Page 30 of The Masterful Mr. Montague

While Adair slowly paced around the desk, Montague scanned the room, identifying what had changed since his previous visit.

Adair noticed. “Anything different?”

“Aside from poor Runcorn being sprawled on the floor”—Montague could see an out-flung hand, the arm, and not much more; it appeared Runcorn had been pulled backward out of his chair—“there’s a bookend missing off that shelf.” He pointed to a shelf behind the desk, midway up the wall; the empty space was obvious once pointed out. “I think it was a horse’s head. And”—he surveyed the documents scattered over the desk; other than the stack that Pringle must have left, obviously dropped on one corner, the entire surface of the desk was awash in a ruffled tide of paper—“that mess isn’t normal. Last time I was here, he had documents on the desk, but most were in stacks. That looks like someone searched through all the stacks, one after the other, without setting the documents back as they went. Runcorn would never have done that.”

“Hmm.” Adair had halted on the other side of the desk, looking down at the body lying stretched upon the floor. “Constable . . . I’m sorry, what was your name?”

“Watkins, sir.”

“Constable Watkins, did you or your colleague move the body at all?”

“No, sir. Just checked his pulse at his wrist and neck—which, of course, there wasn’t any.”

“Good.” Adair glanced at Penelope. “Check with Pringle, will you?”

With a nod, Penelope went, slipping past Montague.

She returned less than a minute later. “He said he didn’t touch the body at all.”

Looking down, Adair grimaced. “Understandable.” Hitching up his trousers, he crouched, then bent lower until all Montague could see were the blond curls on the back of his head. “Very well. I can see the bookend—it’s lying off to one side. We won’t know for certain until the doctor examines him, but I’d wager he was hit on the back of the head with the bookend—it looks more than heavy enough—and then . . .” His voice hardened. “The murderer, whoever he was, and I think we can be sure it was a he, looped a length of cord of some sort . . .”

Adair’s head and shoulders swiveled as he looked about, searching the floor. “And there it is. Rather sloppy of our murderer to leave it, but what looks like a length of silky curtain cord—the sort used to loop back curtains—is lying half under the desk.”

Rising, his hands still sunk in his pockets, Adair bent over the desk, head tilting this way and that as he scanned the documents rumpled and shuffled and flung in disarray upon it. “As far as I can make out, all of these relate to the Halstead estate. There’s nothing obvious, like a piece torn away, or a blot where something may have been copied.” Bending, he peered at the underside of the rocking blotter. “And nothing that looks recent on the blotter.”

“The most likely outcome”—Montague waved—“of all this would be something taken—a letter, an account, a statement—a record of some sort removed.”

Straightening, Adair grimaced. “Which will be very hard to identify.”

Montague nodded. He glanced at Watkins, then looked back at Adair. “When the police are satisfied here, my staff might be able to pinpoint some gap in the records, perhaps with Pringle’s help. We can at least look.”

Adair nodded; his gaze had returned to the body. “I think the blow to his head was powerful enough to render him unconscious. I can’t see any evidence that he struggled, that he fought.”

The weight of the silence that followed suggested that none of them found any great solace in that fact.

Adair was on his way back to the door, and the others were moving back into the outer office, when a dark-suited individual carrying a black bag came through the street door. A sharp, shrewd gaze from very weary eyes found Watkins. “Constable?”

Watkins waved the doctor to the inner office. “He’s in here, and no, no one’s touched him.”

The doctor briefly nodded to Adair, Penelope, and Montague, then strode past and into the inner office.

Montague returned to stand by Pringle at his desk. “The Halstead file—did you notice the documents on Mr. Runcorn’s desk?”

Pringle, whose color had improved, nodded. “Aye—looked like the lot had been thoroughly searched.”

“Any chance of you being able to tell if anything’s been taken?” Montague asked as Adair and Penelope joined them.

Pringle’s brows rose as he considered. “Well, I had the most important records with me, in my drawer, so we know he didn’t get any of them.”

“You’re sure they weren’t searched?” Barnaby asked.

“Aye. I’d left them in a nice neat stack in my drawer there”—Pringle looked down at the second drawer on the right side of his desk—“and set my ink-bottle and capped nibs on the top of them, as I usually do. When I opened the drawer this morning to get the stack out, the ink-bottle and nibs were exactly as I’d left them.”

“Good,” Barnaby said. “So we know those records, at least, are intact. What about the rest of the Halstead documents, the ones Runcorn was looking through?”

“As to that,” Pringle said, his thin chest swelling a trifle, “we have our own system of numbering.” He glanced toward the inner office. “If the police let me at them, I can re-sort the file, check by the numbers if any pages are missing. If any are, there’s a master list of numbers—it was in the file with all the rest in Mr. Runcorn’s office, but unless he knew what the numbers and our notations meant, I can’t see any reason any murderer would have taken the list.” Pringle’s voice had grown stronger. He straightened, meeting Barnaby’s gaze. “I can at least do that if it will help catch whoever did for Mr. Runcorn. Young he might have been, but he was a good man.”

Barnaby nodded. “I’ll do what I can to make sure you get a chance to check the documents.”