"There might be finger-prints on that," he said. "I don’t want to touch it. Just go round to the front door, Inspector, and see if it’s open by any chance. If not, we’ll smash the glass at the other end of this window and use the second casement to get in by, so as not to confuse things."
When the Inspector had reported the front door locked, the Chief Constable carried out his proposal; the untouched casement swung open, and they prepared to enter the room, which hitherto had been concealed from them by the drawn curtains. Sir Clinton led the way, and as he pushed the curtain out of his road, his companions heard a bitten-off exclamation.
"Not much of a mare’s nest, Inspector," he continued in a cooler tone. "Get inside."
The Inspector, followed by Dr. Ringwood, climbed through the open casement and stared in astonishment at the sight before them. The place they had entered was evidently one of the sitting-rooms of the bungalow, and the dust-sheets which covered the furniture indicated that the building had been shut up for the winter. In a big arm-chair, facing them as they entered, sat the body of a girl in evening dress with a cloak around her shoulders. A slight trail of blood had oozed from a wound in her head and marked her shoulder on the right side. On the floor at her feet lay an automatic pistol. One or two small chairs seemed to have been displaced roughly in the room, as though some struggle had taken place; but the attitude of the girl in the chair was perfectly natural. It seemed as though she had sat down merely to rest and death had come upon her without any warning, for her face had no tinge of fear in its expression.
"I wasn’t far out in putting my money on Mr. Justice, Inspector," Sir Clinton said thoughtfully, as he gazed at the dead girl. "It might have been days before we came across this affair without his help."
He glanced round the room for a moment, biting his lip as though perplexed by some problem.
"We’d better have a general look round before touching the details," he suggested, at last; and he led the way out of the room into the hall of the bungalow. "We’ll try the rooms as we come to them."
Suiting the action to the word, he opened the first door that came to hand. It proved to be that of a dismantled bedroom. The dressing-table was bare and everything had been removed from the bed expect a wire mattress. The second door led into what was obviously the dining-room of the bungalow; and here again the appearance of the room showed that the house had been shut up for the season. A third trial revealed a lavatory.
"H’m! Clean towels hanging on the rail?" Sir Clinton pointed out. "That’s unusual in an empty house, isn’t it?"
Without waiting for a minuter examination, he turned to the next door.
"Some sort of store-room, apparently. These mattresses belong to the beds, obviously."
Along one side of the little room were curtained shelves. Sir Clinton slid back the curtains and revealed the stacked house-napery, towels, and sheets.
"Somebody seems to have been helping themselves here," he indicated, drawing his companions’ attention to one or two places where the orderly piling of the materials had been disturbed by careless withdrawals. "We’ll try again."
The next room provided a complete contrast to the rest of the house. It was a bedroom with all its fittings in place. The bed, fully made up, had obviously not been slept in. The dressing-table was covered with the usual trifles which a girl uses in her toilette. Vases, which obviously did not belong to the normal equipment of the room, had been collected here and filled with a profusion of expensive flowers. Most surprising of all, an electric stove, turned on at half power, kept the room warm.
"She’s been living here!" the Inspector exclaimed in a tone which revealed his astonishment.
Sir Clinton made a gesture of dissent. He crossed the room, and threw open the door of a cupboard wardrobe, revealing empty hooks and shelves.
"She’d hardly be living here with nothing but an evening frock in the way of clothes, would she?" he asked. "You can look round if you like, Inspector; but I’m prepared to bet that she never set foot in this room. You won’t find much."
He stepped over to the dressing-table and examined one by one the knick-knacks placed upon it.
"These things are all split-new, Inspector. Look at this face-powder box not been opened, the band’s still intact on it. And the lip-stick’s unused. You can see that at a glance."
Flamborough had to admit the truth of his superior’s statements.
"H’m!" he reflected. "Of course it’s Mrs. Silverdale, I suppose, sir?"
"I should think so, but we can make sure about it very soon. In the meantime, let’s finish going round the premises."
The rest of the survey revealed very little. The remainder of the house was obviously dismantled for the winter. Only once did Sir Clinton halt for any time, and that was in the pantry. Here he examined the cups suspended from hooks on the wall and pointed out to Flamborough the faint film of accumulated dust on each of them.
"None of that crockery has been used for weeks, Inspector. One can’t live in a house without eating and drinking, you know."
"A port of call, then?" the Inspector persisted. "She and young Hassendean could drop in here without rousing any suspicion."
"Perhaps," Sir Clinton conceded abstractedly. "Now we’ll get Dr. Ringwood to give his assistance."
He led the way back to the room through which they had entered the house.
"She was dead before that shot was fired, of course," he said as they crossed the threshold. "But beyond that there ought to be something to be seen."
"What makes you so sure that the shot didn’t kill her, sir?" the Inspector demanded.
"Because there wasn’t half enough blood scattered about the place. She was dead when the shot was fired’ must have been dead for some minutes, I suspect. There was no heart-action to lift the blood in her body, so consequently it sank under gravity and left her skull nearly empty of it. Then when the shot was fired, only the merest trickle came from the wound. I think that’s right, isn’t it, doctor?"
"It’s quite on the cards," Dr. Ringwood agreed. "Certainly there wasn’t the normal amount of bleeding that one might have expected."
"Then the really important point is: how did she come to die. This is where we rely on you, doctor. Go ahead, please, and see what you make of it."
Dr. Ringwood went over to the arm-chair and began his examination of the dead girl. His glance travelled first to the open eyes, which seemed curiously dark; and a very brief inspection of their abnormal appearance suggested one possible verdict.
"It looks as if she’d had a dose of one of these mydriatic drugsвЂ"atropine, or something of that sort. The eye-pupils are markedly dilated," he pronounced.
Sir Clinton refrained from glancing at the Inspector.
"I suppose you couldn’t make a guess at the time of death?" he inquired.
Dr. Ringwood tested the stiffness of the limbs, but from his face they gathered that it was almost a purely formal experiment.
"I’m not going to bluff about the thing. You know yourselves that rigor mortis is only the roughest test; and when there’s an unknown poison to complicate matters, I simply couldn’t give you a figure that would be worth the breath spent on it. She’s been dead for some hours and you could have guessed that for yourselves."
"Congratulations, doctor! There are so few people in this world who have the honesty to say: I don’t know, when they’re questioned on their own speciality. Now you might have a look at the wound, if you don’t mind."
While Dr. Ringwood was carrying out this part of his examination, Inspector Flamborough occupied himself in a search of the room. An ejaculation from him brought Sir Clinton to his side, and the Inspector pointed to a dark patch on the floor which had hitherto been concealed by one of the displaced chairs.