United States or Peru ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was evening when he reached Heredith again, and rode through the woods towards the moat-house. It looked deserted in the gathering twilight. A fugitive gleam of departing sunshine fell on the bronze and blood-red chrysanthemums in the circular beds, but the shadows were lengthening across the lawn, and the mist from the green waters of the moat was creeping up the stained red walls.
But the ivy which covered portions of the brickwork hid some of the ravages of age, and helped the moat-house to show a brave front to the world, a well-preserved survivor of an ornamental period in a commonplace and ugly generation. The place looked as though it belonged to the past and the ghosts of the past.
I hardly knew what to do at first, but the thought came to me that perhaps Mrs. Heredith was worse, and needed someone. So I pushed open the door and went in. "I know the moat-house well, so I was aware that the switch of the electric light was by the side of the fireplace, near the head of the bed, and not close to the door, as in the other rooms.
"I plunged through the woods till I came to the carriage drive. From there the front of the moat-house was visible to me. I could see lights flashing, and people moving hurriedly about. After I had stood there for some time I saw a man hurrying across the moat-house bridge in my direction, so I went back into the wood and hid behind a tree.
As expert evidence at the inquest definitely determined that the bullet extracted from the murdered woman had been fired from the revolver, Merrington did not attach very much importance to the question of ownership, but before his departure for London he arranged that Caldew should return to the moat-house later with the revolver for Phil's inspection, in the hope of settling the point before the trial.
Of course you are aware that he identified the revolver with which his wife was shot as the property of Captain Nepcote, a guest at the moat-house who left on the afternoon of the day on which Mrs. Heredith was murdered. Heredith does not accept your theory of the way in which Hazel Rath is supposed to have obtained the revolver.
In reviewing the whole of the circumstances by the light of the information his sister had given him, it now seemed to him that Miss Heredith fitted into the crime in a remarkable way. The most important fact leading to that inference was that she alone, of all the inmates of the moat-house the previous night, was out of the dining-room when the murder was committed.
If Nepcote was the murderer he must have entered almost immediately before, because he could not have reached the moat-house until nearly half-past seven, and the shot was fired at twenty minutes to eight. How had he known that Mrs. Heredith was there alone, in the darkness?
Here is a sketch plan of the moat-house interior and the grounds which you may find useful." "Thanks. You had better prepare a list of the guests before they leave. They are sure to get away as fast as possible, and we may want to interview some of them later on. Now we had better have a look at the body." They went upstairs to the bedroom.
On that slight information Caldew had pursued inquiries across a long two miles of country between Weydene and the moat-house, and had deemed himself fortunate in finding a farm labourer who, on his homeward walk that night, had been passed by a young man in a long coat making rapidly across the fields in the direction of Heredith.
Word Of The Day