The Sittaford Mystery - Agatha Christie [81]
‘Where did the Inspector go afterwards?’ she asked.
‘To Sittaford, Miss. Tom heard him tell the driver.’
‘To Sittaford House?’
Brian Pearson was, she knew, still staying at Sittaford House with the Willetts.
‘No, Miss, to Mr Duke’s.’
Duke again. Emily felt irritated and baffled. Always Duke—the unknown factor. She ought, she felt, to be able to deduce him from the evidence, but he seemed to have produced the same effect on everyone—a normal, ordinary, pleasant man.
‘I’ve got to see him,’ said Emily to herself. ‘I’ll go straight there as soon as I get back to Sittaford.’
Then she had thanked Mrs Evans, gone on to Mr Kirkwood’s and obtained the key, and was now standing in the hall of Hazelmoor and wondering how and what she had expected to feel there.
She mounted the stairs slowly and went into the first room at the top of the stairs. This was quite clearly Captain Trevelyan’s bedroom. It had, as Mr Kirkwood had said, been emptied of personal effects. Blankets were folded in a neat pile, the drawers were empty, there was not so much as a hanger left in the cupboard. The boot cupboard showed a row of bare shelves.
Emily sighed and then turned and went downstairs. Here was the sitting-room where the dead man had lain, the snow blowing in from the open window.
She tried to visualize the scene. Whose hand had struck Captain Trevelyan down, and why? Had he been killed at five and twenty past five as everyone believed—or had Jim really lost his nerve and lied? Had he failed to make anyone hear at the front door and gone round to the window, looked in and seen his dead uncle’s body and dashed away in an agony of fear? If only she knew. According to Mr Dacres, Jim stuck to his story. Yes—but Jim might have lost his nerve. She couldn’t be sure.
Had there been, as Mr Rycroft had suggested, someone else in the house—someone who had overheard the quarrel and seized his chance?
If so—did that throw any light on the boot problem? Had someone been upstairs—perhaps in Captain Trevelyan’s bedroom? Emily passed through the hall again. She took a quick look into the dining-room; there were a couple of trunks there neatly strapped and labelled. The sideboard was bare. The silver cups were at Major Burnaby’s bungalow.
She noticed, however, that the prize of three new novels, an account of which Charles had had from Evans and had reported with amusing embellishments to her, had been forgotten and lay dejectedly on a chair.
She looked round the room and shook her head. There was nothing here.
She went up the stairs again and once more entered the bedroom.
She must know why these boots were missing! Until she could concoct some theory reasonably satisfactory to herself which would account for their disappearance, she felt powerless to put them out of her mind. They were soaring to ridiculous proportions, dwarfing everything else to do with the case. Was there nothing to help her?
She took each drawer out and felt behind it. In detective stories there was always an obliging scrap of paper. But evidently in real life one could not expect such fortunate accidents, or else Inspector Narracott and his men had been wonderfully thorough. She felt for loose boards, she felt round the edge of the carpet with her fingers. She investigated the spring mattress. What she expected to find in all these places she hardly knew, but she went on looking with dogged perseverance.
And then, as she straightened her back and stood upright, her eye was caught by the one incongruous touch in this room of apple-pie order, a little pile of soot in the grate.
Emily looked at it with the fascinated gaze of a bird for a snake. She drew nearer, eyeing it. It was no logical deduction, no reasoning of cause and effect, it was simply that the sight of soot