"Chief Inspector? Where?" Bond turned swiftly and gazed past the awkward figure with the pistol in his hand. Seeing nothing, he stared hard at his captor.
"You mean—oh, good egg!"
"C.I.D.!" came from Cockburn in tones of rapture.
"Oh, Lord, that's torn it!" Thornton smote his breast as Pointer, gazing at him more in sorrow than in anger closed the window, and drew down the blinds.
"I apologise for the slip in forty different positions, but the surprise—"
"Amateurs will be amateurs, sir." Pointer dropped lightly into a chair. "But I must request that it be forgotten at once by everybody concerned."
"Then we were right! And she was murdered!" Cockburn came back to the meaning of the dingy man's presence in front of them. "I caught sight of her first, you know," he explained to Pointer. "I can't, seem to get the memory of it out of my mind." His voice was husky.
Pointer immediately asked for an account of the findings of the body and of last night's alarm. He asked a few fresh questions, and sat listening intently.
"And you chose the colonel's study to-night, just why?" he asked finally.
Cockburn took out an envelope, and from it two bloodied bits of cord. Evidently some of the same cord Pointer had found in the stove of the summer house.
"After the superintendent turned us down, we had one more go, at the place by the sand-pit," Bond cut in, "before we went back to town. And we came on these under the copse. Now, my father makes ropes. That cord is Indian. I happened to comment on the same stuff lying on the colonel's study mantelpiece yesterday. He said that it had come around a consignment of Bengal chutney. So when we found it near that sand-pit, and stained like that," he paused and looked up at the ceiling, "well, we thought it was well to come on down and have a look for the rest of it. The chief constable is a friend of ours. Besides, we couldn't get away all yesterday, so we decided not to lose another moment and come at night.
"But Scarlett gave the cord on his mantelpiece to di Monti," Thornton put in.
"Ah!" Cockburn sat up like a terrier that hears a rustle.
"Didn't you see him? The count wanted something to tie up the tennis net at the inn. Said he must remember to get some string. The colonel handed him a coil from the end of his mantelpiece, and di Monti drove away with it in his car."
Bond flushed to the roots of his curly hair.
"And to think that I broke into the colonel's—oh, Lord!" He buried his face in a whisky and soda.
"Di Monti! That's what we came to see about. I mean," Cockburn turned a very, grave face to Pointer, "I mean that our breaking into Stillwater House had nothing to do with any one there. Of course, we know they're all right. But this Italian—I never saw a crueller face. More pitiless. More hopeless to appeal to. If Miss Charteris had angered him in any way—God help her!"
Bond murmured his agreement. Thornton stared at the fire.
"What do you say, Mr. Thornton? You're the man on the spot. Do you feel certain that the inmates of Stillwater House are beyond suspicion? All of them?" Pointer asked in Brown's husky voice. He had not dropped one of the latter's characteristics throughout the interview.
Thornton shot him one of his unreadable glances as shook his head vaguely.
"What was it that made you go over the top?" Bond asked Thornton curiously. He could not imagine Thornton sufficiently stirred to take the initiative in anything.
"Oh, just a vague feeling that I wanted a competent judgment on the whole matter. To settle doubts once and for all. Mr. Brown here is very kindly spending the last days of his leave with me."
"Well, I wish to Heaven that we could be of some use," Cockburn said regretfully. "Isn't there anything we can do, Chief Inspector?"
"Anything?" echoed Cockburn.
Pointer thought a moment. Any light thrown on Rose Charteris's circle was all to the good. But friends of that same circle? Thornton, for one, an actual member of it? And young men who climbed into library windows?
"Are you staying for the rest of the night?" he asked.
Cockburn spoke of the Medchester Arms, but Thornton put his second spare room and a Chesterfield at the disposal of the two. His shed only held his own cars, but, as before, they could run their Buick into the colonel's garage.
"Is your garage always locked, sir?" Brown asked Thornton. "I left a notebook in your car when I came, I'm afraid."
Thornton ran his fingers into his pocket, but his expression betrayed his amusement at Scotland Yard's brilliance.
"Here's the key. Yes, I always keep it locked. Wilkins has a duplicate, if you should leave anything else behind you, and I'm out."
"But what about us?" queried the two friends. "If we can be of any use, we'll do anything."
Brown blinked at them.
"Then suppose, when the postman calls to-morrow at Stillwater House, one or other of you could be on hand and get hold of any letters that come for the colonel. I want them steamed open, the contents copied, and the letters carefully closed to show no signs of—"
"Look here, Chief Inspector, what do you take us for?" Bond broke in stiffly.
"Sweeps?" suggested Cockburn hotly.
"No. Amateur detectives," Pointer said innocently. The two men laughed ruefully.
"I see your point. Considering the prod it's just given us, I may well. So we can't be of any help? Rank outsiders, eh?" Bond was a trifle piqued.
"If you'll come out with me in the morning, and show me where that shot seemed to come from, I should be very grateful," and Pointer arranged for a meeting at eight.
"And now I think I'll get a wink of sleep." He left the three together.
"I hope he's up to the work," Bond said gloomily. "Of course one has to discount the make-up and those frightful clothes, but even so, I'm not impressed with the quality of his brains."
"You don't need brains at the Yard," Cockburn complained. "Their place seems to be generally supplied by something called 'information to hand'. With that—whatever it is—you may do quite well. Without it, you're lost."
And the meeting broke up with a vote of lack of confidence in the man who was apparently looking for the wink of sleep of which he had spoken, among the colonel's chutney cases.
There were two of them below stairs. Neither was corded now.
Next morning Pointer found the three men from the cottage very punctual.
"I was walking somewhere about here," Cockburn waved a hand towards a clump of trees. "The shot came from directly in front of me. But I'm afraid that I can't be more exact as to where I stood at the moment."
"I picked up a matchbox yesterday morning a little to the left of us." Pointer pulled one out of his pocket "Is it by any chance yours? That might settle the place where you were standing when you used it."
It was Cockburn's. He pocketed the little silver slab with thanks. "I dropped it when the shot startled me. So it came from over there." He pointed ahead of him. It was where, much farther off, lay the sand-pit.
Now Thornton had indicated another direction in the account that he had given Pointer. He waved his hand towards it energetically. "Surely you said from over here!"
"And I thought you said this way." Bond took a turn at flapping his arms around The three looked for all the world like signallers at a first practice.
Pointer was used to this sort of thing from amateurs. Bond finally came over to Cockburn's unchanging certainty as to whence the sound had reached him the night before. Thornton, however, was, or appeared to be, unconvinced.