Inspector Furnival smiled as he looked at him.
"Come now, Mr. Cardyn, you must rouse yourself. There are just a few questions I should like you to consider with me before we set to work. I wonder if you can form an idea what they are."
Cardyn shook his head wearily. "Probably my ideas would not coincide with yours."
"Well, come in here and I will show you my list. You can see how you would answer them." The inspector opened the library door as he spoke.
The house was now entirely in the hands of the police. They had just watched the dispersal of the household. John Daventry had gone down to the Keep in his small touring car, taking with him Soames who was about to apply for the transfer of the licence of the Daventry Arms. Mr. and Mrs. Fyvert had been accompanied to North Coton by their two nieces, with Margaret Balmaine and their respective maids. The other servants had dispersed in different directions, all leaving their addresses with the police. Though none of the furniture had gone the house looked cold and dismantled in the absence of the life and movement that had so recently pervaded it.
Cardyn shivered as he followed Inspector Furnival. The library was the only room in the house that looked much the same as usual. Since Lady Anne's death it had become the headquarters of the police, and Inspector Furnival's papers were strewn about, while books, presumably on subjects in the inspector's mind, lay on the table.
The inspector took his favourite chair, and, drawing a sheet of foolscap towards him, wrote:
"Question 1. Did Lady Anne Daventry herself sell her pearls to Messrs. Spagnum, or did some one impersonate her sufficiently cleverly to deceive their manager?
"Question 2. Who engineered the man at the window?"
Cardyn bent forward as the inspector's capable fingers wrote down the second.
"Engineered?" he questioned.
"Yes—um, well, yes!" The inspector tapped his lip with his pencil. "Perhaps 'engineered' is not the proper word, and yet it describes what I mean better than 'managed' or 'helped.'"
"But do you mean that some one in the house knew—helped?" Bruce questioned.
"In the house or not—I do!" the inspector said firmly. "Why, put it to yourself, Mr. Cardyn. How could any man get up to that window and get away again without being seen unless he had the help of some one! How he did it is sufficiently difficult of explanation, even with the help.
"Question 3. Who made the footmarks on the border, under the window at the back of the hall?
"When those three questions are answered, Mr. Cardyn, we shall be in a position to say who stabbed Lady Anne Daventry, as I firmly believe."
"Ah, when!" Bruce Cardyn echoed, looking at them.
"And now," the inspector went on, "the first thing we have to do is to make a thorough and systematic search of the house. I think we will begin with the rooms of the two young ladies. But first let me show you this." He took a sheet of paper from his pocket-book and handed it to Cardyn.
The young man's heart beat fast as he saw the writing: "The fifty-pound note about which you were inquiring," Dorothy had written curtly, "was given me last week as my half-yearly allowance, by my aunt, Lady Anne Daventry—"
"What do you think of that?" the inspector inquired.
"I am quite certain that whatever Miss Fyvert tells you is true," Bruce Cardyn said steadily.
"Quite so, quite so!" The inspector's eyes twinkled as he watched the young man's moody face. "You understand, of course, that this is one of the notes paid by Messrs. Spagnum and Thirgood to the real or supposed Lady Anne Daventry?"
"I recognized that at once!" assented Cardyn. "And that answers your first question. Lady Anne must have sold the pearls herself since she gave part of the price to Miss Fyvert."
"Oh, oh! Is that all you have to say, Mr. Cardyn?" the inspector questioned ironically. "I do not think matters will be settled quite so quickly as that. But now to the bedrooms—Miss Balmaine's first."
Margaret Balmaine had occupied a large bedroom on the landing above Lady Anne's. Like the rest of the house it was furnished in Victorian fashion—a big four-poster, a massive wardrobe, a large mahogany dressing-table with a big oval mirror inset; the chairs, the couch and the washstand were all of the same heavy type. Apparently Miss Balmaine had not troubled to make any changes. The only traces of her occupancy that a cursory glance revealed were sundry empty bottles on the toilet table, and a few ashes in the empty fireplace, and an incongruous note was struck by the presence of a small sewing-machine on a side table.
The inspector began to search the room in a very systematic manner. Every shelf, every drawer in the sewing-machine, even every peg in the wardrobe was moved. Every bottle was opened, every small box, every inch of the furniture and bedstead scrutinized. In one thing only, as far as they could see, had Lady Anne been up-to-date within her bedrooms. Instead of the all-over carpet of Victorian days, the floors were stained and there were soft rugs spread at the bedside and before the fireplace. At last the inspector paused.
"Not much to be learned here?"
"The fireplace!" Cardyn had got out his microscope. The inspector had his in his hand. Together they knelt down, but the ashes were just ashes of wood and coal, that was all. When they had finished, the inspector stood up.
"Well, sometimes there is as much to be learned from what you don't find in a person's room as from what you do."
Bruce made no answer. He regarded this meticulous search of Margaret Balmaine's room as entirely superfluous. The inspector drew up the bottom sash of the window and leaned out, looking upwards and downwards and twisting himself about this way and that, so that he could get a good view sideways. The creepers on this side of the house grew right up to the window-sills and had been parted so as to climb up each side.
Inspector Furnival stretched out and plucked a large ivy leaf from just below the ledge.
"Miss Balmaine evidently thought it so important to destroy all trace of what she burned that she even gathered the ashes together and threw them out of the window," he remarked as he displayed a slight powdering of white ash upon the ivy leaf.
"No hope of finding out what was burnt from that. But as I said before we may gather a good deal from the fact that it was burned. But come, I want to have a look at Lady Anne's bedroom." He led the way to the big room below.
Cardyn followed, mildly wondering. It seemed to him that they had gone through every inch of this room over and over again already. Lady Anne's furniture in her own room was even more Victorian than in the rest of the house. The four-poster, with its carefully calendered chintz hangings, seemed to belong to an even earlier period. There were no gimcrack ornaments or bottles of essences or cosmetics in her room, nothing but a few solid boxes and two very large, beautifully cut crystal scent-bottles much like the looking-glass.
The inspector did not waste much time. He went straight to the wardrobe where Lady Anne's dresses were and threw open the door. Modern fashions and post-war tendencies had affected Lady Anne not one whit. John Daventry had once said of her that had crinolines been worn when she was young she would have been wearing them at the time of her death. As it was she wore the long flounced dresses, the fichus, the corsets, the leg of mutton sleeves, and the tightly-fitting bodices of the late Victorian era. Her dress had been simplified by the fact that since her boys' death she had