They went back to the same door. Soames was hovering about in the hall. He looked at them inquiringly.
"As good impressions as we could hope to get," the inspector said patronizingly. "We shall lay the fellow by the heels very soon now."
"I am glad to hear that—for her poor ladyship's sake." The man blew his nose noisily and turned away. "You see it is very upsetting, to them that knew my lady well. And me having been in the family, boy and man, between thirty and forty years."
"Ay! It will come hard on you old ones—like losing one of your own," the inspector said sympathetically. "Between thirty and forty years, you say?"
"Thirty-eight years it will be next Martinmas. The Squire's first wife was alive then, and her daughter, pretty Miss Marjory."
"Mrs. Balmaine, you mean?" the inspector questioned with a sudden accession of interest. "Was she like her daughter?"
"Not much." Soames blew his nose again. "She was darker than Miss Margaret Balmaine, and taller, but she was the apple of her father's eye. He was never the same after she went away. He was proud of Mr. Christopher and Mr. Frank, but they never came up to Miss Marjorie with him."
"I wonder he didn't forgive her marriage, then," Cardyn remarked.
"He would, if she had ever asked him. It was her never troubling about him again that broke her father's heart. And then she died."
"Ah, well! We all have to come to it, Mr. Soames." The inspector gave him a farewell nod. "Now, Mr. Cardyn, we have our work cut out for to-day."
Bruce Cardyn gave himself a mental shake.
For the time being he seemed lost in a sort of dream. His thoughts were very far away as he followed the inspector to Lady Anne's sitting-room.
Nothing could have looked less like the scene of a tragedy. There was nothing to show what had happened. By Inspector Furnival's orders everything had been left exactly as it was at the time of the death, except that what remained of Lady Anne herself had been carried across to her bedroom. The teacups and saucers they had been using stood where the members of Lady Anne's last tea-party had hurriedly set them down when the alarm was raised. The very hot cakes that Soames had dropped when he caught sight of the face at the window still lay on the floor. Some of them had been trodden into Lady Anne's beautiful carpet. The silver cover had rolled or been kicked under the table; the dish itself, with one cake still on it, was near the escritoire.
The inspector's grey eyes looked round appraisingly.
"Now, once more, show me where you all sat, Mr. Cardyn."
Bruce pointed out Dorothy Fyvert's place at the tea-table, his own chair in close proximity, John Daventry's and Margaret Balmaine's near Lady Anne's.
On the flap of the escritoire the little bits of jewellery lay in their open cases, Lady Anne's teacup beside them. On the floor beneath was a deep stain, a silent witness to the tragedy. Inspector Furnival, stepping gingerly among the cakes, went over to the window farthest from the escritoire, which was wide open as it had been left the day before.
He stretched himself out and twisted himself round, staring up and down and both sides.
"I'm afraid your man was not much of a shadower, Mr. Cardyn. In the summer-house, you say he was stationed? I should have said it was impossible for anybody, or anything, to get at this window without being seen."
"So should I," Cardyn acknowledged. "Yet Brooks is one of our most careful men. He allows, though, that he was watching the terrace below, more than the actual window itself. He swears that no one either climbed up from the terrace or came down again."
The inspector took another look.
"He might have put a ladder up possibly without leaving any trace, but he certainly did not climb up by the creeper, that I swear. There isn't not a twig broken as far down as can see. I'll have a look at the roof later on. But now this escritoire. We will just glance through the contents, and then seal it up. Lady Anne kept a diary—I think we will take it away to examine it." Most of the drawers in the escritoire were unlocked, many of them stood open, as they had been: left when Lady Anne was searching for any trace of the missing jewels. But so far as casual glance could see there was nothing in them that bore upon the present case. Right at the back of the secret cavity, where the pearls had been kept, the inspector's keen eyes had noticed some papers, not rolled up or fastened together in a packet, but looking as though they had been hastily thrust in at odd moments.
He pulled them out; some of them had superscriptions written across the envelopes. "From my son Christopher;" "From my boy Frankie;" two or three older by far—"From my husband."
The inspector laid all these reverently aside after a cursory glance. Then he took up the handful of odd ones that remained. Some of them were quite recent. He opened the first.
"From your loving niece, Dorothy Fyvert," he read. "Now why did the old lady preserve this, I wonder?"
"She was very fond of Miss Fyvert," Bruce said quickly.
"Yes," the inspector assented dryly. "This is the letter, Mr. Cardyn. It is dated from Barminster Court: 'Dearest Aunt Anne, I am in dreadful trouble. There is no one—no one to whom I can turn but you. I want five hundred pounds at once. You have often talked of leaving me money. Will you give it me now instead? If you will, I will thank you and bless your name for ever. Oh, dear Aunt Anne, my need is dire as you would realize if I could explain to you. Help me for mercy's sake.'"
Across the sheet there was scrawled, in the shaky handwriting that had become very familiar to Bruce Cardyn since his coming to Charlton Crescent, the one word "Refused."
The inspector handed it to Cardyn with a keen glance at the young man's averted face.
"Miss Fyvert would not have murdered her aunt for five times five hundred pounds. Faugh! The very idea is unthinkable. Besides"—growing calmer—"we have no proof that Lady Anne's death would give Miss Fyvert the five hundred pounds she wanted."
"I feel sure that Miss Fyvert comes into a considerable amount of money on her own account," the inspector said gravely. "But at any rate Miss Fyvert is supposed to be engaged to Mr. John Daventry, who certainly succeeds to much of Lady Anne's wealth automatically—I mean under her late husband's will. Still, I don't know. I wonder whether she got her five hundred, and how, but we shall have to hear her explanation."
"I should say there was a much greater motive for John Daventry to commit the murder than for a girl who might and might not marry him," Bruce said sarcastically. "There is many a slip between the cup and the lip, you know."
"Undoubtedly there is," the inspector agreed. "Still, I think we will have a little confidential talk with Miss Dorothy Fyvert." He was thrusting the rest of the papers back into their hiding-place as he spoke. "These all date farther back." Bruce Cardyn went over to the window. He was anxious above all things that the inspector should not guess the secret he had hitherto guarded so carefully, and, ostrich-like, fancied the Ferret's keen eyes had not even suspected. As he stood there looking up and down it was impossible that the memory of yesterday's tragedy, of the ghastly face at the window, should not recur to his mind. Was the form that had looked so shadowy that of a living man or woman, or was it some visitant from another world? Plain matter-of-fact man as Cardyn had hitherto considered himself, he could not answer the question. As he leaned out still farther, a tiny fluttering thread of white caught his eyes. It was in the ivy, just below the window ledge. He stretched down his arm and picked it out. Then he laid it on the palm of his hand and gazed at it curiously. It looked like a thread torn from a piece of muslin, and he remembered the shadowy veil that had seemed to float round that white face. He was just about to show it to the inspector, when he was startled by a sharp exclamation from the other.
"The diary!"
Cardyn turned quickly.
"Lady Anne Daventry's diary," Inspector Furnival repeated. "It is gone."
"Gone!"