"This will be a terrible scandal, Inspector," said the assistant manager.
Teal looked at him woodenly.
"Were you here when it happened ?"
"No. I was downstairs, in my office——"
Teal collected the information, and ploughed past him. On the right, another door opened off the generous lobby; and through it could be seen another elderly man whose equally pale face and air of suppressed agitation bore a certain general similarity and also a self-contained superiority to the first. Even without his sober black coat and striped trousers, grey side-whiskers and passive hands, he would have stamped himself as something more cosmic than the assistant manager of an hotel—the assistant manager of a man.
"Who are you?" asked Teal.
"I am Fowler, sir. Mr. Enstone's valet."
"Were you here?"
"Yes, sir."
"Where is Mr. Enstone?"
"In the bedroom, sir."
They moved back across the lobby, with the assistant manager assuming the lead. Teal stopped. "Will you be in your office if I want you?" he asked, with great politeness; and the assistant manager seemed to disappear from the scene even before the door of the suite closed behind him.
Lewis Enstone was dead. He lay on his back beside the bed, with his head half rolled over to one side, in such a way that both the entrance and the exit of the bullet which had killed him could be seen. It had been fired squarely into his right eye, leaving the ugly trail which only a heavy-calibre bullet fired at close range can leave. . . . The gun lay under the fingers of his right hand.
"Thumb on the trigger," Teal noted aloud.
He sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on a pair of gloves, pink-faced and unemotional. Simon observed the room. An ordinary, very tidy bedroom, barren of anything unusual except the subdued costliness of furnishing. Two windows, both shut and fastened. On a table in one corner, the only sign of disorder, the remains of a carelessly-opened parcel. Brown paper, ends of string, a plain cardboard box—empty. The millionaire had gone no further towards undressing than loosening his tie and undoing his collar.
"What happened?" asked Mr. Teal.
"Mr. Enstone had had friends to dinner, sir," explained Fowler. "A Mr. Costello—"
"I know that. What happened when he came back from seeing them off?"
"He went straight to bed, sir."
"Was this door open?"
"At first, sir. I asked Mr. Enstone about the morning, and he told me to call him at eight. I then asked him whether he wished me to assist him to undress, and he gave me to understand that he did not. He closed the door, and I went back to the sitting-room."
"Did you leave that door open?"
"Yes, sir. I was doing a little clearing up. Then I heard -the shot, sir."
"Do you know any reason why Mr. Enstone should have shot himself?"
"On the contrary, sir—I understood that his recent speculations had been highly successful."
Teal nodded.
"Where is his wife?"
"Mrs. Enstone and the children have been in Madeira, sir. We are expecting them home tomorrow."
"What was in that parcel, Fowler?" ventured the Saint.
The valet glanced at the table.
"I don't know, sir. I believe it must have been left by one of Mr. Enstone's guests. I noticed it on the dining-table when I brought in their coats, and Mr. Enstone came back for it on his return and took it into the bedroom with him."
"You didn't hear anything said about it?"
"No, sir. I was not present after coffee had been served—I understood that the gentlemen had private business to discuss."
"What are you getting at?" Mr. Teal asked seriously.
The Saint smiled apologetically; and being nearest the door, went out to open it as a second knocking disturbed the silence, and let in a grey-haired man with a black bag. While the police surgeon was making his preliminary examination, he drifted into the sitting-room. The relics of a convivial dinner were all there—cigar-butts in the coffee cups, stains of spilt wine on the cloth, crumbs and ash everywhere, the stale smell of food and smoke hanging in the air—but those things did not interest him. He was not quite sure what would have interested him; but he wandered rather vacantly round the room, gazing introspectively at the prints of character which a long tenancy leaves even on anything so characterless as an hotel apartment. There were pictures on the walls and the side tables, mostly enlarged snapshots revealing Lewis Enstone relaxing in the bosom of his family, which amused Simon for some time. On one of the side tables he found a curious object. It was a small wooden plate on which half a dozen wooden fowls stood in a circle. Their necks were pivoted at the base, and underneath the plate were six short strings joined to the necks and knotted together some distance further down where they were all attached at the same point to a wooden ball. It was these strings, and the weight of the ball at their lower ends, which kept the birds' heads raised; and Simon discovered that when he moved the plate so that the ball swung round in a circle underneath, thus tightening and slackening each string in turn, the fowls mounted on the plate pecked vigorously in rotation at an invisible and apparently inexhaustible supply of corn, in a most ingenious mechanical display of gluttony.
He was still playing thoughtfully with the toy when he discovered Mr. Teal standing beside him. The detective's round pink face wore a look of almost comical incredulity.
"Is that how you spend your spare time?" he demanded.
"I think it's rather clever," said the Saint soberly. He put the toy down, and blinked at Fowler. "Does it belong to one of the children?"
"Mr. Enstone brought it home with him this evening, sir, to give to Miss Annabel tomorrow," said the valet. "He was always picking up things like that. He was a very devoted father, sir."
Mr. Teal chewed for ,a moment; and then he said: "Have you finished? I'm going home."
Simon nodded pacifically, and accompanied him to the lift. As they went down he asked: "Did you find anything?"
Teal blinked.
"What did you expect me to find?"
"I thought the police were always believed to have a Clue," murmured the Saint innocently.
"Enstone committed suicide," said Teal flatly. "What sort of clues do you want ?"
"Why did he commit suicide?" asked the Saint, almost childishly.
Teal ruminated meditatively for a while, without answering. If anyone else had started such a discussion he would have been openly derisive. The same impulse was stirring him then; but he restrained himself. He knew Simon Templar's wicked sense of humour, but he also knew that sometimes the Saint was most worth listening to when he sounded most absurd.
"Call me up in the morning," said Mr. Teal at length, "and I may be able to tell you."
Simon Templar went home and slept fitfully. Lewis Enstone had shot himself—it seemed an obvious fact. The windows had been closed and fastened, and any complicated trick of fastening them from the outside and escaping up or down a rope-ladder was ruled out by the bare two or three seconds that could have elapsed between the sound of the shot and the valet rushing in. But Fowler himself might. . . . Why not suicide, anyway? But the Saint could run over every word and gesture and expression of the leave-taking which he himself had witnessed in the hotel lobby, and none of it carried even a hint of suicide. The only oddity about it had been the queer inexplicable piece of pantomime—the fist clenched, with the forefinger extended and the thumb cocked up in crude symbolism of a gun—the abstruse joke which had dissolved Enstone into a fit of inanely delighted giggling, with the hearty approval of his guests. . . . The psychological problem fascinated him. It muddled itself up with a litter of brown paper and a cardboard box, a wooden plate of pecking chickens, photographs . . . and the tangle kaleidoscoped through his dreams in a thousand different convolutions until morning.