“I may grow used to this,” Daniel said as he headed for the stairs. “Breakfast in bed every day, a wife who attends to my every need. Yes, marriage may prove most satisfactory.” But the sentence finished in a barked cough. I looked at him with concern.
“For the love of Mike go to bed and stop talking. It’s doing you no good to keep coughing like this. You take it easy and I’ll be up with the food.”
“I wish I could take it easy,” Daniel said. “But I’m itching to be out there taking a look at that body before they cart it away. I know that little oaf is going to make a mess of the investigation.”
“No you don’t,” I said. “For all we know he might be a first-class detective. Looks can be deceiving, you know.”
“Not in his case,” Daniel growled. “Any first-class detective would welcome outside expertise, especially in the form of a man from New York. He jumped a mile when he thought I might be stepping on his toes.”
“You did rather try to take over his investigation,” I pointed out.
“What if I did? It hadn’t even occurred to him that we might be dealing with foul play here, or at the very least that someone assisted him in falling over that cliff.”
“We don’t know it is any more than an accident,” I said. “We only have their word that he wasn’t likely to be near the cliffs in the dark. What if he made a point of checking out his estate each time he arrived here? And besides, how would you or anyone prove it if he were a victim of a crime?”
“I might be able to prove it,” Daniel said. “There was a storm recently, remember? A lot of rain means the ground is still soggy. There would be evidence of a second person—a footprint in a patch of mud, the fiber from clothing caught on a bush, and above all, signs of a scuffle on the clifftop.”
“Even Mr. Prescott would notice signs of a scuffle, I suspect,” I said dryly.
“That Prescott fellow wouldn’t know a clue if it jumped up and bit him.” Daniel started slowly up the stairs. Then he turned back to me. “I feel it in my bones that this is more than a simple accident, Molly. All the instincts of my training tell me so.”
“And why is that?”
“A man arrives at his property for the first time in months. His family and servants are inside and yet he doesn’t pop his head in the door and say, ‘Good evening one and all, I’m just about to inspect my grounds.’ He goes to the edge of the cliff and falls over? Not good enough, Molly. For one thing his family has pointed out that he was cautious about the cliffs and for another he wasn’t likely to lose his way in the dark. The house is fitted with electricity. There would be light streaming from all the windows. He’d have had enough light to see by, and what’s more there is a fountain, a tennis court, formal flower beds—plenty of landmarks by which he could orient himself. He could only have lost his way if he was on the fringes of his property where there is more of a wilderness, and surely even then the sound of the surf would have warned him he was getting close to the cliffs.”
I nodded in agreement. “It does seem rather odd,” I said.
“And there is one more thing that convinces me.” Daniel paused at the top of the stairs.
“What is that?”
“He asked me to be here at the same time as his family.”
With that final statement he went into the bedroom.
Twelve
When I came up with a breakfast tray, Daniel was standing at the window, leaning forward to get a better view, his face almost pressed against the pane like a young child watching a parade go by.
“The damned fools are attempting to bring up the body already.” He did not turn back to address me. “No sign of a police photographer and I doubt they made any proper observations of the crime scene. That Prescott fellow probably thinks that only Sherlock Holmes approaches a case in a scientific manner.”
I put the tray down on the bedside table.
“Daniel, I’ve been thinking,” I said. “You said that the fact that Mr. Hannan invited you here at the same time as his family was important. Do you have an idea why Mr. Hannan wanted you here with his family? You claimed ignorance before but I wondered if you hadn’t wanted to tell me all the facts at that time. So do you know what this might be about? Did he suspect he was in danger?”
He turned around now and shrugged. “I really don’t know, Molly,” he said. “He said he wanted to show me something and then he said something like, ‘I think I might have got it wrong.’”
“Got what wrong?”