The fact of his having bought a return ticket showed that he had intended to return to Holt Stacey by train. But he had not gone back by train. The last train for Holt Stacey left Newbury at 9:11, and at 9:30 he had been seen by a seedsman who kept a shop in the town, and who knew Churchill well, standing in the High Street talking to an unknown man he had never seen before. After that, nobody appeared to have seen Churchill until—just before 10:30, at which time the inn at Holt Stacey closed—he had come into the inn and ordered a hot drink. Nobody was with him then. He appeared, so the innkeeper said, to already have drunk to excess, and this had surprised the innkeeper, who knew him to be a temperate man, adding that that was the first time he had ever seen him even partially intoxicated. Incidentally Churchill had mentioned that "a gentleman had given him a lift from Newbury in his car." He had not said who the gentleman was—if a stranger or somebody he knew, or where he was going. Presumably the man in the car had branched off at Holt Stacey—for he had not put up there for the night. Had he been going on past Holt Manor he would, it was reasonable to suppose, have taken Churchill all the way, and dropped him at the gate. Soon after 10:30 Churchill had left the inn, saying that he was about to walk home to Holt Manor, a distance of four miles. That was the last time he was known to have been seen alive. It was snowing when he set out. Poor Dulcie was terribly cut up. I had always known her to be very partial to the old gardener, who remembered her as a baby, but until after his death I had not realized how deeply attached to him she really had been. What most distressed me was that she blamed herself, indirectly, for what had happened. Again and again did she declare to me that, had she not given him leave to take the afternoon off the tragedy would not have happened. In vain I tried to make her see the fallacy of her argument—she would not listen to reason. A fortnight went by, and nothing was discovered. The secret of the murder remained even a greater mystery than the secret of the robbery. True, I had my suspicions, but until I had some slight shreds of evidence to go upon it would, I knew, be futile to make known those suspicions. And it was because I suspected somebody of indirect, if not direct, connivance at Churchill's murder, that I became more and more distressed, indeed alarmed, at Dulcie's daily increasing affection for the woman Stapleton. Their friendship was now firmly established—at any rate, Dulcie's feeling of friendship for the widow. Whether the widow's feeling of friendship for Dulcie was actual or only apparent was, I thought, quite another matter. "_Come at once. Urgent_:—_Jack_."