"This is off the little finger. It’s a plain gold signet with Y and S intertwined on it. Evidently it’s Mrs. Silverdale right enough, sir. The inscription’s inside . . . H’m! there’s a variation here. The date’s – 15.11.25 – here; but there’s only a single letter at each end: a Y at one side and a B at the other. That’s a bit of a puzzle," he concluded, glancing at his superior to see if he could detect anything in his face.
"I agree with you, Inspector," was all that he elicited for his pains. "Now take off the bracelet, and that string of pearls round her neck. Anything of note on the bracelet?"
"Nothing whatever, sir," the Inspector reported after a glance at it.
"Well, you’d better put these in a safe place when we get back to town. Now does that finish us here?"
He glanced round the room and his eye was caught by the second window which looked out from the side of the bungalow. The curtains were still undrawn, and he noticed a minute gap through which the outer daylight could pass freely. A thought seemed to strike him as he ran his eyes over the fabric.
"We’ll just go outside for a minute," he announced, and led the way through the hall and out of the front door. "Let’s see, that window’s round here, isn’t it. Keep back for a moment."
He halted outside the window and scrutinised the ground with care for a few seconds.
"See that, Inspector?" he inquired. "There aren’t any foot-prints that one could make anything out of; but someone has put his foot on the box edging of the path just in front of the window. It’s quite obviously crushed . . . and freshly crushed, too, by the look of it."
Stepping softly on to the flower-bed which lay under the window-sill, he bent down until his eye was level with the chink between the curtains and peered through into the room.
"That’s interesting," he said, as he turned again to face his companions. "One gets quite a good view of the room from here; and it looks as if somebody had taken advantage of it last night. Nobody would attempt to look into a shut-up house in the dark, so presumably the lights were on when he took the trouble to put his eye to the crack."
The Inspector made no pretence of concealing his delight.
"If we could only get hold of him. Perhaps he saw the murder actually done, sir."
Sir Clinton seemed disinclined to rejoice too fervently.
"It’s all pure hypothesis," he pointed out, rather frigidly.
Flamborough’s rectitude forced him into a semi-apology for past doubts.
"You were quite right about Mr. Justice, sir. He’s been a trump-card; and if we can only get hold of him and find out what he saw here last night, the rest ought to be as easy as kiss-your-hand."
Sir Clinton could not restrain a smile.
"You’re devilish previous, Inspector, in spite of all I can do. This Peeping Tom may be Mr. Justice, or again he may not. There isn’t any evidence either way."
He stepped back on to the path again.
"Now, Inspector, we’ll have to leave you here in charge. It seems to be your usual rГґle in these days. I’ll send a couple of men up to relieve you – the fellow who makes our scale-models, too. You can set him to work. And I’ll make arrangements for the removal of Mrs. Silverdale’s body."
"Very good, sir. I’ll stay here till relieved."
"Then Dr. Ringwood and I had better get away at once."
They walked round the bungalow to the car. As he drove away, Sir Clinton turned to the doctor.
"We must thank you again, doctor, for coming out here."
"Oh, that’s all right," Ringwood assured him. "I got Ryder to look after my patients - at least the worst ones – this morning. Very decent of him. He made no bones about it when he heard it was you who wanted me. It hasn’t been a pleasant job, certainly; but at least it’s been a change from the infernal grind of Carew’s practice."
Sir Clinton drove for a few minutes in silence, then he put a question to the doctor.
"I suppose it’s not out of the question that young Hassendean might have driven from the bungalow to Ivy Lodge with those wounds in his lungs?"
"I see nothing against it, unless the P.M. shows something that makes it impossible. People with lung-wounds – even fatal ones – have managed to get about quite spryly for a time. Of course, it’s quite on the cards that his moving about may have produced fresh lesions in the tissues. What surprises me more is how he managed to find his way home through that fog last night."
"That wouldn’t be so difficult," Sir Clinton rejoined. "This road runs right from the bungalow to the end of Lauderdale Avenue. He’d only to keep his car straight and recognise the turn when he came to it. It wasn’t a case of having to dodge through a network of streets."
A thought seemed to occur to him.
"By the way, doctor, did you notice any peculiar coincidence in dates that we’ve come across?"
"Dates? No, can’t say I did. What do you mean?"
"Well," the Chief Constable pointed out deliberately, "the date on that scrap from the torn envelope we found in the drawer was 1925, and the figures on that mysterious signet-ring were 5.11.25. It just happened to strike me."
His manner suggested that he had no desire to furnish any further information. Dr. Ringwood changed the subject.
"By the way, you didn’t examine the lever handle of the window for finger-prints," he said, with a note of interrogation in his voice.
"The Inspector will do that. He’s very thorough. In any case, I don’t expect to find much on the lever."
For a few moments Sir Clinton concentrated his attention on his driving, as they were now within the outskirts of Westerhaven. When he spoke again, his remark struck the doctor as obscure.
"I wish that poor girl who was done in at Heatherfield last night hadn’t been such a tidy creature."
Dr. Ringwood stared.
"Why?" he inquired.
"Because if she’d shirked her job and left those coffee-cups unwashed, it might have saved us a lot of bother. But when I looked over the scullery, everything had been washed and put away."
"Well . . . you don’t seem to miss much," the doctor confessed. "I suppose it was what I repeated to you about Mrs. Silverdale looking queer when she came out of the drawing-room – that put you on the track? You were thinking of drugs, even then?"
"That was it," Sir Clinton answered. Then, after a moment he added: "And I’ve got a fair notion of what drug was used, too."
Chapter Six. THE NINE POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
The police machinery under Sir Clinton’s control always worked smoothly, even when its routine was disturbed by such unpredictable events as murders. Almost automatically, it seemed, that big, flexible engine had readjusted itself to the abnormal; the bodies of Hassendean and the maid at Heatherfield had been taken into its charge and all arrangements had been made for dealing with them; Heatherfield itself had been occupied by a constabulary picket; the photographic department had been called in to take "metric photographs" showing the exact positions of the bodies in the two houses; inquiries had ramified through the whole district as to the motor-traffic during the previous night; and a wide-flung intelligence system was unobtrusively collecting every scrap of information which might have a bearing on this suddenly presented problem. Finally, the organism had projected a tentacle to the relief of Inspector Flamborough, marooned at the bungalow, and had replaced him by a police picket while arrangements were being made to remove Mrs. Silverdale’s body and to map the premises.
"Anything fresh, Inspector?" Sir Clinton demanded, glancing up from his papers as his subordinate entered the room.
"One or two more points cleared up, sir," Flamborough announced, with a certain satisfaction showing on his good-humoured face. "First of all, I tried the lever of the window-hasp for finger-prints. There weren’t any. So that’s done with. I could see you didn’t lay much stress on that part of the business, sir."