In the night

This tale of mystery must be regarded as a diversion from war, a word which does not occur in its pages. It was planned in a base-hospital in France, and written during recovery at home; if it serves to interest for an hour or two those similarly placed and those still in the trenches, its existence is amply justified.

It tries, at any rate, to deal fairly with its readers, who are not called upon to admire clevernesses of deduction they are prevented from performing for themselves. Nothing is more irritating, and more common, in tales of the investigation of crime, than to find such sentences as “the great detective rose from his knees and put away his magnifying-glass with a self-satisfied air,” and not be told what he saw to make him self-satisfied. In the following pages, therefore, every essential fact is related as it is discovered and readers are, as far as possible, given the eyes of the investigators and equal opportunities with them of arriving at the truth.

R. G. B.

CHAPTER I

At the Rose and Crown

The quiet of a fine summer evening was falling on the little village of Salting; the fields were slowly emptying as the dusk settled down, and the bar of the Rose and Crown was steadily filling with the heavy-footed, silent-minded labourers. Salting lies a mile or two away from a branch-line which ends with apparent inconsequence at a sleepy town some ten miles further; and the pursuits of its inhabitants, and in consequence their conversation, range eternally round the topics of the season and the crops and the simple, but not necessarily good-natured, personalities concerning one another. Nor is it a social district in the sense in which so many English neighbourhoods are, galvanized sporadically into an appearance of life by the moneyed activities of the upper classes. There are no small gentry, only farmers of varying prosperity; there is only one large estate, and though the great house which is hidden in the woods of it had been built for twenty-five years or more, it had never become in any sense part of the life of the place.

Salting Towers was the residence of Sir Roger Penterton, a man who cared nothing for the village which had happened to lie in the hollow below the hill selected as a suitable site for his house. He was not interested in agricultural affairs; he had chosen the locality solely because it was sufficiently convenient for the visits he continued to pay two and three times a week to the town in which he had pursued a highly successful career at the head of a big business; hence an appearance in a birthday honour list and that accretion of dignity and pride which proclaims itself in the carriage of a Knight. He liked, however, to fancy himself as a landed proprietor even while holding that class in the greatest contempt as a set of idle and unthrifty folk; the type of man of whom he was a shining example was, as he often used to proclaim as he stood astride of the fire in hall or smoking-room, the real backbone of the country. By years of hard work he had built up a fine business, amassed a large fortune, and incidentally married above himself. He had succeeded and not by any stroke of luck, but, as he would declare, by sheer industry, and so could any one else; he had no pity for failures. “Show me a failure and I’ll show you an idler,” was a favourite remark of his to those who tried to enlist his purse in aid of some charitable scheme.