Antony had met Bill Beverley two years before in a tobacconist’s shop.  Gillingham was on one side of the counter and Mr. Beverley on the other.  Something about Bill, his youth and freshness, perhaps, attracted Antony; and when cigarettes had been ordered, and an address given to which they were to be sent, he remembered that he had come across an aunt of Beverley’s once at a country-house.  Beverley and he met again a little later at a restaurant.  Both of them were in evening-dress, but they did different things with their napkins, and Antony was the more polite of the two.  However, he still liked Bill.  So on one of his holidays, when he was unemployed, he arranged an introduction through a mutual friend.  Beverley was a little inclined to be shocked when he was reminded of their previous meetings, but his uncomfortable feeling soon wore off, and he and Antony quickly became intimate.  But Bill generally addressed him as “Dear Madman” when he happened to write.

Antony decided to stroll over to the Red House after lunch and call upon his friend.  Having inspected his bedroom which was not quite the lavender-smelling country-inn bedroom of fiction, but sufficiently clean and comfortable, he set out over the fields.

As he came down the drive and approached the old red-brick front of the house, there was a lazy murmur of bees in the flower-borders, a gentle cooing of pigeons in the tops of the elms, and from distant lawns the whir of a mowing-machine, that most restful of all country sounds ....

And in the hall a man was banging at a locked door, and shouting, “Open the door, I say; open the door!”

“Hallo!” said Antony in amazement.

CHAPTER III

Two Men and a Body

Cayley looked round suddenly at the voice.

“Can I help?” said Antony politely.

“Something’s happened,” said Cayley.  He was breathing quickly.  “I heard a shot—­it sounded like a shot—­I was in the library.  A loud bang—­I didn’t know what it was.  And the door’s locked.”  He rattled the handle again, and shook it.  “Open the door!” he cried.  “I say, Mark, what is it?  Open the door!”

“But he must have locked the door on purpose,” said Antony.  “So why should he open it just because you ask him to?”

Cayley looked at him in a bewildered way.  Then he turned to the door again.  “We must break it in,” he said, putting his shoulder to it.  “Help me.”

“Isn’t there a window?”

Cayley turned to him stupidly.

“Window?  Window?”

“So much easier to break in a window,” said Antony with a smile.  He looked very cool and collected, as he stood just inside the hall, leaning on his stick, and thinking, no doubt, that a great deal of fuss was being made about nothing.  But then, he had not heard the shot.

“Window—­of course!  What an idiot I am.”