“Genius, just genius. And what’s Lady Lunt like?”
“Well, you know, she isn’t quite a lady. And yet she is in big things. He married her about ten years ago, somewhere on the Continent. But she’s English. She was a dancer or singer or something. Pretty low class, I believe. She was awfully handsome—big, dark, dashing type. She hasn’t kept her looks, but she’s still striking. She was pretty rowdy at first—went the pace like he did. He was an awful old bounder, you know. But for a good while now she’s been different—quiet and serious—looking after things down here, good work on the estate—that sort of thing. She quietened him down too, but he was pretty bad. I think she was getting him in hand slowly, but she must have been having a rotten time for years.”
“And what does Lady Lunt want now?”
“I’m hanged if I know,” said Barnes, after some hesitation. “She thinks there’s more in it than the detectives see, and she’s not satisfied about this arrest.”
“Now go easy. Two other people have called me in, and I don’t know who I’ll act for. So don’t spoil anybody’s game. Lomas wired for me—”
“Lomas! So Scotland Yard isn’t so mighty cocksure.”
“Did Lomas seem so? Rude fellow. And then there’s V. Cranford.”
“Cranford’s got to you already! He’s lost no time.”
“Oh, he’s in very good hands. Now let’s take a walk. You’ll show me where Lunt was killed, and I’ll have a look at him.” Reggie shed his fur coat and became brisk.
It was his bailiff who had found Sir Albert Lunt, taken the news to the house, and telephoned for Gerald Barnes. Sir Albert Lunt had been walking back from his home farm across the park, which was an undulating stretch of turf over chalk, broken here and there by some fine beeches and coverts of gorse and bramble. A gravel path ran straight from the home farm to the main chestnut avenue. Barnes halted at a place where the turf was trampled in half-frozen footprints. Reggie looked round him. “Humph! Well out of sight of any house. Nobody heard the shot?”
“Nobody noticed it. It’s a good way from the house, you see, and a mile from the farm. A shot or so—what’s that in the open country? You often hear a gun somewhere.”
“Quite. Where’s that path go to?” Reggie pointed to a track across the turf diverging from the gravel.
“That? Oh, over to Victor Lunt’s place. His park—he calls it a park too, but it’s a small affair—almost joins this, you know.”
“Well, well, let’s see the body,” Reggie yawned, and they marched on to Prior’s Colney.
It had once been a comely place in a staid eighteenth-century fashion. “Oh, my only aunt!” Reggie groaned. “Looks like your grandmother put into the Russian ballet.” It was loaded with excrescences of contorted ornament still raw and new against the mellow solemnity of the original homely house.
A motorcar stood at the door. While they were detaching hats and sticks in the hall, they could hear someone being told that Lady Lunt was not leaving her room. Then, being shown out, came a bulky man muffled in a fur coat with a big Astrakhan collar. He had a large head and a long face of unhealthy complexion. Across the forehead from right eyebrow to hair was a red furrow. He had prominent, pale eyes.
“Who is the sportsman with the scratched face?” Reggie said, as the door shut on him.
“Oh, that’s Victor Lunt. Been inquiring after Lady Lunt, I suppose.”
“Bright and brotherly,” Reggie murmured.
There appeared briskly a man of grave and military aspect, who was presented to Reggie as Radnor Hall, Sir Albert Lunt’s secretary. Radnor Hall (in a faintly American accent) was very glad to see Mr. Fortune; hoped for Mr. Fortune’s company to lunch; after which, Lady Lunt was most anxious to see Mr. Fortune.
“I want to see the body,” Reggie said gruffly.
So to the body he was taken, and saw that Gerald Barnes was right enough: there could be no doubt of the cause of death. A pistol bullet, fired from some little distance, had entered the chest and lodged in the spinal vertebrae. Sir Albert Lunt might not have died on the instant. He could not have lived long. But that mortal wound was tiny. What made the dead man look horrible was the gash in his forehead and the bruise round it. And over that Reggie frowned and pondered. “Showy, isn’t it, very showy?” he complained. Such a hurt a man might get by falling on a stone. But Sir Albert Lunt had fallen on his back on the turf. If someone had hit him with a stone or some such jagged thing—but why should any man take a stone who had a pistol and was not afraid to use it? “If there was any sense in it, I’d say it was a fake,” Reggie grumbled.
He gave up the wounds at last and moved round the body.
“Oh, you’re looking at the wrong hand,” Barnes said.
“Am I though?”
“Yes, this is the one where the thumb’s sprained—the right hand.”
“Well, you know, he seems to have been busy with his hands. What did you make of this?”
Barnes came to look. The fingers of the left hand were bent towards the thumb as if the dead man had been plucking at something.
“Not much in that, is there?”
“What was he wearing?”
“Rough brown overcoat—brown tweeds.”
“Oh, ah!” Delicately Reggie extracted from the stiff fingers some little curly, black tufts.
“Well, that’s queer,” Barnes said. “Looks like a nigger’s hair.”
“You know you’ve got imagination.” Reggie put the stuff very carefully in his pocketbook. “Some oppressed nigger from the compounds at Johannesburg—came all the way to Prior’s Colney for vengeance—threw a stone at him—shot him—and then butted him. Thorough fellow, very thorough.”
“What is it, then?” Barnes said sulkily.
“Seek not to proticipate. Hallo!”
The interruption was the Hon. Stanley Lomas, Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, dapper and debonair.
“Ah, Fortune, good man. Why didn’t you ask for me? I’m at the
