A light went on in the sitting-room.
Ahead of him it was still dusky. On his left, parallel with the lane, began the thick coppice of birches which pressed up along the stone boundary wall. On his right, some hundred odd yards ahead, stood the cottage. There was no obstruction in front of it: he could dimly see the whitewashed stone, and the black beams, and the low-pitched shingled roof, set back from the road in its front garden.
But beside and beyond it, also eastwards and parallel with the lane, stretched the thick orchard of fruit-trees which formed a kind of tunnel with the birch-copse opposite. That tunnel was the narrow lane. Through it poured narrowly the pinkish light, now tinged with watery yellow, of the rising sun.
It penetrated only there, leaving the sides of the road in shadow. Glints of it were caught and held in thick foliage. But it paled the glow of thin electric light which had been switched on inside two windows - ground-floor windows, now uncurtained - of Sir Harvey Gilman's cottage.
The sitting-room, not a doubt of it
The sitting-room, where he had been talking to the old boy last night, with its windows facing the lane.
Dick Markham stopped short, his heart thudding and the queasiness of an empty stomach taking hold at early morning.
He did not quite know he was running so hard, or what he expected to find. Apparently Sir Harvey was up early, since he had already drawn back the curtains and switched on the light. Dick walked forward slowly in that eerie dusk, facing the tunnel of sunlight which fell at his feet, and repeated to himself that he did not know. But, when he was less than thirty yards from the cottage, at last he knew.
A slight rasping noise, as of metal against stone, made him turn his eyes to the left, along the boundary wall of Ashe Hall Park.
Somebody, hidden from sight behind that low stone wall, was running out a rifle. Somebody was steadying the barrel of the rifle on top of the wall; somebody was aiming, with carefully drawn sights, at one of the lighted windows in the cottage opposite.
' Hey!’ yelled Dick Markham.
But it went unheard when somebody fired a shot.
The report of the rifle cracked out with inhuman loudness, sending birds whirring up from the trees. Dick's long eyesight caught the star of the bullet-hole in window-glass. Then the rifle vanished. Somebody was running, thrashing, perhaps even laughing, in the birch-coppice among the dense twilight trees. Echoes settled back to disturbed chirpings; the marksman had gone.
For perhaps ten seconds Dick stood there motionless.
He did not run now, since he believed with horrible certainty that he knew what had happened. To chase any marksman in that dense coppice - even if you wanted to chase the marksman - would be hopeless.
The edge of the sun showed itself, a tip of fiery white-gold behind the dark screen of trees, with only the little lane between. The light, shone straight along that lane into Dick's eyes. Some third person, who must also have heard the shot, appeared in the lane from the easterly direction.
Though the sunlight was still not bright, that figure remained for a few moments a silhouette, hurrying towards Dick.
·What is it? Who's there?' the figure called. He recognized the voice of Cynthia Drew, and he ran forward even as she ran to meet him. They met just outside the front garden of Sir Harvey's cottage. Cynthia, wearing the same pinkish-coloured jumper and brown skirt she had worn the night before, stopped short and stared at him in astonishment.
'Dick! What is it?'
' 'It's trouble, I'm afraid.'
'But what on earth are you doing here?'
'If it comes to that, Cynthia, what are you doing here?'
She made a gesture. 'I couldn't sleep. I went for a walk.' Cynthia, slim yet very sturdy, should have been the last girl in the world to be called fanciful or imaginative. But she saw his expression, and her hands moved up and pressed against her breast. The sun behind her turned the edges of her hair to clear gold. 'Dick! Was what we heard...?'
'Yes. I think so.'
Until this moment, until he had come fully in front of the cottage, he would not turn fully round to the right and look at it. But he did so now, seeing what he expected to see.
Set some thirty feet back from the road in an unkempt front garden, the cottage had a longish frontage. But it was a little low doll's house of a place, with little dormer windows projecting from the slope of the dark-shingled roof to form an upper floor. Its whitewashed stone front and crooked black beams lay shadowed by the fruit-orchard eastwards. On the ground floor, the two illuminated windows - just to the left of the front door - showed what was inside.
Last night, Dick remembered, Sir Harvey Gilman had been sitting in an easy-chair beside the big writing-table in the middle of the room. Now the easy-chair had been moved round to face the table, as though someone were sitting there to write. Someone was sitting there; even the dwarfed view through the window showed it to be Sir Harvey; but he was not writing.
The hanging lamp in its tan-coloured shade shed light down across the pathologist's bald head. His chin was sunk forward on his chest. His arms lay quietly along the arms of the chair. You might have thought him dozing, a figure of peace, if you bad not noticed the light on the whitish-edged, clean-drilled bullet-hole through window-glass -and seen that this bullet-hole was just in line with the bald skull.
Dick felt a physical sickness rising in his throat. But he conquered this. Cynthia, very steady and composed, followed the direction of his glance; her teeth fastened in her lower lip.
'That's the second time,' Dick said. 'Yesterday I saw the bullet-hole jump up in the wall of the tent. To-day I saw it jump up in the window. But it doesn't get any easier. I think .. .Just a minute!'
He swung round to look at the stone boundary wall, opposite those windows, with the screen of birch-trees rising dark above it. In three strides he crossed the strip of coarse grass separating the wall from the lane, and peered into the semi-gloom beyond the wall. Something had been thrown down under the trees there, left behind when the marksman fled.
Vaulting over the wall, completely disregarding any question of fingerprints, Dick picked up this object It was a .22 calibre slide-action repeating rifle: a Winchester 61. He could not doubt it was the same one he expected to find.
After Lesley Grant had given back this rifle to Major Price yesterday afternoon, the rifle had been stolen from the shooting-gallery. That was what Lord Ashe had said.
' Don't!' cried Cynthia Drew.
'Don't what?'
'Don't look like that!'
But Dick's expression was not consternation. It was one of crazy triumph. For, whoever might have stolen that rifle, it could not possibly have been Lesley Grant
He, Dick Markham, had been with her all the time after the 'accident'; he had taken her home; he had remained with her for several hours. And she had not taken the rifle. Not only was he prepared to swear to this: he knew it to be the simple truth.
Dropping the rifle on the ground again, Dick vaulted back over the wall. Lesley, at least, couldn't have donethis’ He hardly saw or heard Cynthia, who was saying something he did not afterwards remember. Instead he set off at a run towards Sir Harvey's cottage.
No fence enclosed the front garden. Unkempt grass dragged at your shoes like wires as you crossed it. It was going to be a hot day, too; the earth breathed up moist warmth, dissolving dew-cobwebs; a wasp circled up out of the fruit-orchard; the front of the cottage itself exhaled an odour of old wood and stone. Dick approached the window with the bullet-hole - it was the right-hand one as you faced the house - and flattened his face against the grimy glass.