's assume that it is, and see if it takes us any further. They must have procured the amyl nitrite beforehand and brought it here on purpose to use it. Now amyl nitrite won't kill an ordinary man. Therefore they must have known the state of Peter Hay's health. And they must have known, too, that he kept some sweets in the house always. My impression is that they brought that bag of pear-drops with them and took away Peter's own bag—which probably hadn't pear-drops in it. You'd better make a note to look into Peter's sweet-buying in the village lately, inspector. Find out what he bought last.”

Sir Clinton pitched his cigarette-end over the hedge and took out his case.

“You see what these things point to?” he inquired, as he lit his fresh cigarette.

“It's easy enough to see, when you put it that way,” Wendover replied. “You mean that if they knew about Peter's health and Peter's ways to that extent, they must be local people and not strangers.”

“If one works from the premises, I think that's so,” Sir Clinton confirmed. “But remember, the premises are only guesses so far. We need the P. M. to confirm them. Now, there are just three more points: the time of death; the lack of wounds on the face or anywhere; and the matter of the silver in the drawer. As to the first two, the amyl nitrite notion fits in quite well. The murderers, if it was murder, made their first slip when they laid him down so carefully and forgot to arrange the hands under the body. I suppose they thought they were giving a suggestive turn to things by the attitude they chose—as though Peter Hay had collapsed under a thunderbolt attack. As to the time of the assumed murder, all we really know was that it was after dew-fall. They may have talked for hours before they finished the old man, for all we can tell; or they may have given him the nitrite almost as soon as they got him tied up. We can't tell, and it's not so very important, after all.”

He flicked some ash from his cigarette.

“Now we come to the real thing that a jury would want to know about: the motive. What were they after?”

He glanced at his two companions, as if inviting an opinion.

“I suggested a possible motive, sir,” the inspector reminded him.

“Yes, but from the jury point of view you'd have to do two things to make that convincing. You'd have to prove that Peter Hay was helping himself to stuff from Foxhills; and you'd have to establish that the murderers got away with the bulk of it. That's almost a case in itself. If you ask me, inspector, I think that silver represents the usual thing—the murderer's attempt to make things too darned convincing.”

Armadale's face betrayed some incredulity.

“Don't you see the slip?” Sir Clinton continued. “What sort of man was Peter Hay? You heard me pumping the constable, didn't you? And what did I get? That Peter Hay was a simple old chap who read his Bible and practically nothing else. Now, just recall the fact that there wasn't a fingerprint on any of those things; and silver will take a fingerprint more clearly than most surfaces. Whoever handled these ornaments knew all about the fingerprint danger. He wore gloves, whoever he may be. You'll hardly persuade me—after hearing the constable's report of Peter Hay—that he was a person likely to think of a precaution of that sort.”

The inspector looked doubtful.

“Perhaps not, sir; but you never can tell.”

“Well, my guess is that Peter Hay never handled the stuff at all. It was put there by his murderers; and they took good care not to leave their visiting-cards on it. Doesn't its presence suggest something else to you people?”

“You mean,” said Wendover, “that they may have burgled Foxhills themselves, Clinton, and put these things into Peter Hay's drawer to lay the scent in his direction, while they got away with the main bulk of the stuff?”

Sir Clinton seemed disinclined to endorse this heartily.

“It's a possibility, squire. We needn't brood over it just yet, however. When we get into Foxhills, we'll see if anything's missing except these things.”

He glanced at his wrist-watch.

“Time's getting on. These people might be here any minute, if the constable didn't waste time. Let's finish up this symposium. Suppose we eliminate robbery as a motive, then——”

He broke off abruptly in the middle of the sentence as a car came along the avenue and drew up at the entrance to the lane which led down to the cottage. Paul Fordingbridge was driving, and his sister sat beside him. Followed by his two companions, Sir Clinton walked down the lane to where the car had halted.

Chapter V.
The Diary

“I suppose the constable explained things more or less, Mr. Fordingbridge?” Sir Clinton asked, as he came abreast of the car.

Miss Fordingbridge did not wait for her brother's reply.

“It's really dreadful, Sir Clinton,” she broke out. “I can hardly believe that it's true. And who could want to kill poor Peter Hay, who hadn't an enemy in the world, is beyond me altogether. I simply can't imagine it. And what made them do it? I can't guess. I must try at my next séance to see if I can get any light on it. Perhaps you've found out all about it already.”

Sir Clinton shook his head.

“We've found out next to nothing, I'm sorry to say.”

Miss Fordingbridge regarded him with marked disapproval.

“And aren't you going to arrest the man who killed him?”

“In the end, I hope,” Sir Clinton answered patiently. Then he turned to Paul Fordingbridge. “These are the keys of Foxhills that Peter Hay kept. I haven't a search-warrant; but we must get into the house, if you'll let us go over it. Would you mind showing us round the place? You see, you know all about it, and your help would be of value to us in case there's anything wrong up there.”

At the word “search-warrant,” Paul Fordingbridge seemed to prick up his ears; and there was a perceptible pause before he answered the chief constable's inquiry.

“Certainly, if you wish it,” he replied smoothly. “I shall be only too glad to give you any assistance that I can. But what makes you think there's anything wrong at Foxhills? The constable told us that Peter Hay was found at his own cottage.”

At a gesture from Sir Clinton, the inspector went over to the chief constable's car and, first drawing on his rubber gloves, he brought back one of the silver ornaments taken from Peter Hay's drawer.

“You recognise that?” Sir Clinton asked.

“Yes, indeed,” Miss Fordingbridge replied, without hesitation. “That's one of the things we left behind when we shut up Foxhills. It's of no great value, and so we didn't send it to the bank strong-room with the rest of the stuff.”

“Peter Hay told someone it was valuable,” the inspector broke in.

“Oh, so it was, in a way,” Miss Fordingbridge replied. “It was a present to me from an old friend, and so it had a sentimental value. But in itself it's worth next to nothing, as you can see.”

Evidently Peter Hay had misunderstood something which he had heard. Armadale, rather disgusted by the news, carried the article back to the chief constable's car.

“We'll need to keep that and the other things in our charge for a time,” Sir Clinton said apologetically. “They were found at Peter Hay's cottage. Perhaps you could suggest some reason for their removal from Foxhills?”

“There's no reason whatever that I can see,” Miss Fordingbridge replied promptly. “Peter Hay had nothing to do with them, and he'd no right to take them out of the house. None at all.”

“Possibly he mistook them for things of value, and thought they'd be safer in his cottage,” Wendover suggested.

“He had no right to touch anything of mine,” Miss Fordingbridge commented decidedly.

“Suppose we go up to the house?” Paul Fordingbridge suggested in a colourless voice. “You'll take your own car? Good. Then I'll go ahead.”

He pressed the self-starter and took his car up the avenue. Sir Clinton and his companions got into their own car and followed.

“You didn't get much out of him,” Wendover commented to the others.

Sir Clinton smiled.

“I don't think he got much chance to volunteer information,” he pointed out.

They reached Foxhills as Paul Fordingbridge was opening the main door of the house; and he invited them with a gesture to come in.

“I suppose you merely wish to have a general look round?” he asked. “Do just as you like. I'll go round with you and answer any questions that I can for you.”

Miss Fordingbridge attached herself to the party, and they went from room to room. Sir Clinton and the inspector examined the window-catches without finding anything amiss. At last Miss Fordingbridge noticed something out of the common.

“We left a few silver knick-knacks lying about. I don't see any of them.”

Inspector Armadale made a note in his pocketbook.

“Could you give me a list of them?” he asked.

Miss Fordingbridge seemed taken aback.

“No, I couldn't. How could you expect me to remember all the trifles we left about? I daresay I could remember some of them. There was a silver rose-bowl; but it was very thin, and I'm sure it wasn't worth much. And a couple of little hollow statuettes, and some other things. They weren't of any value.”

“What room is this?” Sir Clinton inquired, cutting her eloquence short, as they paused before a fresh door.

“The drawing-room.”

She went in before the others and cast a glance round the room.

“What's that?” she demanded, as though her companions were personally responsible for a sack which stood near one of the windows.

Armadale went swiftly across the room, opened the mouth of the sack and glanced inside.

“It looks like the missing loot,” he remarked. “I can see something like a rose-bowl amongst it, and the head of one of your statuettes. You might look for yourself, Miss Fordingbridge.”

He stood aside to let her inspect the contents of the sack.

“Yes, these are some of the things,” she confirmed at once.

Sir Clinton and Wendover in turn examined the find. The chief constable tested the weight of the sack and its contents.

“Not much of a haul,” he said, letting it settle to the floor again. “Taking pure silver at eight shillings an ounce, and allowing for alloy, there's less than twenty pounds' worth there—much less.”

“I suppose this means that the thieves must have been disturbed, and left their swag behind them,” Paul Fordingbridge suggested.

Sir Clinton seemed intent on an examination of the window-fastenings; but Inspector Armadale curtly agreed with Paul Fordingbridge's hypothesis.

“It looks like it.”

The chief constable led the way to a fresh room.

“What's this?” he asked.

Miss Fordingbridge seemed suddenly to take a keener interest in the search.

“This is my nephew's room. I do hope they haven't disturbed anything in it. I've been so careful to keep it exactly as it used to be. And it would be such a pity if it were disturbed just at the very moment when he's come back.”

Sir Clinton's eye caught an expression of vexation on Paul Fordingbridge's face as his sister spoke of her nephew.

“He's been away, then?” he asked.

It required very little to start Miss Fordingbridge on the subject; and in a few minutes of eager explanation she had laid before them the whole matter of her missing relation. As her narrative proceeded, Sir Clinton could see the expression of annoyance deepening on her brother's features.

“And so you understand, Sir Clinton, I kept everything in his room just as it used to be; so that when he comes back again he'll find nothing strange. It'll just be as if he'd only left us for a week-end.”

Wendover noticed something pathetic in her attitude. For a moment the normal angularity and fussiness seemed to have left her manner.

“Poor soul!” he reflected. “Another case of unsatisfied maternity, I suppose. She seems to have adored this nephew of hers.”

Paul Fordingbridge seemed to think that enough time had been spent on the family's private affairs.

“Is there anything more that you'd care to see?” he asked Sir Clinton, in an indifferent tone.

The chief constable seemed to have been interested in Miss Fordingbridge's tale.

“Just a moment,” he said half-apologetically to Paul Fordingbridge. “I'd like to be sure about one or two points.”

He crossed the room and examined the window-catches with some care.

“Now, Miss Fordingbridge,” he said, as he turned back after finding the fastenings intact like the others, “this is a room which you're sure to remember accurately, since you say you looked after it yourself. Can you see anything missing from it?”

Miss Fordingbridge gazed from point to point, checking the various objects from her mental inventory.

“Yes,” she said suddenly, “there's a small silver inkstand missing from his desk.”

“I saw an inkstand in the sack,” Armadale confirmed.

Sir Clinton nodded approvingly.

“Anything else, Miss Fordingbridge?”

For a time her eyes ranged over the room without detecting the absence of anything. Then she gave a cry in which surprise and disappointment seemed to be mingled. Her finger pointed to a bookshelf on which a number of books were neatly arranged.

“Why,” she said, “there's surely something missing from that! It doesn't look quite as full as I remember it.”

She hurried across the room, knelt down, and scanned the shelves closely. When she spoke again, it was evident that she was cut to the heart.

“Yes, it's gone! Oh, I'd have given almost anything rather than have this happen! Do you know what it is, Paul? It's Derek's diary—all the volumes. You know how carefully he kept it all the time he was here. And now it's lost. And he'll be back here in a few days, and I'm sure he'll want it.”

Still kneeling before the bookshelves, she turned round to the chief constable.

“Sir Clinton, you must get that back for me. I don't care what else they've taken.”

The chief constable refrained from making any promise. He glanced at Paul Fordingbridge, and was puzzled by what he read on his features. Commiseration for his sister seemed to be mingled with some other emotion which baffled Sir Clinton. Acute vexation, repressed only with difficulty, seemed to have its part; but there was something also which suggested more than a little trepidation.

“It's a rather important set of documents,” Paul Fordingbridge said, after a pause. “If you can lay your hands on them, Sir Clinton, my sister will be very much indebted to you. They would certainly never have been left here if it had not been for her notions. I wish you'd taken my advice, Jay,” he added irritably, turning to his sister. “You know perfectly well that I wanted to keep them in my own possession; but you made such a fuss about it that I let you have your way. And now the damned things are missing!”

Miss Fordingbridge made no reply. Sir Clinton interposed tactfully to relieve the obvious strain of the situation.

“We shall do our best, Miss Fordingbridge. I never care to promise more than that, you understand. Now, can you see anything else that's gone a-missing from here?”

Miss Fordingbridge pulled herself together with an effort. Clearly the loss of the diary had been a severe blow to her sentiment about her nephew's study. She glanced round the room, her eyes halting here and there at times when she seemed in doubt. At last she completed her survey.

“I don't miss anything else,” she said. “And I don't think there's anything gone that I wouldn't miss if it had been taken away.”

Sir Clinton nodded reflectively, and led the way in an examination of the rest of the house. Nothing else of any note was discovered. All the window-fastenings seemed to be intact; and there was no sign of any means whereby thieves could have entered the premises. An inspection of the contents of the sack in the drawing-room yielded no striking results. It was filled with a collection of silver knick-knacks evidently picked up merely because they were silver. Neither Paul Fordingbridge nor his sister could recall anything of real intrinsic value which might have been stolen.

“Twenty pounds' worth at the most. And they didn't even get away with it,” Sir Clinton said absent-mindedly, as he watched the inspector, in his rubber gloves, replacing the articles in the sack in preparation for transporting them to the car.

“Is that all we can do for you?” Paul Fordingbridge asked, with a certain restraint in his manner, when the Inspector had finished his task.

Sir Clinton answered with an affirmative nod. His thoughts seemed elsewhere, and he had the air of being recalled to the present by Paul Fordingbridge's voice.

“Then, in that case, we can go, Jay. I'm sure Sir Clinton would prefer things left untouched at present, so you mustn't come about here again, shifting anything, until he gives permission. Care to keep the keys?” he added, turning to the chief constable.

“Inspector Armadale had better have them,” Sir Clinton answered.

Paul Fordingbridge handed over the bunch of keys, made a faint gesture of farewell, and followed his sister to the car. Sir Clinton moved across to the window and watched them start down the avenue before he opened his mouth. When they had disappeared round a bend in the road, he turned to his two companions again. Wendover could see that he looked more serious even than at Peter Hay's cottage.

“I may as well say at once, inspector, that I do not propose to extend my bus-driver's holiday to the extent of making a trip to Australia.”

Armadale evidently failed to follow this line of thought.

“Australia, sir? I never said anything about Australia.”

Sir Clinton seemed to recover his good spirits.

“True, now I come to think of it. Shows how little there is in all this talk about telepathy. I'd made certain I'd read your thoughts correctly; and now it turns out that you weren't thinking at all. A mental blank, what? Tut! Tut! It's a warning against rushing to conclusions, inspector.”

“I don't see myself rushing to Australia, anyhow, sir.”

“H'm! Perhaps we'll get along without that, if we're lucky. But think of the platypus, inspector. Wouldn't you like to see it at home?”

The inspector gritted his teeth in an effort to restrain his temper. He glanced at Wendover, with evident annoyance at his presence.

“It's going to be a pretty problem, evidently,” Sir Clinton continued in a more thoughtful tone. “Now, what about the evidence? We'd better pool it while it's fresh in our minds. Civilians first. What did you see in it all, squire?”

Wendover decided to be concise.

“No signs of entry into the house. Bag of silver odds and ends in drawing-room, as if ready for removal. Set of volumes of diary removed from nephew's study. Strange story of missing nephew turning up. That's all I can think of just now.”

“Masterly survey, squire,” said Sir Clinton cordially. “Except that you've left out most of the points of importance.”

He nodded to Armadale.

“See anything else, inspector? The credit of the force is at stake, remember.”

“Mr. Fordingbridge didn't seem overmuch cut up by Peter Hay's death, sir.”

“There's something in that. Either he's a reserved person by nature, or else he'd something of more importance to himself on his mind, if one can judge from what we saw. Anything more?”

“Mr. Fordingbridge and Miss Fordingbridge seemed a bit at cross-purposes over this nephew.”

“That was more than obvious, I admit. Anything else?”

“Whoever packed up that silver must have come in with a key.”

“I think that goes down to Mr. Wendover's score, inspector. It follows directly from the fact that the house wasn't broken into in any way.”

“The silver here and the silver at Peter Hay's link up the two affairs.”

“Probably correct. Anything further?”

“No more evidence, sir.”

Sir Clinton reflected for a moment.

“I'll give you something. I was watching Mr. Fordingbridge's face when the loss of the diary was discovered. He was more than usually annoyed when that turned up. You weren't looking at him just then, so I mention it.”

“Thanks,” Armadale responded, with some interest showing in his voice.

“That missing diary would be a useful weapon,” Sir Clinton continued. “You could check statements by it; or you could produce false statements from it, if you were a swindling claimant.”

“That's self-evident,” Wendover interjected.

“So it is,” Sir Clinton admitted blandly. “I suppose that's why you didn't mention it yourself, squire. To continue. There's one point which strikes me as interesting. Supposing that Miss Fordingbridge hadn't come up here to-day, do you think we'd have discovered that the diary was missing at all?”

“No, unless Mr. Fordingbridge had noticed the loss.”

“Naturally. Now I'll give you a plain hint. What is there behind Mr. Fordingbridge's evident annoyance? That seems to me a fruitful line for speculation, if you're thinking of thinking, as it were.”

Wendover reflected for a moment.

“You mean that the diary would be invaluable to a claimant, and hence Fordingbridge may have been angry at its loss. Or else you mean that Fordingbridge was mad because the loss had been discovered. Is that what you're after, Clinton?”

Sir Clinton's gesture in reply seemed to deprecate any haste.

“I'm not after anything in particular, squire,” he assured Wendover. “I simply don't see my way through the business yet. I merely recommend the subject for you to browse over. As they say about Shakespeare, new perspectives open up before one's eyes every time one examines the subject afresh. And, by the way, hypophosphites are said to be sustaining during a long spell of intense cogitation. I think we'll call at the druggist's on the way home and buy up his stock. There's more in this affair than meets the eye.”

The inspector picked up the sack. Then, apparently struck by an after-thought, he laid it on the floor again and took out his note-book.

“Would you mind giving me any orders you want carried out immediately, sir?” he asked. “Anything in the way of information you need from the village?”

Sir Clinton looked at him in mock surprise, and answered with a parody of the “Needy Knifegrinder”:

“Orders! God bless you! I have none to give, sir. This is your case, inspector, not mine.”

Armadale succeeded in finding a form of words to turn the flank of his superior's line:

“Well, sir, suppose you were in my place, what would you think it useful to find out?”

“A deuce of a lot of things, inspector. Who killed Peter Hay, for one. Who stole the diary, for another. When I'm likely to get any lunch, for a third. And so on. There's heaps more of them, if you'll think them up. But, if I were in your shoes, I'd make a beginning by interviewing young Colby, who found the body; then I'd investigate the sweet-shop, and find out who bought pear-drops there lately; I'd make sure there are no fingerprints on any of the silver; I'd get the P. M. done as quickly as possible, since amyl nitrite is volatile, and might disappear if the body's left too long; and I think I'd make some very cautious inquiries about this long-lost nephew, if he's anywhere in the vicinity. And, of course, I'd try to find out all I could about Peter Hay's last movements yesterday, so far as one can discover them from witnesses.”

Inspector Armadale had been jotting the chief constable's advice down in shorthand; and, when Sir Clinton finished speaking, he shut his note-book and put it back in his pocket.

“Peter Hay puzzles me,” Wendover said thoughtfully, as they made their way to the car.

“Perhaps Peter Hay knew too much for his own safety,” Sir Clinton answered, as he closed the door of Foxhills behind them.

A fresh line of thought occurred to Wendover.

“This missing nephew came from Australia, Clinton. I'm playing golf to-morrow morning with that Australian man who's staying at the hotel. He isn't the missing heir by any chance, is he?”

“I shouldn't think so, from Miss Fordingbridge's story. This claimant was pretty badly disfigured, whereas Cargill's rather a nice-looking chap. Also, she's sure to have come across Cargill in the hotel; he's been here for a week at least; but the claimant-man only presented himself to her last night, if you remember.”

Chapter VI.
The Beach Tragedy

Wakened abruptly by the trilling of a bell beside his bed, Sir Clinton bitterly regretted the striving of the Lynden Sands Hotel towards up-to-dateness, as represented by a room telephone system. He leaned over and picked up the receiver.

“Sir Clinton Driffield speaking.”

“I'm Armadale, sir,” came the reply. “Can I see you? It's important, sir, and I can't very well talk about it over the 'phone.”

Sir Clinton's face betrayed a natural annoyance.

“This is an ungodly hour to be ringing anyone up in his bed, inspector. It's barely dawn. However, since you're here, you may as well come up. My room's No. 89.”

He laid down the receiver, got out of bed, and put on his dressing-gown. As he moved across the room and mechanically began to brush his hair, a glance through the window showed him that the rain of the previous night had blown over and the sky was blue. The sun had not yet risen, and a pale full moon was low on the western horizon, A murmur of the incoming tide rose from the beaches; and the white crests of the waves showed faintly in the half-light.

“Well, inspector, what is it?” Sir Clinton demanded testily. “You'd better be brief, be businesslike, and be gone, as they say. I want to get back to bed.”

“There's been another murder, sir.”

Sir Clinton made no effort to conceal his surprise.

“Another murder! In a place this size? They must be making a hobby of it.”

The inspector observed with satisfaction that his superior had given up any thoughts of bed, for he was beginning to dress himself.

“This is what happened, sir,” Armadale continued. “Shortly after midnight a man appeared at the house of the local constable—Sapcote, you remember—and hammered on the door till Sapcote came down. He began some confused yarn to the constable, but Sapcote very wisely put on his clothes and brought the fellow round to me. I've got a room in a house near by, where I'm staying till this Hay affair is cleared up.”

Sir Clinton nodded, to show that he was paying attention, but went on swiftly with his dressing.

“I examined the man,” Armadale continued. “His name's James Billingford. He's a visitor here—he's rented old Flatt's cottage, on the point between here and Lynden Sands village. It seems he sometimes suffers from sleeplessness; and last night he went out rather late, hoping that a walk would do him some good. He strolled along the beach in this direction, not paying very much attention to anything. Then he heard the sound of shooting farther along the beach.”

“Does that mean one shot or several?” Sir Clinton demanded, turning from the mirror in front of which he was fastening his tie.

“He was a bit doubtful there,” Armadale explained. “I pressed him on the point, and he finally said he thought he heard two. But he wasn't certain. He seems to have been mooning along, not paying attention to anything, when he heard something. It wasn't for some seconds that he identified the sound for what it was; and by that time he was quite muddled up as to what he had really heard. He doesn't seem very bright,” the inspector added contemptuously.

“Well, what happened after the Wild West broke loose on the beach?” Sir Clinton demanded, hunting for his shoes.

“It appears,” pursued Armadale, “that he ran along the beach close to the water's edge. His story is that he couldn't see anything on the beach; but when he came level with that big rock they call Neptune's Seat he saw a dead man lying on it.”

“Sure he was dead?”

“Billingford was quite sure about it. He says he was in the R.A.M.C. in the war and knows a dead 'un when he sees one.”

“Well, what next?”

“I didn't question him much; just left him in charge of Sapcote till I came back. Then I hunted up a couple of fishermen from the village and went off myself along with them to Neptune's Seat. I made them stick to the road; and when I got within a couple of hundred yards of the rock, I left them and went down to the very edge of the water—below Billingford's marks, as the tide was still falling—and kept along there. There was enough moonlight to save me from trampling over anyone's footmarks and I took care to keep clear of anything of that sort.”

Sir Clinton gave a nod of approval, but did not interrupt the story by any verbal comment.

“The body was there all right,” Armadale continued. “He'd been shot through the heart—probably with a small-calibre bullet, I should think. Dead as a doornail, anyhow. There was nothing to be done for him, so I left him as he was. My main idea was to avoid muddling up any footprints there might be on the sand.”

Again Sir Clinton mutely showed his approval of the inspector's methods. Armadale continued his narrative:

“It was too dim a light to make sure of things just then, a bit cloudy. So the best thing seemed to be to put the men I had with me to patrol the road and warn anyone off the sands. Not that anyone was likely to be about at that hour of the morning. I didn't think it worth while to knock you up, sir, until it got a bit brighter; but as soon as there seemed any chance of getting to work, I came up here. You understand, sir, the tide's coming in; and it'll wash out any tracks as it rises. It's a case of now or never if you want to see them. That's why I couldn't delay any longer. We've got to make the best of the time we have between dawn and high tide.”

Armadale paused, and looked at Sir Clinton doubtfully.

“I understand, inspector.” The chief constable answered his unspoken query. “There's no room for fooling at present. This is a case where we're up against time. Come along!”

As he stood aside to let the inspector leave the room in front of him, Sir Clinton was struck by a fresh idea.

“Just knock up Mr. Wendover, inspector. He's next door—No. 90. Tell him to dress and follow on after us. I'll get my car out, and that will save us a minute or two in getting to the place.”

Armadale hesitated most obviously before turning to obey.

“Don't you see, inspector? All these tracks will be washed out in an hour or two. We'll be none the worse of having an extra witness to anything we find; and your fishermen pals would never understand what was important and what wasn't. Mr. Wendover will make a useful witness if we ever need him. Hurry, now!”

The inspector saw the point, and obediently went to wake up Wendover, whilst Sir Clinton made his way to the garage of the hotel.

In a few minutes the inspector joined him.

“I waked up Mr. Wendover, sir. I didn't wait to explain the thing to him; but I told him enough to make him hurry with his dressing. He says he'll follow in less than five minutes.”

“Good! Get in.”

Armadale jumped into the car, and, as he slammed the door, Sir Clinton let in the clutch.

“That tide's coming in fast,” he said anxiously. “The Blowhole up there is beginning to spout already.”

Armadale followed in the direction of the chief constable's glance, and saw a cloud of white spray hurtling up into the air from the top of a headland beside the hotel.

“What's that?” he asked, as the menacing fountain choked and fell.

“Sort of thing they call a souffleur on the French coast,” Sir Clinton answered. “Sea-cave gets filled with compressed air owing to the rise of the tide, and some water's blown off through a landward vent. That's what makes the intermittent jet.”

About a mile from the hotel the inspector motioned to Sir Clinton to stop at a point where the road ran close to the beach, under some sand-dunes on the inland side. A man in a jersey hastened towards them as the car pulled up.

“Nobody's come along, I suppose?” the inspector demanded when the new-comer reached them. Then, turning to Sir Clinton, he added: “This is one of the men who were watching the place for me.”

Sir Clinton looked up with a smile at the introduction.

“Very good of you to give us your help, Mr.——?”

“Wark's my name, sir.”

“. . . Mr. Wark. By the way, you're a fisherman, aren't you? Then you'll be able to tell me when high tide's due this morning.”

“About half-past seven by God's time, sir.”

Sir Clinton was puzzled for a moment, then he repressed a smile slightly different from his earlier one.

“Half-past eight by summer time then?” he queried.

He glanced at his wrist-watch, and then consulted a pocket diary.

“Sunrise is due in about a quarter of an hour. You gauged it neatly in waking me up, inspector. Well, we've a good deal less than two hours in hand. It may keep us pretty busy, if we're to dig up all the available data before the tracks are obliterated by the tide coming in.”

He reflected for a moment, and then turned to the fisherman.

“Would you mind going into Lynden Sands village for me? Thanks. I want some candles—anything up to a couple of dozen of them. And a plumber's blow-lamp, if you can lay your hands on one.”

The fisherman seemed taken aback by this unexpected demand.

“Candles, sir?” he inquired, gazing eastward to where the golden bar of the dawn hung on the horizon.

“Yes, candles—any kind you like, so long as you bring plenty. And the blow-lamp, of course.”

“The ironmonger has one, sir.”

“Knock him up, then, and quote me for the price—Sir Clinton Driffield—if he makes any difficulty. Can you hurry?”

“I've got a bicycle here, sir.”

“Splendid! I know you won't waste time, Mr. Wark.”

The fisherman hurried off in search of his cycle; and in a very short time they saw him mount and ride away in the direction of the village. The inspector was obviously almost as puzzled as Wark had been, but he apparently thought it best to restrain his curiosity about the candles and blow-lamp.

“I think we'll leave your second patrol to watch the road, inspector, while we go down on to the beach. I suppose that's the rock you were speaking about?”

“Yes, sir. You can't see the body from here. The rock's shaped rather like a low chesterfield, with its back to this side, and the body's lying on what would be the seat.”

Sir Clinton glanced towards the bar of gold in the east which marked the position of the sun below the horizon.

“I don't want to go blundering on to the sands at random, inspector. What about a general survey first of all? If we climb this dune at the back of the road, we ought to get some rough notion of how to walk without muddling up the tracks. Come along!”

A few seconds took them to the top of the low mound. By this time the dawn-twilight had brightened, and it was possible to see clearly at a fair distance. Sir Clinton examined the beach for a short time without making any comment.

“That must be my own track, coming along the beach from the village, sir. The one nearest the water. I kept as close to the waves as I could, since the tide was falling and I knew I was sticking to ground that must have been covered when Billingford came along.”

“What about the fishermen?” Sir Clinton asked.

“I made them keep to the road, so as to leave no tracks.”

Sir Clinton approved with a gesture, and continued his inspection of the stretch of sand below.

“H'm!” he said at last. “If clues are what you want, inspector, there seem to be plenty of them about. I can make out four separate sets of footprints down there, excluding yours; and quite possibly there may be others that we can't see from here. It's lucky they aren't all muddled up together. There's just enough crossing to give us some notion of the order in which they were made—in three cases at least. You'd better make a sketch of them from here, now that there's light enough to see clearly. A rough diagram's all you'll have time for.”

The inspector nodded in compliance, and set about his task. Sir Clinton's eye turned to the road leading from the hotel.

“Here's Mr. Wendover coming,” he announced. “We'll wait till he arrives, since you're busy, inspector.”

In a few moments Wendover clambered up the dune.

“Did you turn back to the hotel for anything?” he inquired, as he came up to them.

“No, squire. Why?”

“I noticed a second track of motor-wheels on the road at one point as I came along. It faded out as I got nearer here, so I thought you might have gone back for something or other.”

“That would have made three tracks, and not two; one out, one back, and a final one out again.”

“So it would,” Wendover admitted, evidently vexed at having made a mistake.

“We'll have a look at that track later on,” Sir Clinton promised. “I took care not to put my own tracks on top of it as we came along.”

“Oh, you saw it, did you?” said Wendover disappointedly. “Confound you, Clinton, you seem to notice everything.”

“Easy enough to see the track of new non-skids on a wet road, especially as I didn't see my own track while I was making it. We'll have no trouble in disentangling them, even if they do cross here and there, for my tyres are plain ones, and a bit worn at that. I think I ought to mention that our patrols report no traffic on the road since they came on to it; and, as I remember that there was no rain in the early evening, that gives us some chance of guessing the time when that car made its tracks in the mud.”

“The rain came down about half-past eleven,” the inspector volunteered as he finished his sketch. “I heard it dashing on my window just after I'd gone to bed, and I went up stairs about twenty past eleven.”

Sir Clinton held out his hand for the inspector's note-book, compared the diagram with the view before him, and passed the book to Wendover, who also made a comparison.

“Better initial it, squire,” the chief constable suggested. “We may need you to swear to its accuracy later on, since we'll have no visible evidence left after this tide's come in.”

Wendover obeyed, and then returned the note-book to the inspector as they began to descend from the dune towards the road. Halfway down, Sir Clinton halted.

“There's another set of tracks which we couldn't see from the place we were,” he said, pointing. “Behind that groyne running down towards the rock. The groyne was in the line of sight up above, but we've moved to the left a bit and you can just see one or two footprints. Over yonder, inspector. You'd better fill them in when we get to the road and have a clear sight of them.”

The inspector completed his diagram, and handed it to his companions in turn for verification.

“We may as well start with this track,” Sir Clinton suggested. “It's a fairly short one, and seems isolated from all the others by the groyne.”

He stepped down on to the sand, taking care to keep well away from the footmarks; and his companions followed his track. They walked on a line parallel to the footprints, which ran close under the groyne. At first the marks were hardly defined; but suddenly they grew sharp.

“This is where he hit the sand wetted by the tide, obviously,” said Wendover. “But the trail looks a bit curious—not quite like a normal man's walk.”

“Suppose he'd been crouching under the groyne as he went along,” Sir Clinton suggested. “Wouldn't that account for it? Look!”

He moved on to a piece of untouched sand, bent almost double, and began to move cautiously along. Wendover and the inspector had to admit that his tracks were very like those of the trail beside the groyne.

“Somebody spying on the people on the rock?” Wendover hazarded. “If you can get hold of him, Clinton, he ought to be a useful witness.”

The inspector stooped over the footprints and scanned them closely.

“It's a clear impression. A man's shoe with a pointed toe, it seems to be,” he announced. “Of course, if he was creeping along behind the groyne we can't get his ordinary length of step, so we haven't any notion of his height.”

Sir Clinton had moved on to the end of the trail.

“He evidently crouched down here for quite a while,” he pointed out. “See the depth of these impressions and the number of times he must have shifted the position of his feet to ease his muscles. Then he turned back again and went back to the road, still crouching.”

He swung slowly round, looking about him. The beach was empty. Farther along it, towards the hotel, a group of bathing-boxes had been erected for the use of hotel visitors. Less than ten yards from the turning-point of the footprints, on the other side of the groyne, Neptune's Seat jutted up from the surrounding sand. It was, as the inspector had said, like a huge stone settee standing with its back to the land; and on the flat part of it lay the body of a man. Sir Clinton bent down and scrutinised the surface of the sand around the turning-point of the track for some minutes, but he made no comment as he completed his survey. When he rose to his full height again, he saw on the road the figure of the fisherman, Wark; and he made a gesture forbidding the man to come down on the sand.

“Just go up and see if he's got the candles and the blow-lamp, inspector, please. We may as well finish off here if he has.”

Armadale soon returned with the articles.

“Good fellow, that,” Sir Clinton commented. “He hasn't wasted time!”

He turned and gazed across at the advancing tide.

“We'll have to hurry up. Time's getting short. Another half-hour and the water will be up near that rock. We'll need to take the seaward tracks first of all. Hold the blow-lamp, will you, inspector, while I get a candle out.”

Wendover's face showed that even yet he had not grasped the chief constable's object. Sir Clinton extracted a candle and lit the blow-lamp.

“Plaster of Paris gives a rotten result if you try to take casts of sand-impressions with it,” he explained. “The classics pass rather lightly over the point, but it is so. Therefore we turn to melted wax or tallow, and by dropping it on very carefully in a thin layer at first, we get something that will serve our purpose. Hence the candles and the blow-lamp. See?”

He suited the action to the word, making casts of the right and left footprints in the sand from the sharpest impressions he could pick out.

“Now we'll take Mr. Billingford's track next,” he said, as he removed the two blocks of wax from their beds. “His footmarks will be the first to be swamped by the tide, so we must get on to them in a hurry.”

He led his companions back to the road and turned round the landward end of the groyne.

“This is where he landed on the road, evidently. Now step in my tracks and don't wander off the line. We mustn't cut up the ground.”

He moved along the trail, and soon reached the tidal mark, after which the footprints grew sharper. A little farther on, he reached a point where Billingford's marks crossed an earlier track—the prints of a woman's nail-studded shoes.

“Golfing-shoes, by the look of them,” he pointed out to his companions. “We can leave them alone just now. The tide won't reach here for long enough yet, so we've plenty of time to come back. Billingford's the important thing at present.”

Billingford's track ran down to Neptune's Seat, where it was lost on the hard surface of the rock. Sir Clinton, without halting, directed his companions' attention to a second trail of male footprints running up towards the rock from the road, and crossed just at the landward side of Neptune's Seat by the traces of Billingford.

“There's no return track for these, so far as I can see,” he pointed out, “so it looks as if the murdered man made them.”

Without a glance at the body, he stepped up on to the rock, picked up the farther trail of Billingford, and began to follow it as it led along the beach towards Lynden Sands village. The footprints ran along the top of a series of slight whale-backs of sand, behind which lay a flatter zone running up towards the high-tide mark. Nearer the sea, a track showed the inspector's line of advance during the night. After following the trail for nearly a quarter of a mile, Sir Clinton pointed to a change in its character.

“This is where he began to run. See how the pace shortens beyond this.”

Rather to the surprise of his companions, he continued to follow the trail.

“Is it really necessary to go as far as this?” Wendover demanded after a time. “You've come the best part of three-quarters of a mile from the rock. What are you trying to do?”

“I'm trying to find out the earliest moment when Billingford could have reached the rock, of course,” sir Clinton explained, with a trace of irritation.

A few yards farther on, Billingford's track was neatly interrupted. For twenty feet or so there were no tracks on the sand; then the footprints reappeared, sharply defined as before. At the sight of the gap Sir Clinton's face brightened.

“I want something solid here,” he said. “Stakes would be best, but we haven't any. A couple of cairns will have to do. Bring the biggest stones you can lift; there are lots up yonder above the tide-mark.”

He set them an example, and soon they had collected a fair number of heavy stones. Sir Clinton, with an anxious eye on the tide, built up a strong cairn alongside the last of Billingford's footprints which was visible.

“Now the same thing on the other side of the gap,” the chief constable directed.

Wendover suppressed his curiosity until the work in hand was over; but as soon as the second cairn had been erected at the point where Billingford's footprints reappeared on the sand he demanded an explanation.

“I'm trying to estimate when Billingford passed that point last night,” Sir Clinton answered. “No, I haven't time to explain all about it just now, squire. We're too busy. Ask me again in twelve hours or so, and I'll tell you the answer to the sum. It may be of importance or it mayn't; I don't know yet.”

He turned and glanced at the rising tide.

“Jove! We'll need to look slippy. The tide's getting near that rock. Look here, inspector. Get hold of one of these fishermen and ask them to pounce on the nearest boat and bring it round to the rock. Then we can leave everything on the rock to the last moment and spend our time on the sands, which haven't got permanent traces and must be cleared up first of all. If we get cut off by the tide, we can always get the body away on a boat, if we have one handy.”

The inspector hurried off, waving to attract the attention of the fishermen. In a few moments he was back again.

“They say, sir, that the nearest boat is at Flatt's cottage, just on the point yonder. They're off to bring it round. By the way, they warned me against going near that old wreck there, farther along the bay. It seems there's a patch of bad quick-sand just to the seaward side of it—very dangerous.”

“All right, inspector. We're not going any farther along in this direction for the present. Let's get back to the rock where the body is. We've still got the other trails of footmarks to examine.”

They hurried off towards Neptune's Seat, and at the edge of the rock Sir Clinton halted.

“Here's a set of prints—a neatly-shod woman, by the look of them,” he pointed out. “She's come down to the rock and gone back again almost on the same line. Take a cast of good ones, inspector, both left and right feet. Be careful with your first drippings of the wax.”

Wendover inspected the line of prints with care.

“They don't tell us much,” he pointed out. “Billingford's tracks don't cross them, so there's no saying when they were made. It might have been a visitor coming down to the beach yesterday afternoon.”

“Hardly,” interrupted Sir Clinton. “High tide was at half-past eight; and obviously they must have been made a good while after that or else this part of the sands would have been covered. But it was a moonlight night, and it's quite possible someone came down here to look at the sea late in the evening.”

“It's a small shoe,” Wendover pursued, without answering the criticism.

“Size 3½ or thereabouts,” Armadale amended, glancing up from his work. “I shouldn't make it bigger than a 3½, and it might be even smaller.”

Wendover accepted the rectification, and continued.

“The step's not a long one either. That looks like a rather small girl with a neat foot, doesn't it?”

Sir Clinton nodded.

“Looks like it. Have you a tape-measure, inspector? We ought to make a note of the length of the pace, I think. It might turn out useful. One never knows.”

The inspector fished a tape-measure from his pocket; and, with the help of Wendover, Sir Clinton made measurements of various distances.

“Just twenty-four inches from one right toe-mark to the next,” he announced. “And it seems a very regular walk. Now if you're ready, inspector, we'll go on to the next trail. It's the single one, so it's probably the murdered man's.”

They moved round the rock a little. The inspector's face lighted up at the sight of the footprints.

“Rubber soles, sir; and a fairly well-marked set of screws to check anything with. If they do belong to the murdered man, we'll have no trouble in identifying them.”

Sir Clinton agreed.

“Don't bother taking casts of them yet. We may not need them. Let's go on to the next tracks.”

They had to cut across Billingford's trail and walk to the far end of the rock before they reached their objective.

“This is the other end of the track we noticed before,” Wendover pointed out. “It's the woman in golfing-shoes who came down from the road near the groyne.”

The inspector fell to work on his casting, whilst Sir Clinton took another series of measurements of the length of pace shown by the footprints.

“Twenty-six and a half inches,” he reported, after several trials of comparison. “Now, once the inspector's finished with his impression-taking, we can have a look at the body. We've just done the business in time, for the tide's almost washing the base of the rock now.”

Chapter VII.
The Letter

Followed by Wendover and the inspector, Sir Clinton mounted the platform of Neptune's Seat, which formed an outcrop some twenty yards long and ten in breadth, with the landward part rising sharply so as to form a low natural wall. The body of the murdered man lay on the tiny plateau at the end nearest the groyne. It rested on its back, with the left arm slightly doubled up under the corpse. Blood had been welling from a wound in the breast.

“Anybody claim him?” inquired Sir Clinton. “He isn't one of the hotel guests, at any rate.”

Armadale shook his head.

“I don't recognise him.”

Sir Clinton lifted the head and examined it.

“Contused wound on the back of the skull. Probably got it by falling against the rock as he came down.”

He turned to the feet of the body.

“The boots have rubber soles with a pattern corresponding to the tracks up yonder. That's all right,” he continued. “His clothes seem just a shade on the flashy side of good taste, to my mind. Age appears to be somewhere in the early thirties.”

He bent down and inspected the wound in the breast.

“From the look of this hole I guess you're right, inspector. It seems to have been a small-calibre bullet—possibly from an automatic pistol. You'd better make a rough sketch of the position before we shift him. There's no time to get a camera up here before the tide swamps us.”

Armadale cut one or two scratches on the rock as reference points, and then, after taking a few measurements, he made a rough diagram of the body's position and attitude.

“Finished?” Sir Clinton asked; and, on getting an assurance from the inspector, he knelt down beside the dead man and unfastened the front of the raincoat which clothed the corpse.

“That's interesting,” he said, passing his hand over a part of the jacket underneath. “He's been soaked to the skin by the feel of the cloth. Did that rain come down suddenly last night, inspector?”

“It sounded like a thunder-shower, sir. Dry one minute and pouring cats and dogs the next, I remember.”

“That might account for it, then. We proceed. I can see only one wound on him, so far as the front's concerned. No indication of robbery, since his raincoat was buttoned up and the jacket also. Help me to lift him up, inspector, so that we can get his arm free without scraping it about too much. If he wore a wrist-watch, it may have stopped conveniently when he fell, for he seems to have come rather a purler when he dropped.”

Armadale raised the left side of the body slightly, and Sir Clinton levered the twisted arm gently into a more normal position.

“You're right, sir,” the inspector exclaimed, pointing to the strap on the dead man's wrist. He bent forward as though to turn the hand of the body, but the chief constable stopped him with an imperative gesture.

“Gently, inspector, gently. We may need to be cautious.”

Very carefully he manœuvred the dead man's wrist until they could see the face of the watch.

“It's stopped at 11.19,” Armadale pointed out. “That gives us the moment when he fell, then. It doesn't seem of much use to us yet, though.”

Wendover detected a flaw in the inspector's assumption.

“Some people forget to wind up their watches now and again. Perhaps he did, the night before last; and it might have stopped of its own accord at 11.19, before he was shot at all.”

“Dear me, squire! This is a break-away from the classics with a vengeance. I thought it was always taken for granted that a watch stopped conveniently at the very moment of the murder. But perhaps you're right. We can always test it.”

“How?” demanded Wendover.

“By winding it up now, counting the clicks of the rachet as we do it; then let it run fully down and wind up again, also counting the clicks. If the two figures tally, then it's run down naturally; if they don't it's been forcibly stopped. But I doubt if we'll need to bother about that. There must be some better evidence than that somewhere, if we can only lay hands on it.”

Wendover's eyes had been ranging over the surface of the rock; and, as Sir Clinton finished his exposition, Wendover drew his attention to a shiny object lying at the other end of Neptune's Seat.

“Just have a look at it, squire, will you? I'm busy here just now. Now, inspector, it seems to me as if some of this watch-glass is missing. There doesn't seem enough to cover the dial. Let's have a look under the body and see if the rest's there.”

Armadale raised the dead man sufficiently to enable Sir Clinton to examine the spot where the watch had struck the rock.

“Yes, here's the rest of the glass,” the chief constable reported. “And there's a faint scrape on the rock surface to show that he must have come down with a bit of a thud. Thanks, inspector, you can let him down again.”

When Armadale had let the body drop back into its original position, Sir Clinton knelt down and unstrapped the wrist-watch, after which he wrapped it carefully in his handkerchief. The fragments of glass he handed to the inspector, who stowed them away in an envelope.

Meanwhile Wendover had made a discovery.

“Come here, Clinton. That yellow thing was the brass case of a discharged cartridge.”

Sir Clinton stepped across the rock and picked up the tiny object, marking its position as he did so by scoring a cross on the stone with his penknife.

“It's a .38 calibre, apparently,” he commented, after a glance at it. “You'd better keep it, inspector. Hullo! Here's the boat coming in.”

A rowing-boat manned by the two fishermen was approaching Neptune's Seat.

“That's good. We can finish our examination on the spot now. The tide won't rise to the level of the rock for a while yet; and it doesn't matter if we do get cut off, now that the boat's here. Bring her close in, please, if there's water enough.”

The fishermen, nothing loath to get a closer view of the proceedings, brought the boat's bow up to the natural quay formed by the rock; and then, shipping their oars, they sat down to watch what was going on.

“We may as well go through his pockets next,” Sir Clinton suggested, returning to the body. “Go ahead, inspector.”

Armadale began his search, reporting each object discovered.

“Raincoat pockets—nothing in either. Left-hand breast pocket of jacket—a handkerchief. Right-hand breast pocket—a note-case.”

He handed this over to Sir Clinton, who opened it.

“Fifteen-ten in notes. Nothing else. Well, it wasn't a case of robbery, apparently. Go on, inspector.”

“Right-hand upper waistcoat pocket,” the inspector droned obediently, “a pocket diary.”

Sir Clinton took it, skimmed over the pages, and put it down.

“It's a calendar diary—blank. A book of stamps, with some stamps missing, in the cover. Not much help there. Go ahead.”

The inspector continued his search.

“Other upper pocket—a pencil and fountain-pen. Lower waistcoat pocket, left hand, a silver match-box with monogram—S and N intertwined. Right-hand pocket—a penknife and a cigar-cutter. Trouser side-pockets—some money, mostly silver, and a nail-trimmer, and a couple of keys. Hip-pocket—a cigar-case.”

He handed the various articles to the chief constable.

“Nothing in the ticket-pocket. Outside jacket pockets. Left-hand pocket—there's a pipe and a tobacco-pouch. Right-hand pocket—ah, here's something more interesting! Letter-card addressed to ‘N. Staveley, Esq., ℅ Billingford, Flatt's Cottage, Lynden Sands.’ So his name was Staveley? That fits the S on the monogram. And here's another bit of paper; looks like a note of some sort. No envelope to it.”

He held out the two papers to Sir Clinton, who examined the letter-card first.

“Posted two days ago in London—W.1. H'm! Nothing much to take hold of here, I'm afraid. ‘Dear Nick,—Sorry to miss you on Tuesday. See you when you get back to town.’ No address, and the signature's a scrawl.”

He turned to the single sheet of note-paper, and as he unfolded it Wendover saw his eyebrows raised involuntarily. For a moment he seemed in doubt; then, with a glance at the two fishermen, he carefully refolded the paper and stowed it away in his pocket-book.

“That will keep for the present,” he said.

Over the chief constable's shoulder, Wendover caught a glimpse of a figure advancing along the sands from the direction of the hotel bathing-boxes. A towel over its shoulder showed the reason for the appearance of the stranger on the beach before breakfast. As it approached, Wendover recognised the gait.

“Here's Cargill, that Australian who's staying at the hotel, Clinton. He's come down for a bathe, evidently. You'd better do the talking for us.”

Cargill had evidently recognised them, for he hastened his steps and soon reached the groyne.

“I shouldn't come any farther, Mr. Cargill,” Sir Clinton said politely. “There are some tracks there which we may want to look at if we have time; and I'd rather not have them mixed up with yours, if you don't mind.”

Cargill halted obediently, but looked inquisitively at the group on the rock.

“Is that where the murder happened?” he inquired.

“How do you know about it?” Sir Clinton replied, giving question for question.

“Oh, the news came up to the hotel with the milk, I expect,” the Australian answered. “I heard it from a waiter as I came through on my way to bathe. The whole staff's buzzing with it. I say, who Is it?”

“Couldn't say yet,” Sir Clinton returned with an air of candour. Then he added: “I'm sorry we haven't time to talk it over just now, Mr. Cargill. This tide will be all round us in a minute, if we don't get a move on.”

He turned to the fishermen.

“We'll shift the body into your boat now, and then you can row slowly along towards the village. Don't hurry; and don't go ashore till you see Inspector Armadale there. He'll take the body off your hands. You understand? Thanks.”

The boat was brought close alongside the natural quay and the body of Staveley put aboard without mishap. At a sign from Sir Clinton, the boat put out into the bay. Armadale seemed a little at a loss over the procedure; but he made no audible protest. Cargill remained on the other side of the groyne, obviously taking the keenest interest in the whole affair.

Sir Clinton gave a last glance round the rock plateau; then, followed by his companions, he retreated to the upper sands. Cargill, thus left alone, hovered uncertainly for a moment or two, and finally sat down on the groyne, looking idly at the sand around his feet. Evidently he understood that he was not wanted, but it looked as though he had still some faint hopes of being allowed to join the party.

“We must carry all this stuff up to the car,” Sir Clinton reminded his companions. “I'll take some of the casts; you can manage the rest, inspector. Wendover, the blow-lamp and the rest of the candles are your share, if you don't mind.”

When they reached the car, he motioned Wendover into the driving-seat and signed to the inspector to get in also.

“I'm going for a short walk along the road towards the hotel,” he explained. “Let me get a bit ahead, squire, and then follow on, slowly. I'm going to have a look at that extra wheel-track at close quarters. It won't take more than a moment or two.”

He moved along the road to a point just before the groyne, and halted there for a few moments, examining the faint track left by the turning of a car. Then he continued his walk towards the hotel, scrutinising the ground as he went. At the end of a few hundred yards he halted; and, when Wendover brought up his car, Sir Clinton got into it, taking the seat in front.

“There are really two tracks there,” he explained, as he closed the door. “Down by the beach, both of them are very faint, and I noticed rain-marks on top of them. Then, just a few dozen yards back from here, one of the tracks is strongly marked, while the second track remains faint. It's so lightly marked that I expect you missed it this morning, squire. Now what do you make of that?”

Wendover considered for a few moments.

“Somebody came down the road in a car before the rain and made the light track,” he suggested. “Then he turned and came back in this direction; and when he had got this length the rain came on, and his tracks after that were in mud and not in dry dust, so they'd be heavier. That it?”

“I expect so,” Sir Clinton acquiesced. “No, don't go on yet. I've something to show you before we go farther. I didn't care to produce it before all that audience down at the rock.”

He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out the piece of note-paper found on Staveley's body. Wendover leaned over and examined it as the chief constable unfolded it.

“Hullo! The hotel heading's on the paper, Clinton,” he exclaimed. “This is getting a bit near home, surely.”

“It is,” said Sir Clinton drily. “I'll read it, inspector. It's short and very much to the point, apparently. The date on it is yesterday. This is how it goes. There's no ‘Dear So-and-so’ or anything of that sort at the beginning.

“Your letter has come as a complete surprise, as you expected, no doubt. You seem to know all about what has happened, and I suppose you will do all you can to make the worst of things—at least I can't take any other meaning out of what you have written. I shall come to Neptune's Seat to-night at 11 p.m. to hear what you have to say. But I warn you plainly that I will not submit to being blackmailed by you, since that seems to be what is in your mind.”

And the signature,” Sir Clinton concluded, “is Cressida Fleetwood.”

The inspector leaned forward and took the letter.

“Now we've got something to go on!” he exclaimed jubilantly. “That name, coupled with the hotel note-paper, ought to let us lay our hands on her within half an hour, if we've any luck at all.”

Wendover had been thunder-struck by the revelation of the signature. His mind involuntarily called up a picture of Cressida as he had seen her less than twenty-four hours earlier, frank and care-free, and so evidently happy with her husband. A girl like that could hardly be mixed up with a brutal murder; it seemed too incongruous. Then across his memory flitted a recollection of Sir Clinton's description of the poker-sharp, and the implied warning against trusting too much to appearances; but he resolutely put them aside. A glance at Armadale's face tended to increase his bias, for it displayed a hardly restrained exultation. Quite evidently the inspector supposed that his case was now well on the road to a satisfactory solution.

“Damned man-hunter!” Wendover commented inwardly, quite forgetting that a few minutes earlier he himself had been every bit as eager as the inspector. “I don't want to see her fall into that brute's hands.”

His imagination called up a picture of Cressida, with that fascinating touch of shyness changed to dismay, faced by the harsh interrogations of an Armadale determined to force from her some damning statement. The inspector would see no reason for kindly treatment in the case of a woman whom he seemed to have condemned already in his mind.

Wendover turned to Sir Clinton in the hope of seeing some signs of other feelings there. But the chief constable's face betrayed nothing whatever about his thoughts, and Wendover remembered that Sir Clinton had known the contents of the letter before he left the beach. It had not affected him when he read it then, Wendover recalled; for there had been no change in his manner.

Suddenly the squire felt isolated from his companions. They were merely a couple of officials carrying out a piece of work, regardless of what the end of it might be; whereas he himself had still his natural human sympathies to sway him in his judgments and tip the scale in a case of doubt. Almost with surprise, he found himself disliking Armadale intensely; a great, coarse-fibred creature who cared nothing for the disaster which he was about to unchain within an hour.

Wendover awoke from his thoughts to find Sir Clinton looking at him with an expressionless face.

“Care to step off here, squire? Your face gives you away. You don't like the way things are trending? Better leave us to finish the job alone.”

Wendover's brain could work swiftly when he chose. Almost in a moment he had gauged the situation. If he dropped out, then the two officials would go forward together and there would be no human feelings among the hunters. If he stayed with them, he could at least play the part of critic and shake the inspector's confidence in any weak links of the chain which he was forging. Further than that he could not go, but at least he could hold a watching brief for Cressida. His mind was made up at once.

“No,” he answered. “If you don't mind, since I'm in the thing now, I'll stay in. You may need an impartial witness again, and I may as well have the job.”

The inspector made no attempt to conceal his disgust. Sir Clinton showed neither approval nor objection, but he evidently thought it right to give a warning.

“Very well, squire. It's your own choice. But, remember, you're only a witness. You're not to go putting your oar in when it's not wanted.”

Wendover indicated his acquiescence by a curt nod. Sir Clinton restarted his car and drove along with his eyes fixed on the clearly marked tracks of the non-skid tyres. At the hotel entrance the studded print turned inward, and was lost on the gravel of the sweep up to the hotel.

As he noticed this, the inspector made an involuntary gesture of satisfaction, whilst Wendover felt that the net had been drawn yet tighter by this last piece of evidence.

“That's a clincher, sir,” Armadale pointed out with a frank satisfaction which irritated Wendover intensely. “She took a car down and back. This is going to be as easy as falling off a log.”

“I suppose you noticed that that car never stopped at all on the road home,” Sir Clinton remarked casually. “The tracks showed no sign of a stop and a restart once the machine had got going.”

Only after he had run his car into the hotel garage did he speak again.

“We don't want any more chatter than we can help at present, inspector. There's no real case against anyone yet; and it won't do to rush into the limelight. I suggest that Mr. Wendover should ask to see Mrs. Fleetwood. If you inquired for her, every tongue in the place would be at work in five minutes; and by the time they'd compared notes with each other, it'll be quite impossible to dig out anything that one or two of them may really happen to know. Everything will have got mixed up in their minds, and they won't remember whether they saw something themselves or merely heard about it from someone else.”

Wendover saw the force of the argument; but he also realised clearly the position into which he was being pushed.

“I'm not so sure I care about that job, Clinton,” he protested. “It puts me in a false position.”

The chief constable interrupted him brutally.

“Five minutes ago I offered you the chance to get off the bus. You preferred to stay with us. Therefore you do as you're told. That's that.”

Wendover understood that his only chance of keeping in touch with the hunters now depended on his obeying orders. Gloomily he made his submission.

“All right, Clinton. I don't like it; but I see there are some advantages.”

Accompanied by the others, he entered the hotel and made his way to the desk, while the two officials dropped into the background.

“Mrs. Fleetwood?” the clerk repeated, when Wendover had made his inquiry. “Yes, sir, she's upstairs. Didn't you know that Mr. Fleetwood broke his leg last night? The doctor's set it now. I think Mrs. Fleetwood's up in his room with him.”

“What's the number?” Wendover asked.

“No. 35, sir. Shall I phone up and ask if you can see her? It's no trouble.”

Wendover shook his head and turned away from the desk. As he crossed the hall, the other two rejoined him.

“It's on the first floor. We'll walk up,” said Sir Clinton, turning towards the stairs. “You can do the talking, inspector.”

Nothing loath, Armadale knocked at the door of No. 35, and, on receiving an answer, he turned the handle and entered the room. Sir Clinton followed him, whilst Wendover, acutely uncomfortable, hovered on the threshold. On the bed, with his features pale and drawn, lay Stanley Fleetwood. Cressida rose from an armchair and threw a startled glance at the intruders.

The inspector was no believer in tactful openings.

“I'm sorry to trouble you,” he said gruffly, “but I understand you can give me some information about the affair on the beach last night.”

Wendover, despite his animus against Armadale, could not help admiring the cleverness of this sentence, which took so much for granted and yet had a vagueness designed to lead a criminal into awkward difficulties in his reply. But his main interest centred in Cressida; and at the look on her face his heart sank suddenly. Strain, confusion, and desperation seemed to have their part in it; but plainest of all was fear. She glanced from her husband to Armadale, and it was patent that she understood the acuteness of the danger.

“Why,” he admitted to himself in dismay, “she looks as if she'd really done it! And she's deadly afraid that Armadale can prove it.”

Cressida moistened her lips automatically, as if she were about to reply; but, before she could say a word, her husband broke in.

“What makes you come here with inquiries? I suppose you've some authority? Or are you a reporter?”

“I'm Inspector Armadale.”

Stanley Fleetwood made an evident effort to keep himself in hand, in spite of the physical pain which he was obviously suffering. He nodded in acknowledgment of the inspector's introduction, and then repeated his question.

“What makes you come to us?”

Armadale was not to be led into betraying anything about the extent of his information.

“I really can't go into that, Mr. Fleetwood. I came to ask a few questions, not to answer any. It's to your interest to answer frankly.”

He turned to Cressida.

“You were on the beach last night about eleven o'clock?”

Stanley Fleetwood broke in again before Cressida could make a reply.

“Wait a moment, inspector. Are you proposing to bring a charge against me?”

Armadale hesitated for a moment, as if undecided as to his next move. He seemed to see something further behind the question.

“There's no charge against anyone—yet,” he said, with a certain dwelling on the last word; but as he spoke his eyes swung round to Cressida's drawn features with a certain menace.

“Don't say anything, Cressida,” her husband warned her.

He turned back to the inspector.

“You've no power to extract evidence if we don't choose to give it?” he asked.

“No,” the inspector admitted cautiously, “but sometimes it's dangerous to suppress evidence, I warn you.”

“I'm not very amenable to threats, inspector,” Stanley Fleetwood answered drily. “I gather this must be something serious, or you wouldn't be making such a fuss?”