Page:The Viaduct Murder (1926).pdf/52

"Well, good luck to your sleuthing; but mark my words, you'll find it was suicide. I'm going to play a round now to try and take my mind off the thing, but I don't believe I shall be able to drive at the third after⁠—after what we saw yesterday."

Left to themselves, Mordaunt Reeves and Gordon arranged that they would meet again at luncheon and report on the morning's investigations.

"And look here," said Reeves, "it's a belief of mine that one wants to cover the ground oneself if one's to visualize the setting of a crime properly. So I vote that after lunch we stroll down to the railway and take a look at the top of that viaduct, and then take the 4.50 from Paston Oatvile to Paston Whitchurch so as to picture the whole thing exactly as it happened." And so they parted, Reeves walking to Brotherhood's bungalow, close to Paston Whitchurch station, while Gordon mounted a motor-bicycle and set out for Binver, a sleepy market town of some importance as a railway junction, about twelve miles off.

Mr. Brotherhood's housekeeper, Mrs. Bramston, had something of the airs of a landlady. She spoke painfully correct English, far more terrible than the native cockney which it half revealed and half concealed. She commenced where others began, closed doors where others shut them, and recollected instead of remembering. Her final consonants were all sibilant, and seemed to form part of the succeeding word. She was a merciless and largely irrelevant talker, and the opportunity of a stranger's visit de-