The Greatest Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding Collection. Dorothy Fielding

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      "Fond of gardening, is he?" Brown struck in wheezily "That's like me. I like to do a bit that way myself."

      "Fond? Not beyond seeing as there isn't a stray leaf, and that the flowers come up to time. They mustn't be late for parade, or he wants to know the reason why." Bennet began to help the boy to pick up the broken pots inside. "Just look at 'em." The gardener was almost in tears. "I think he's going dotty, lately, that's my opinion. I wouldn't stay on, not if he asked me."

      "Leaving, eh? The colonel hard to please?"

      Bennet straightened himself with some difficulty.

      "I was fourth gardener at Welbeck," he said with dignity, "and I take it there's nothing in my work I aren't up to. No, he gave me notice out of temper. Pure bad temper."

      "Because some of the flowers didn't come up to time?" Brown asked, with the tactlessness of the dull.

      Bennet's eyes snapped.

      "I've told you once already that I know my job, thank you. The colonel gave me notice because he lost a telegram, or a letter. He called it first one, then the other. Couldn't find it, and said it must have blown out of the window. I'm not a betting man. I'm not interested in tips. He would have it that I'd picked it up. I was marking out some plots in front of his study. Later on, next day it was, the thing turned up. Daresay he still was able to put his bit on. Anyway he was ashamed of himself. I will do him that justice. He apologised quite handsome. But I'm leaving at the end of the month. He's getting too peppery lately. There's no pleasing him. He'll order a thing one day and change it the next. Look at this place. Yet just before he drove off he says that he wants nothing more done here till further orders. Told me not to cart away the broken pots. But I knows him and his little ways by now. This time to-morrow he'll be raving because the rubbish has been left here."

      "Mr. Thornton'll miss your good lady. When do you leave?"

      "Four weeks from this last Wednesday. I don't say that if—"

      Bennet was interrupted. He was wanted down on the grass courts immediately. The colonel had left an order that they were to be prepared for returfing, and it was a case of all hands on deck.

      "There!" Bennet handed Brown back his tobacco pouch. "Thank 'ee. Those courts was new sown last week. Mr. Cutbush won't stand much more of this. He'll be leaving next."

      Bennet hurried away.

      Pointer mounted a short flight of stairs inside the house to the landing where two doors opened, one on either side. He found both to be prettily furnished bedrooms, and guessed them to be used at times as an overflow from Stillwater House.

      The left room he only glanced at. The right room detained him longer. Some one had lain on the bed last night. There were the marks of dusty boots on the flowered coverlid, and still an impress in the crumpled pillows. He was a tall man and very light, Pointer decided. His walking had been done before the rain. "Before the rain" had come to mean to him by now "before the murder of Rose Charteris."

      One of the lace blinds that covered half the window was on the floor. He found that it was liable to come off at a touch. The window looked out over that side of the tiled surround where Rose must have fallen. On testing it, the pear-shaped window latch gave a nearly perfect print of a thumb and first finger. A long, slender finger which had never been calloused by toil.

      It was not Mr. Thornton's first finger and thumb. Pointer had prints of those already from the back of a prepared notebook that he had handed his host to hold for a second. He examined the ground around the summer house while apparently looking for a dropped pencil. He found no marks, except once that same hard-tyred wheel mark which he had seen before on the short cut.

      He thought of Mr. Thornton's cottage, which lay quite close.

      Opening the gate into the lane beside it, he looked around him. From that gate to where the lane turned into the high road to London, Pointer saw the marks where a light little car had run up and down many times about three this morning, judging by the depth of the half-dried earth. He decided that this case was going to be a shining example of how favoured detectives are in the British Isles in the matter of damp. Seldom indeed is the ground not able, and willing, to date some event for the investigator. He often maintained that the work of his confrères in really good climates must be much more arduous.

      The little car had apparently been used as a shuttle. Four times it had run out to the main road and back to the gates close beside Mr. Thornton's cottage. It had been going light and had been driven very slowly. One might have thought that someone was waiting? But why not wait patiently? Why patrol that one little part of the lane, now as close as possible to the Stillwater hedges, now as close as possible to the other side?

      Pointer, deep in thought, entered the grounds again, and decided to have a look at the two garages.

      The colonel's chauffeur was busy at work, but Brown asked for a little petrol to take a stain out of his coat. He used his eyes while he sponged. Then he went on to Red Gates. Thornton's two-seater was out, but a big Bently saloon was there. Pointer lit one of the lamps, as well as the electric light, and began his examination.

      The car had been lately and hastily cleaned. It certainly had been out very recently, and as certainly after, not in, or before, last night's storm. The wheel-discs still held marks of wet splashings, but the mud was of a fairly thick consistency. The door handles and steering wheel yielded no finger prints.

      The criss-cross markings of the clutch showed sand, and a few particles of what, fished out with a pin on to white paper, showed under his magnifying glass as crushed flower-pot dust.

      Caught in the clutch was a wisp of thin, black silk material. Pointer laid that away in an envelope. So a woman had driven the car!

      The inside of the saloon had been swept out, also very hastily. He found more sand, and more flower-pot crumbs in the corners under the seats. There, too, far back, he found a pencil, not much used, with a protective metal tip. It was a French make.

      He found the oddest thing last of all.

      Two marks like little horse shoes, side by side, showed on the gray cloth upholstery. One pair at the top of the window, but a little to one side. One pair was overhead.

      Pointer studied them They were reddish brown in colour. He decided that they had been made by a pair of men's boot heels. The stains showed under his magnifying glass to be of the same horrible blood and fertilise mixture which he had found on the sacking, and which he believed he had found on the swab taken from the cut on Rose's head.

      The two marks were close together each time, all but touching. That told its own tale. The man's feet had been bound—lashed together. His hands must also have been tied, or those convulsive efforts to free himself, to kick open a window, or the carriage top, of which the marks told, would have been accompanied by some torn cushions. But their very cording was intact. Down by the door he found a few bloodstains, very small, but still damp. Judging by the height of the heel marks, a man of about the same size as the man who had lain on that bed in the summer house had been carried in this car last night.

      Pointer felt his pulses quicken. His intelligence rose to meet the puzzle like a good horse at a stiff fence. But for the moment he reined it back. He thought of that to-and-fro driving of the little car in the lane outside. Suppose that a large car, such a car as this, had passed out first along the lane, and then suppose that the little car, such a car as he had seen in the Colonel's garage a few, minutes ago, and of which he had the particulars СКАЧАТЬ