Having lived for some years in the neighbourhood of King’s Poplars, and being a man of observation and discretion, Ross had a reasonably accurate notion of the relations existing between the various members of the Gray clan. He knew, moreover, that of late letters had been received from London—so much was village gossip—following whose arrival Gray would be less approachable than usual, accusing his daughter of wilful extravagance and irresponsibility. The frequent visits of Moore to the house had not gone unremarked, and there was a widely spread belief that the old man had allowed himself to come under the thumb of the foreigner, as the fellow was generally regarded. The younger son also was known to be a firebrand and something of a mendicant. Of Isobel, Ross had heard only the legendary stories of the neighbourhood, that was rich in such tales; men declared that she passed through the village without casting a shadow, that she was to be seen walking on the moors on dark nights with a lantern, and that when a mortal approached her, she disappeared, leaving the lantern hanging in mid-air. Ross could dismiss all this at its true value, but he was astute enough to guess that a situation of some gravity must have arisen during the past months, that had been difficult enough for the well-to-do, and practically ruinous for the small speculator.
The Grays, unquestionably, had come down in the world. Once they had been landed proprietors of some standing; during the past twenty or thirty years, however, their fortunes had sunk and they had parted with much of their property. At the same time, the family began to break up, various members migrating to London and other large towns, some of them even going abroad. The lands that remained were leased to farmers, the family keeping only the Manor House. The life of the village that had once centred round it now swept past its doors. No one dreamed of going there in difficulty and anxiety, for consolation, assistance, or advice. It was the old story of a new order stealing the charm from the old. But with the break-up of the county tradition had come, too, so far as an outsider could gauge, the break-up of the family itself. A steady deterioration in character was obvious in the various members; their point of view had changed. They now desired the ambitions of the common herd, that once they had despised. Place, possession, authority—these were now their gods. The generations of Grays in the churchyard would scarcely have recognised their descendants, and would certainly have been reluctant to acknowledge their kinship.
“And now the old man’s dead, presumably murdered by one of his own children,” Ross reflected, swinging out of the last field and approaching the house. “They’d scarcely send for the police to take his temperature. You don’t call us in, especially on Christmas Day, if you can help it, not when you’ve gone walking through the village for years, like a cock among a lot of shabby hens that he can have for the asking, and doesn’t think worth the trouble.”
3
Richard met him in the hall and took him to the disordered library. The feet of so many people passing in and out, their aimless gestures and the flurry caused by the lifting of the old man, had disarranged many books and papers. Ross saw that scattered on the table and carpet were several letters and notes that had presumably been kept in place by the slab of brass that, Richard said, was believed to have been used for the murder. There was also a number of pamphlets and prospectuses lying about the room, referring for the most part to companies not very well spoken of on the London Stock Exchange—to copper and ore prospectors, to men full of wild schemes for abstracting gold and gems from remote parts of the earth, for crazy inventions, and for pioneering work that promised substantial rewards. If Gray had been induced to lodge his money in any of these concerns, he could know very little of industrial affairs.
Ross was inclined to be impressed by Richard’s aloof dignity, a certain calm and reticence that were arresting. Tall, spare, grey of face, he appeared a sombre man emerging from a natural secrecy to accept the challenge of the event. Ross appreciated his attitude. The notion that anything within the family circle can empower curious strangers to come in against the owner’s will and ask impertinent and intimate questions is bound to be peculiarly galling.
“There is also the rather odd matter of the open window,” Richard wound up his brief explanations. “It seems unlikely that my father opened it, since he suffered habitually from the cold, and Moulton remembers closing and fastening it during the evening.”
Ross made his first mental note. Richard Gray seemed anxious to show that the open window had no connection with the crime, thus disposing of the only alternative to a family murderer. Why?
Richard left him presently to his task of examining the room. Ross was aware of a curious sense of depression very foreign to him. It almost amounted to embarrassment; and it was difficult to trace it to its source. It was not as if this were the worst case in which he had as yet been involved; he had had murder cases before. Rather his dejection was due to a certain sense of inhumanity and irritation that the house seemed to exude, as though the people in it were touched, not by pity or by grief, but by anger at the manner of Gray’s death and the discomfort and publicity they must themselves endure.
“Goodness knows, the dead are forgotten soon enough,” he reflected, “shovelled underground and given
