On a chesterfield, a fair-haired young man was lying helpless. From the red stain on the lips, Dr. Ringwood guessed at a hæmorrhage of the lungs; and the quantity of blood on the boy’s shirt-front and the dark pool on the carpet pointed to the severity of the attack. The youth’s eyes caught the newcomer, and he beckoned feebly to the doctor. Ringwood crossed to the chesterfield and bent down. It hardly needed an expert to see that assistance had come too late. The sufferer made an effort, and the doctor stooped to catch the words.
". . . Caught me . . . pistol . . . shot . . . thought it was . . . all right . . . never guessed . . ."
Dr. Ringwood bent closer.
"Who was it?" he demanded.
But that broken and gasped-out message had been the victim’s last effort. With the final word, a cough shook him; blood poured from his mouth; and he fell back among the cushions in the terminal convulsion.
Dr. Ringwood saw the jaw drop and realised that he could be of no further service. Suddenly his weariness, accentuated by the strain of the drive through the fog, descended upon him once more. He straightened himself with something of an effort and gazed down at the body, feeling himself curiously detached from this suddenly-emergent mystery, as though it were no direct concern of his. Then, in his own despite, his cool medical brain began to work as though by some volition independent of his own. He drew out his notebook and jotted down the few disjointed words which he had caught, lest he should forget them later on.
Still held by the rigour of his training, he stooped once more and made a close examination of the body, discovering in the course of it two tiny tears in the dress shirt which evidently marked the entries of the bullets which had pierced the lungs. Then, his inspection completed, he left the body undisturbed, noted the time on his wrist-watch, and made a further jotting in his pocket-book.
As he did so, a fresh idea crossed his mind. Had there been more murders? What about the maids in the house? The one who had rung him up must have been somewhere on the premises, dead or alive. Possibly the murderer himself was still lurking in the villa.
Too tired to think of risk, Dr. Ringwood set himself to explore the house; but to his amazement he discovered that it was empty. Nowhere did he see the slightest sign of anything which suggested a divergence from normal routine. The cloak-room showed that two men lived on the premises, since he noted hats of two different sizes on the pegs; and there appeared to be three bedrooms in use, apart from the servants’ rooms on the upper floor.
The next step was obviously to ring up the police, he reflected. The sooner this affair was off his shoulders, the better. But at this point there flashed across his mind the picture of a methodical and possibly slow detective who might even be suspicious of Ringwood himself and wish to detain him till the whole affair was cleared up. That would be a nuisance. Then a way out of the difficulty opened up before him. He remembered paying a visit on the previous night to a butler down with ’flu. When he had seen the patient, the man’s master had come and made inquiries about the case; and Ringwood had been able to reassure him as to the man’s condition.
"What was that chap’s name?" Ringwood questioned his memory. "Sir Clinton Something-or-other. He’s Chief Constable or some such big bug. When in doubt, go to headquarters. He’ll remember me, I expect; he didn’t look as if much slipped past him. And that’ll save me from a lot of bother at the hands of underlings. What the devil was his name? Sir Clinton . . . Driffield, that’s it. I’ll ring him up."
He glanced round the hall in which he was standing but saw no telephone.
"It’s probably in the smoke-room where the body is," he suggested to himself.
But though he searched all the likely places in the house he was unable to find any instrument.
"They haven’t a ’phone, evidently," he was driven to admit. "But in that case, I can’t be in Silverdale’s house at all. This must be the wrong shop."
Then he remembered the moment when the other car had swept down upon him out of the fog.
"That probably explains it," he said aloud. "When I had to swerve out of his way, I must have missed one of the entrance gates before I got back in touch with the pavement again. If that’s so, then obviously I’m in the wrong house. But whose house is it?"
He re-entered the smoke-room and looked round in search of some clue. A writing-desk stood over against one of the walls, and he crossed to it and took up a sheet of paper from a note-paper case. The heading was what he wanted: "Ivy Lodge, 28 Lauderdale Avenue, Westerhaven."
"That’s what happened," he reflected, with a faint satisfaction at having cleared the point up so simply. "I’m next door to Silverdale’s place, evidently, I can ’phone from there."
