فصل 14

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

What Mary Dove had said about hearing someone moving about upstairs explained the small piece of mud Neele had found on the floor of the sitting room. He thought of the pretty desk in that room with its obvious ‘secret’ drawer.

He had found three letters in that drawer, written by Vivian Dubois to Adele Fortescue. Neele had sent them up at once to the Yard because at that time it looked as if Rex Fortescue had been poisoned by his wife, with or without her lover’s help. But there had been nothing in any of the letters to suggest that a crime was being planned. Inspector Neele believed that Dubois had asked Adele to destroy his letters and that she had told him she had done so.

Well, now they had two more deaths to investigate. That should mean that Adele Fortescue had not killed her husband. Unless Adele Fortescue had wanted to marry Vivian Dubois and Vivian Dubois had wanted, not Adele, but the hundred thousand pounds which would come to her on the death of her husband. He had believed, perhaps, that Rex Fortescue’s death would be blamed on natural causes.

What if Adele Fortescue and Vivian Dubois had been guilty? Adele might have rung up Dubois, talking loudly and he had realized that someone in Yewtree Lodge might have overheard her. What would Vivian Dubois have done next?

Inspector Neele decided to make inquiries at the Golf Hotel to find out if Dubois had been in or out of the hotel between the hours of quarter past four and six o’clock. Vivian Dubois was tall and dark like Lance Fortescue. He might have gone through the garden to the side door, gone upstairs and then what? Looked for the letters and found them missing? Or maybe waited until tea was over and then gone down to the library when Adele Fortescue was alone?

But all this was going too fast; he must see what Jennifer Fortescue had to say.