"Hannaford!--dead!" he exclaimed. "Great Scott!--why, he was as fit as a fiddle at noon yesterday, Hetherwick! He and his granddaughter called on me, and I took 'em to lunch--I come from Sellithwaite, you know, so of course I knew them. Hannaford had to go as soon as we'd lunched--some appointment--so I showed the girl round a bit. Nice girl, that--clever. Name of Rhona. Worth cultivating. And the old man's dead! Bless me!"
"I don't think there's much doubt about foul play," observed Hetherwick.
"Looks uncommonly like it," said Kenthwaite. He went on with his double task. "Well," he added, "sorry, but I can't be of any use to Miss Hannaford to-day--got to go down to a beastly Quarter Sessions case, my boy, and precious little time to catch my train. But to-morrow--perhaps you can give 'm a hand this morning?"
"Yes," answered Hetherwick. "I'm doing nothing. I'll go round there after a while. I'm interested naturally. It's a queer case."
"Queer! Seems so, rather," assented Kenthwaite. "Well--give Miss Hannaford my sympathy and all that, and tell her that if there's anything I can do when I get back--you know what to say."
"She said she'd relations here in London," remarked Hetherwick.
"Cousins--aunts--something or other--over Tooting way, I think," agreed Kenthwaite. "Twenty past eight!--Hetherwick, I'll have to rush for it!"
He swallowed the last of his coffee, seized the bag and darted away; Hetherwick went back to his own chambers and breakfasted leisurely. And all the time he sat there he was pondering over the event of the previous midnight, and especially upon the sudden disappearance of the man with the stained fingers. To Hetherwick that disappearance seemed to argue guilt. He figured it in this way--the man who ran away at Charing Cross had poisoned this other man in some clever and subtle fashion, by means of something which took a certain time to take effect, and, when that time arrived, did its work with amazing swiftness. Hetherwick, in his war service, had seen men die more times than he cared to remember. He had seen some men shot through the brain; he had seen others shot through the heart. But he had never seen any of these men--some of them shot at his very side--die with the extraordinary quickness with which Hannaford had died. And he came to a conclusion: if the man with the stained fingers had poisoned Hannaford, then he was somebody who had a rare and a profound knowledge of poisons.