“I wouldn’t exactly say that,” said Henry, “but one of them was very valuable, and that one is missing.”
“How do you know it’s missing? How do you know he ever had it? He wouldn’t have known the difference if the set had been one short. For heaven’s sake, why don’t you go up to the Grange and see if it’s not there?” There was a little silence, and the Mason added, “I suppose you know that Manning-Richards is a classical scholar?”
“Is he? No, I didn’t know that.”
Frank laughed, ill-humoredly. “When I say scholar,” he amended, “I mean that he played around at Greek and Latin, as he played with everything else. He seemed to think…” Mason groped for the most damning expression he could find. Eventually, he finished, “He seemed to think that education was for fun.”
Henry could not repress a smile. “Poor fellow,” he said. “He must be one of the last people alive to take that view.”
“I’m glad to say,” said Mason aggressively, “that we’ve practically eliminated the privileged class that can afford to study for amusement.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Henry.
“Oh, I can see that you’re in the pockets of the Manciples and the Manning-Richards,” said Mason. “Just as I’d expect. You’re a sad little bourgeois, and you’d give your eyes to be what you call a real gentleman. The fact that one of these precious gentlemen of yours is a murderer doesn’t bother you, of course. The king can do no wrong.”
Henry looked at him seriously for a moment. Then he said, “If you really believe what you’ve just said, Mr. Mason, doesn’t it strike you that you are in considerable danger from this murderer yourself?”
“I can look after myself.”
“I do hope so. Sometimes the most unexpected people turn out to be very vulnerable.” Henry paused. Then he added, “If you are thinking of visiting Maud Manciple, I think I should tell you that her great-aunt died last night.”
“The ninety-year-old? Well, she’d had her innings, hadn’t she?”
“I’m told,” said Henry, “that there is to be no mourning, because the Manciples don’t go in for it. All the same, I think the old lady will be very much missed. She was greatly loved. I’d be a little tactful, if I were you. And careful.”
“Careful?”
“Somebody,” said Henry, “has that gun. If it isn’t you…” He left the sentence unfinished, and went on. “Have you had many visitors here in the last couple of days?”
“Visitors? Oh, I see what you’re driving at. The person who…” Frank laughed, the laugh totally devoid of any sort of joy or amusement, a laugh he seemed to use as a weapon against the Establishment in the same way that a small boy will stick his tongue out at his elders. “You don’t imagine that Cregwell has been beating a path to my door, do you? I’m not likely to have had any visitors.”
“But did you?”
“I’ve told you, no.”
“Not even the postman or the milkman?”
“Well, yes, of course, they were both here yesterday. But I don’t count them.”
“That’s what I was getting at,” said Henry. “Is there anyone else who has been here whom you don’t count?”
“Your famous Sergeant Duckett, wizard of the Fenshire force, was around here on Sunday,” said Frank with ponderous sarcasm. “Something about checking a statement. And I can do even better. The great Sir John Adamson himself favored me with a brief call on Sunday evening.”
“Did he?” Henry deliberately ironed any interest out of his voice. “In connection with the case, I suppose?”
“To tell me that the inquest is to be next Friday,” said Mason. “Very solicitous of him. He could perfectly easily have let events take their normal course. I had an official notification from the coroner’s office yesterday in any case, which accounts for the visit of the postman, if you’re interested. It came by the afternoon mail.”
“I expect Sir John thought that you’d rather…”
“He wanted to take a good look at me,” said Frank. “Quite understandable. But, of course, simple vulgar curiosity can never be admitted to affect the aristocracy. Oh, no. So he comes here in avuncular mood, dripping patronage.”
“If you care to take it that way…” Henry shrugged. “You seem to have caught a nasty cold,” he added.
“So would anybody in this benighted hole. What’s that to do with…?”
“I just wondered if the Doctor had been up to see you?”
Mason looked surly. “He did drop in yesterday,” he said. “I rang to ask when his hours were, and he said that he had a call to make in these parts and that he’d drop by. He gave me a prescription for some cough mixture and aspirins. Anything sinister about that?”
“I don’t know,” said Henry. “When was this?”
“Yesterday morning, around eleven, I suppose. I didn’t make an accurate note of the time.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Henry seriously. He was too absorbed in his thoughts to worry about the irony in Mason’s voice. “Were any of these people left alone in this room for any length of time?”
Mason knitted his brows in thought, and began to cough again. Then he said, “Yes. All of them.”
“Really?”
“Well, the telephone rang in the hall outside while Duckett was here, and I had to go and answer it. That must have given him three or four minutes alone in here. Then, Sir John High-and-Mighty Adamson made it so clear that he expected to be offered a drink that eventually I had to give him one. I went out into the kitchen to get some ice — that must have taken a few minutes. As for old Thompson, he started on about my National Health card, because obviously he’s not the G.P. I’m registered with. I happen to know it’s not necessary to produce the card for a temporary thing like this, but he made quite a fuss, and so I had to pretend to go and look for it. I knew I didn’t have it here, of course. Damned bureaucracy, that’s all it is. Men like Thompson think they can push people around, just because they’ve got a couple of letters tacked onto their names. In a properly-organized society…”
Mercifully, another fit of coughing intervened, for although Henry would have been interested to hear how Mason, who was far from unintelligent, proposed to reconcile a Communist society with the abolition of bureaucracy, he really did not have time for it just then. He waited until the coughing ceased, and then said, “Any other visitors?”
“Not that I know of. But that doesn’t mean that people may not have been prowling around.”
“Wouldn’t you have seen them?”
“Not if I was out.”
“But you’d have noticed if any of the doors or windows had been forced…”
“I don’t lock doors,” said Frank Mason. “I trust my fellow workers.”
“There seem to be an awful lot of people you don’t trust, all the same,” said Henry.
Suddenly, disarmingly, Frank Mason smiled. Henry was amazed to see how a real smile, as opposed to a sneer, could illuminate his face and fill it with interest, as a shaft of sunlight reveals the contours of a landscape. “The people I distrust,” said Frank Mason, “are the rich people. And there’s nothing in this house worth locking up against people of that sort.”
Henry, in his turn, smiled, but a trifle bitterly. “I think you’re wrong,” he said. “Or at least, you were. There was something worth taking, but now it’s gone. So I wouldn’t bother about locking up. Remember the old proverb about the stable door. Well, I’d better be off. I’ve a lot to do this morning. And by the way,” he hesitated, “I’d like to read your book when it’s finished.”