“How do you know that?”
“Because Miss Trevert and Dr. Romain both tried the handle and couldn’t
get in!”
“Ah!” said Manderton, “you mean the door was locked _when the body was
found!_ Now, as to these voices. Were they men’s voices?”
“Yes, sir, I should say so.”
“Why?”
“Because they were deep-like!”
“Was Mr. Hartley Parrish’s voice one of them?”
The butler spread out his hands.
“That I couldn’t say! I just heard the murmur-like, then shut the
passage door quickly ...”
“Why?”
“Well, sir, I thought ... I didn’t want to listen....”
“You thought one of the voices was Mr. Greve’s, eh? Having a row with
Mr. Parrish, eh? About the lady, isn’t that right?”
“Aren’t you going rather too fast?” said Robin quietly.
But the detective ignored him.
“Come on and answer my question, my man,” he said harshly. “Didn’t you
think it was Mr. Hartley Parrish and Mr. Greve here having a bit of a
dust-up about the young lady being engaged to Mr. Parrish?”
“Well, perhaps I did, but....”
Like a flash the detective turned on Robin.
“What do you know about this?” he demanded fiercely.
“Nothing,” said Greve. “As I have told you already, I did not see Mr.
Parrish alive again after lunch, nor did I speak to him. What I would
suggest to you now is that upon this evidence of Bude’s depends the
vitally important question of how Mr. Parrish met his death. Though he
was found with a revolver in his hand, none of us in this house know of
any good motive for his suicide. I put it to you that the man who can
furnish us with this motive is the owner of the voice heard by Bude in
conversation with Mr. Parrish, since obviously nobody other than Mr.
Parrish and possibly this unknown person was in the library block at
the time. And I would further remark, Mr. Manderton, that, until the
bullet has been extracted, we do not know that Mr. Parrish killed
_himself_...”
“No,” said the detective significantly, “we don’t!”
He had dropped his eyes to the ground now and was studying the pattern
of the hearth-rug.
“You say you heard no shot?” he suddenly asked Robin.
“No!”
“No one other than Miss Trevert, I gather, heard the shot?”
“That is so!”
Mr. Manderton consulted a slip of paper which he drew from his pocket.
“Inspector Humphries,” he said, “has drawn up a rough time-table of
events leading up to Mr. Parrish’s death, based on the evidence he has
taken here this evening. You will tell me if it tallies.”
He read from the slip:
5 P.M. Bude sounds the gong for tea.
5.10 Mr. Greve passes Bude in the hall and goes down the corridor
leading to the library. Mr. Greve states he went straight out by the
side door into the gardens.
The detective looked up from his reading.
“At 5.12, let us say, Bude comes back from the servants’ quarters to
the hall and hears voices from the library. He closes the passage door.
Is that right?”
Bude nodded.
“It would be about two minutes after I saw Mr. Greve the first time,”
he agreed.
“Very well!”
The detective resumed his reading.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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