It suited me perfectly, for I wanted to hear about the inquest. So I got in beside him, looking with rather stunned admiration at the inconceivably luxurious car. It didn’t have platinum handles and diamonds set in the wheel, but it had everything else. He saw me looking at it.
“A beauty, isn’t it?” he said, backing expertly and swiftly so as to head the long gray hood toward the village. “My means don’t run to cars like this, though. It’s Alexia’s.”
His voice didn’t caress her name in loverly fashion, certainly; but then there was no reason why it should, even if, as Craig had hinted, he was actually rather infatuated with her. Craig hadn’t said how he knew, but then one can usually tell these things about people one knows very well, without words and without definite proof; it’s something in the eyes, something in the air. But it occurred to me that if Peter intended to wait, discreetly, until he could press his suit with propriety, then he was reckoning without Alexia’s singular directness.
In any case, whether or not there was anything in what Craig had told me, certainly both Peter Huber and myself, chance wayfarers, really, in the Brent house, were yet inexorably and inextricably bound up with the things that had happened there.
I sighed a little at that thought and he glanced at me.
“Tired? They’ve kept you going. I don’t suppose you’ve really rested since Conrad died. Well, since before that really. What with Craig sick and all the goings on before Conrad died.”
“There weren’t… Oh, you mean the bump on the door and seeing Nicky?”
“Seeing…” The car swerved toward the stone wall at the edge of the road, jerked back to the middle, and Peter said, “What do you mean? Was it Nicky you saw in the hall when you opened the door?”
“No, no. I didn’t see anybody. I opened the door after there was that-well, bump against it. But not right away. So whoever went past the door, carrying Heaven knows what, was out of sight by that time. It was earlier when I saw Nicky. And he wasn’t doing anything, really. Just coming out of some room along the hall.”
“Oh,” said Peter. “I thought the way you spoke you had seen Nicky in the hall.”
“No, no! Not then.” Nicky! If he’d hurried, the night before, taking a short cut through the meadow to the house, he might possibly have arrived before me. In any case I made it clear. “I didn’t see Nicky then. It was earlier.” Suddenly I remembered Conrad’s white starched shirt front and black tie. “Nicky must have changed after dinner again. Unless he didn’t change for dinner. Do you remember?”
“Do I-oh, I see what you mean.” He frowned, seemed to think back and said, “Why, yes! He wore a dinner jacket at dinner that night. So did Conrad; he always did. I changed, too. But I believe-yes, you’re right. It must have been my room you saw Nicky come from; he’d been in to get a book I was reading. And I remember now, he had changed back to, I think, tweeds; a brown checked coat, anyway. But I…” He drove in silence for a moment, watching the road ahead. “I thought nothing of it then. And I don’t see now that it makes any difference.”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t either.”
We had already topped the ridge where I stood the previous night; now we turned into the main traveled road. We could see the village ahead, very snug and peaceful and rather distant in the gentle dusk. And then all at once, neither of us speaking, we were there. The little main street lengthened, the white houses attained sudden height, and we turned and parked along a street of small, low-roofed shops, in front of a small haberdashery, in fact, and a clerk lounging in the doorway recognized Peter and spoke to him. “Evening, Mr. Huber.”
“Hello.”
“Hear there was an inquest this afternoon.” The man’s eyes were curious.
“Yes,” said Peter shortly and helped me out.
“H’m,” said the clerk and, as Peter offered no comment but steered me along the sidewalk in the direction of the inn (a long, sprawled, white building with the sign Coach Inn, 1782, hanging above its door), the clerk called after us, “You look fine, Mr. Huber. Glad the things fit.”
“Oh, thanks,” said Peter. “Yes, they were all right.”
“I’ll never forget what you looked like when you came to the store that morning,” added the clerk with a chuckle that carried clearly through the winter twilight and silence of the little street.
Peter grinned back at the chatty (and curious) clerk and we crossed the narrow white porch of the inn.
It was a hospitable and warm old tavern. We went along a dark passage so narrow that my cape brushed the walls and entered the tap room, all smoke-stained rafters and age. Aside from nearly braining myself on a low rafter, I reached a table without misadventure and looked around me. Except for the bartender, no one else was there-or at least I could see no one, although the high-backed settles along the side walls cut off my view of one corner of the room.
Beside the bar was the kind of machine where one drops in nickels (or dimes or quarters, if one is really just a gambler at heart) and takes what comes, if anything. With this machine it had to be nickels. It was very quiet; I had had a kind of expectation of some kind of repercussion from the inquest, but if the police or Soper were still in town, I saw and heard nothing of them then.
The bartender knew Peter, too. He came forward, wiping his hands.
“Hello, Mr. Huber.”
“Hello, John. I guess we’ll have a-what do you want, Miss Keate?”
I took ginger ale. Peter ordered whisky and soda. And suddenly the bartender chuckled much as the haberdashery clerk had chuckled. “You certainly look different, Mr. Huber,” he said. “Ever find your baggage?”
“No,” said Peter. “Guess it’s gone forever.”
“Too bad. You looked as if you’d been shipwrecked,” the bartender laughed.
“Felt like it, too,” said Peter. He unbuttoned his short leather jacket, untied the white scarf around his throat and said, “Anybody been in here from the inquest, John?”
The bartender’s face sobered instantly. “That’s a bad business, Mr. Huber,” he said. “First murder in Balifold since-well, I can’t remember another and I’ve been here a long time. Ginger ale for you, Miss? And whisky and soda.” He ambled away.
Peter leaned his chin gloomily in his hands. “I lost my baggage,” he said ruefully. “I arrived here in what amounted to fancy dress. The natives can’t forget it. They all but burst into hysterics whenever they see me.”
If he was trying to divert me, he didn’t succeed.
“You were at the inquest, then,” I said. “What happened?”
“Nothing, really,” he said, staring at the bare table and biting his knuckles. “They didn’t intend anything to happen, I suppose. It was a formality. Dr. Chivery was there; he and the police doctor both testified as to what they had found. The police testified, too-that is, Nugent and one of the troopers. Then they had the lawyer that had drawn up Brent’s will tell something of its contents. I suppose that was only to show that Brent was a rich man and that there might have been a motive for his murder.”
“Was that all?”
“That was all. Or about all. They adjourned then.”
“Then they said nothing of-of Drue?”
He shook his head, rubbed his hands across his thick, curly blond hair and then put them flat on the table. “Not a word. And Soper can’t ask for a Grand Jury indictment until after the inquest reconvenes and delivers a verdict. Or so they tell me. So Drue is safe till then. They had to hold an inquest in order to give the police a kind of ticket to go ahead. Soper can go back now to the county seat or wherever his office is. And Nugent stays here and goes on with the investigation, calling on Soper whenever he needs him. The inquest can’t be concluded, I understood, until they have more evidence. There couldn’t be a verdict, but they made no bones of calling it murder.”