Free Case with No Conclusion by Leo Bruce Page B

thought now that it must have been going on for some time to have awoken her. She could hear Mrs. Duncan snoring, and no sound of movement on the servants’ landing.
    When Beef asked her what time it had been when she got out of bed she said she was certain she was not sure, and even when pressed to give some rough estimate she only insisted that she could not say.
    Going on with her story, she said that she had pulled on her overcoat (she mentioned that she could not afford a dressing-gown) and began to go downstairs. But when she reached the first-floorlanding she thought she’d have a look out of the window which commanded the drive to the front door. And as she did so she saw a man get on a bicycle and start up towards the front gate. But when he had nearly reached it he jumped off and turned back. There had been bright moonlight, she said, and she could see his outline distinctly. She hadn’t recognized him, and she wouldn’t recognize him again. He was black, standing there. We knew how people looked in the moonlight, she said. She hadn’t been able to make out why he should have stopped and looked back, and was just beginning to wonder whether he had seen her, when she heard him call out, “Who’s that down there?” sharply, as though he were frightened. He must have stood there, she thought, for two minutes, then suddenly he jumped on his bicycle and pedalled away.
    She herself had not been able to move. She was, she now explained, glued to the spot. Her heart was going in a manner which she described as “fit to burst,” while at the same time, and rather confusingly, she didn’t know whether she was standing on her head or her heels. A feather, she assured us, would have been sufficient to send her prostrate. But it was fortunate that these metaphors, however mixed, had come into play, for they kept her there to see something else. A long time passed, she assured us, and then, as sure as she was standing before us now, a man emerged from the shrubbery near the front door. At this point Beef interrupted her.
    â€œThere!” he said. “I asked them if there was any foot-prints!”
    This lonely and silent pedestrian had, the girl thought, kept to the grass borders at the edge of the drive, for although the night was so still that she had been enabled to hear her own respiration, she didn’t catch the sound of his footsteps. No, she hadn’t been able to recognize him. You couldn’t see any face. All you could see was the shape of a man walking away.
    It appeared that her information was exhausted, but, with the willingness of her type to oblige as much as possible, she was about to repeat it from the beginning. And when Peter Ferrers had told her kindly that that would do, she said, with a broad smile, that she hoped that she had been useful.
    â€œUseful,” growled Beef. “I don’t know about that. It makes things two or three times more conplicated. Still, I suppose you meant to do right,” he added grandly. “You may go now.”

Chapter X
    P ETER FERRERS asked us if we would have some lunch, but Beef declined, and as we were walking down the drive together he explained his refusal. “I noticed a nice little House down at the corner,” he said, “where I shouldn’t be surprised if we was to pick up some information.”
    I thought what an old hypocrite he was, but said nothing and resigned myself to the inevitable bread and cheese which was all the pub was likely to supply.
    When we entered the Sheepdippers’ Arms it seemed doubtful if we should get even that. What Beef had called a “nice little house” turned out to be a small and dreary pub with the smell of last week’s beer still hanging on the air in the taproom. There was no fire lit in the grate, and even the dart-board was pierced and decayed until a player’s score would have been more dependent on faith than on mathematics. The man