CHAPTER 21Inspector Stoddart left Holford Hall considerably worried.
It looked uncommonly as though Miss Tottie Delauney's story might be true, and that Mrs. Burford had played the star part in this sordid drama. If so, his suspicions that Saunderson and Superintendent Mayer had been murdered by the same hand would have to go. Mrs. Burford might possibly have shot the former, but for the hour during which Mayer had been killed she had an unassailable alibi.
He promised Harbord, who had been waiting for him in the hall, to tell him the main points of the interview later on. He wanted to think, and when he had that object in view had found nothing so efficacious as solitude and a cigarette in the fresh air.
It was a lovely autumn day—one of those days on which it seems good to be alive. H
