There was a sudden snigger from a nervous gentleman in the crowd at the back of the room, and the Coroner put on his glasses and stared sternly in the direction from which it came.  The nervous gentleman hastily decided that the time had come to do up his bootlace.  The Coroner put down his glasses and continued.

“Did anybody come out of the house while you were coming up the drive?”

“No.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gillingham.”

He was followed by Inspector Birch.  The Inspector, realizing that this was his afternoon, and that the eyes of the world were upon him, produced a plan of the house and explained the situation of the different rooms.  The plan was then handed to the jury.

Inspector Birch, so he told the world, had arrived at the Red House at 4.42 p.m. on the afternoon in question.  He had been received by Mr. Matthew Cayley, who had made a short statement to him, and he had then proceeded to examine the scene of the crime.  The French windows had been forced from outside.  The door leading into the hall was locked; he had searched the room thoroughly and had found no trace of a key.  In the bedroom leading out of the office he had found an open window.  There were no marks on the window, but it was a low one, and, as he found from experiment, quite easy to step out of without touching it with the boots.  A few yards outside the window a shrubbery began.  There were no recent footmarks outside the window, but the ground was in a very hard condition owing to the absence of rain.  In the shrubbery, however, he found several twigs on the ground, recently broken off, together with other evidence that some body had been forcing its way through.  He had questioned everybody connected with the estate, and none of them had been into the shrubbery recently.  By forcing a way through the shrubbery it was possible for a person to make a detour of the house and get to the Stanton end of the park without ever being in sight of the house itself.

He had made inquiries about the deceased.  Deceased had left for Australia some fifteen years ago, owing to some financial trouble at home.  Deceased was not well spoken of in the village from which he and his brother had come.  Deceased and his brother had never been on good terms, and the fact that Mark Ablett had come into money had been a cause of great bitterness between them.  It was shortly after this that Robert had left for Australia.

He had made inquiries at Stanton station.  It had been market-day at Stanton and the station had been more full of arrivals than usual.  Nobody had particularly noticed the arrival of Robert Ablett; there had been a good many passengers by the 2.10 train that afternoon, the train by which Robert had undoubtedly come from London.  A witness, however, would state that he noticed a man resembling Mark Ablett at the station at 3.53 p.m. that afternoon, and this man caught the 3.55 up train to town.