“That sounds all right,” Wendover admitted.
Sir Clinton put an innocent question.
“If it had been a one-man affair and a big struggle, then surely Peter Hay would have had his attack while the fight was going on, and if he’d died during the struggle there would have been no need to tie him up? Isn’t that so, squire?”
Wendover considered the point and grudgingly agreed that it sounded probable.
“Go on, inspector,” Sir Clinton ordered, without taking up the side-issue any further.
“I can’t quite see what they did when they’d got him tied up,” the inspector acknowledged. “They don’t seem to have done much in the way of rummaging in the cottage, as far as I can see. Whatever it was that they were after, it wasn’t the cash in the drawer; and it wasn’t the two or three bits of silver, for they left them intact, although they could easily have got them if they’d wanted them. That part of the thing beats me just now.”
Wendover showed a faint satisfaction at finding the inspector driven to admit a hiatus in his story.
“However it happened, Peter Hay died in his chair, I think,” Armadale went on. “Perhaps it was the excitement of the affair. Anyhow, they had a dead man on their hands. So, as Mr. Wendover pointed out, they did their best to cover their tracks. They untied him, carried him outside, laid him down as if he’d fallen unconscious and died there. But they forgot one thing. If he’d come down all of a heap, as they wanted to suggest, his face would have been smashed a bit on the stones of the path. They arranged him with his hands above his head, as if he’d fallen at full length. In that position, he couldn’t shield his face as he fell. Normally you fall with your hands somewhere between your face and your chest—under your body, anyhow. But his hands were above his head; and yet his face hadn’t a bruise on it. That’s not natural.”
“Quite clear, inspector.”
“Then there’s another point. You called my attention to the moisture on the front of his clothes, under the body. Dew couldn’t have got in there.”
“Precisely,” Sir Clinton agreed. “That dates the time when they put the body down, you think?”
“It shows it was put down on top of the dew, therefore it was after dew-fall when they brought him out. And at the other side you’ve got the fact that his bed wasn’t slept in. So that limits the time of the affair to a period between dew-fall and Peter Hay’s normal bedtime.”
“Unless he’d sat up specially late that night,” Wendover interposed.
Armadale nodded a rather curt acknowledgment of this suggestion, and continued:
“Two points more. They’ve just occurred to me, sir. The silver’s the first thing.”
“Yes,” Sir Clinton encouraged him, since the inspector seemed to feel himself on doubtful ground.
“I’m not sure, sir, that robbery can be ruled out, after all. It may be a case of one crime following on another. Suppose Peter Hay had been using his position as caretaker to get away with any silver left at Foxhills, and had got it stored up here for removal at a convenient time. The men who did him in last night might quite well have nailed the main bulk of it and overlooked those stray bits that he’d put away in his cash-drawer. For all we can tell, they may have made a good haul.”
“And the next point, inspector?”
“The next point’s the marks on the skin. They weren’t made by ropes. Well, you can tie a man up with other things—strips of cloth, handkerchiefs, or surgical bandages. The edge of a surgical bandage would leave a sharp line on the flesh if it was pulled tight enough, or if the man struggled against it once he’d been tied in the chair. You understand what I mean?”
Wendover interposed:
“You mean a rope leaves its mark mainly at the middle, because it’s a cylinder and the convex curve cuts into the flesh; whereas a flat bandage gives even pressure all over except at the edge, where the flesh can bulge up alongside the fabric?”
“That’s what I mean,” the inspector confirmed.
Sir Clinton volunteered no immediate criticism of either of the inspector’s points. Instead, he seemed to be considering his course of action. At last he made up his mind.
“We’ve got a bit away from our original agreement, inspector. But, since you’ve put your cards on the table, I’ll do the same, so that we’re still level. But you’re not to take this as a precedent, remember. I don’t care about expounding airy theories formed as we go along. It’s much better to go on the old lines and consider the evidence as we pick it up, each of us from his own point of view. Pooling our views simply means losing the advantage of three different viewpoints. You and Mr. Wendover came to slightly different conclusions about the basic factor in the business; and, if you hadn’t put your ideas into words, then he’d have gone forward looking for one criminal, whilst you’d have been after two or more men; and so we’d have had both possibilities covered. Now, I think, the chances are that you’ve come round to the inspector’s view, squire?”
“It seems to fit the facts better than mine,” Wendover admitted.
“There you are!” Sir Clinton said. “And so we’ve lost the services of one man keeping his eye on the—always possible—case that it was a single-handed job. That’s why I don’t like pooling ideas. However, inspector, it wouldn’t be fair to take your views and to say nothing about my own, so I’ll give you mine. But it’s no precedent, remember.”
Armadale made a gesture of grudging agreement.
“Then here’s what I make of things, so far,” Sir Clinton continued.
