The Red House MysteryMilne, A. A. (Alan Alexander)
General
The Red House Mystery
Milne, A. A. (Alan Alexander)
Detective and mystery stories; England -- Fiction
“No; the thing which I said that I had to do this afternoon.”
“Oh, of course. What is it?”
Without saying anything, Antony led the way indoors to the office.
It was three o’clock, and at three o’clock yesterday Antony and Cayley
had found the body. At a few minutes after three, he had been looking
out of the window of the adjoining room, and had been surprised
suddenly to find the door open and Cayley behind him. He had vaguely
wondered at the time why he had expected the door to be shut, but he
had had no time then to worry the thing out, and he had promised
himself to look into it at his leisure afterwards. Possibly it meant
nothing; possibly, if it meant anything, he could have found out its
meaning by a visit to the office that morning. But he had felt that he
would be more likely to recapture the impressions of yesterday if he
chose as far as possible the same conditions for his experiment. So he
had decided that three o’clock that afternoon should find him once more
in the office.
As he went into the room, followed by Bill, he felt it almost as a
shock that there was now no body of Robert lying there between the two
doors. But there was a dark stain which showed where the dead man’s
head had been, and Antony knelt down over it, as he had knelt
twenty-four hours before.
“I want to go through it again,” he said. “You must be Cayley. Cayley
said he would get some water. I remember thinking that water wasn’t
much good to a dead man, and that probably he was only too glad to do
anything rather than nothing. He came back with a wet sponge and a
handkerchief. I suppose he got the handkerchief from the chest of
drawers. Wait a bit.”
He got up and went into the adjoining room; looked round it, pulled
open a drawer or two, and, after shutting all the doors, came back to
the office.
“The sponge is there, and there are handkerchiefs in the top right-hand
drawer. Now then, Bill, just pretend you’re Cayley. You’ve just said
something about water, and you get up.”
Feeling that it was all a little uncanny, Bill, who had been kneeling
beside his friend, got up and walked out. Antony, as he had done on the
previous day, looked up after him as he went. Bill turned into the room
on the right, opened the drawer and got the handkerchief, damped the
sponge and came back.
“Well?” he said wonderingly.
Antony shook his head.
“It’s all different,” he said. “For one thing, you made a devil of a
noise and Cayley didn’t.”
“Perhaps you weren’t listening when Cayley went in?”
“I wasn’t. But I should have heard him if I could have heard him, and I
should have remembered afterwards.”
“Perhaps Cayley shut the door after him.”
“Wait!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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