The inn lay directly opposite the gates of Green Hall. It was an instinctive tactic, to arrive on foot. Overnight bag in hand, he followed the gently rising drive from the Lichfield Road, trying to make his shoeleather discreet on the gravel. As the house, slantingly lit by the frail late-afternoon sun, became plain before him, he stopped in a tree’s shade. Why should the methods of Dr. Joseph Bell not persuade architecture to yield secrets, just as physiology did? So: 1820s, he guessed; white stucco; a pseudo-Greek façade; a solid portico with two pairs of unfluted Ionic columns; three windows on either side. Three storeys—and yet to his enquiring eye there was something suspicious about the third. Yes, he would bet Wood a forty-point start that there was not a single attic room behind that row of seven windows: a mere architectural trick to make the house taller and more impressive. Not that this fakery could be blamed on the current occupant. Peering beyond the house, across to the right, Doyle could make out a sunken rose garden, a tennis ground, a summer house flanked by a pair of young grafted hornbeams.What story did it all tell?
