“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.