“Why not have breakfast?”
“I’m not hungry.
I don’t think I could eat anything.”
But he did eat a fair meal when it appeared, talking meanwhile of unimportant matters.
Not until we were in the library with the door closed did he mention the real object of his visit.
“Miss Bell, did you ever hear of a young woman named Gunther?”
“I think not.
Why?”
“Florence Gunther?”
“Florence!
The Florence who telephoned to Sarah?”
“I think it’s possible. I’m not certain.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m glad you’ve found her.
She must know something.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Yes, I think she did know something.
But she will never be able to tell it.
She was shot and killed last night.”
Later on I was to wonder why he did not tell me then the details of that killing.
Perhaps he was still rather sick; perhaps he had reasons of his own.
But what he told me then was only that the girl had been shot and that there was some evidence that her room had been gone through, like Sarah’s.
The body had been taken to the Morgue.
“There are certain points of resemblance,” he said, “although this girl was shot, not stabbed.
For instance—I don’t want to harrow you—but the shoes had been removed.
And although her room is not in the condition of Sarah Gittings’, it had been searched.
I’ll take my oath to that.
She seems to have been an orderly person, very quiet, and—”
But that phrase, very quiet, recalled something to me.
Quiet. A quiet person.
I remembered then; Joseph’s description of the young woman who had tried to see me the day before.
“I wonder,” I said, “if she could have been here yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
“How was she dressed?
What did she look like?
Joseph turned away a young woman while I was resting.
It just might have been—”
He was in the hall in a moment, calling Joseph, and what I had feared turned out to be correct.
Joseph not only identified a cabinet photograph of her, but recalled that she had worn a blue coat, and “a sort of plaid dress, sir; checked, it might have been.”
When he had excused Joseph, who looked shaken over the whole business, the Inspector gave me such facts as he had.
Florence Gunther had been shot and killed; the bullet had gone into her brain and out again.
But the murderer had also tried to burn her body, and had largely succeeded.
A farmer named Hawkins, out on the Warrenville road, had gone out at ten o’clock the night before to look after a sick cow, and in a gully beside the road, not two hundred yards from his front gate, had seen a fire blazing.
Thinking that a passing motorist had ignited the brush with a lighted cigarette, he went back into the house and got an old blanket and a broom with which to beat out the flames.
He had actually commenced this when he realized what lay before him.
He smothered the fire with the blanket and called the police.
But for the incident of the sick cow the body would have been destroyed, as the family had already retired.
As it was, identification would have been a slow matter, had it not been for the one thing which Mr. Harrison had said every criminal overlooks, and this was that where the body had been placed a small spring, a mere thread of water really—I saw it later—effectually soaked the ground at this point.
Such garments as were in contact with the earth, then, were not destroyed, and they revealed the fact that the unfortunate woman had worn a checked dress and a dark blue coat.
There must have been footprints in that soft ground, the heavy marks of a man carrying a substantial burden; but a passing car with a group of curious and horrified motorists, Hawkins himself extinguishing the fire, the police and police reporters when they arrived, had thoroughly erased them.
The three detectives from the homicide squad reached the spot to find the body, a crowd of curious onlookers, and not a discoverable clue to the murder.