The man pointed down the Market Place to the doors of the police-station.
"Two cars just pulled up there, sir," he said. "Came round the corner just now from the Norcaster road."
The superintendent glanced back and saw two staring headlights standing near his own door.
"Oh, well, there's Smith there," he said. "And if it's anybody wanting me, he knows where I've gone. Come on--for aught we know these two may have cleared out already."
But there were thin cracks of light in the living-room window of the lonely cottage on the Shawl, and the superintendent whispered that somebody was certainly there and still up. He halted his companions outside the garden gate and turned to Cotherstone.
"I don't know if it'll be advisable for you to be seen," he said. "I think our best plan'll be for me to knock at the front door and ask for the woman. You other two go round--quietly--to the back door, and take care that nobody gets out that way to the moors at the back--if anybody once escapes to those moors they're as good as lost for ever on a dark night. Go round--and when you hear me knock at the front, you knock at the back."
The two men slipped away round the corner of the garden and through the adjacent belt of trees, and the superintendent gently lifted the latch of the garden gate.
"You keep back, Mr. Cotherstone, when I go to the door," he said. "You never know--hullo, what's this?"
Men were coming up the wood behind them, quietly but quickly. One of them, ahead of the others, carried a bull's-eye lamp and in swinging it about revealed himself as one of the superintendent's own officers. He caught sight of his superior and came forward.
"Mr. Brereton's here, sir, and some gentlemen from Norcaster," he said. "They want to see you particularly--something about this place, so I brought them----"
It was at that moment that the sound of the two revolver shots rang out in the silence from the stillness of the cottage. And at that the superintendent dashed forward, with a cry to the others, and began to beat on the front door, and while his men responded with similar knockings at the back he called loudly on Miss Pett to open.
It was Mallalieu who at last flung the door open and confronted the amazed and wondering group clustered thickly without. Every man there shrank back affrighted at the desperation on the cornered man's face. But Mallalieu did not shrink, and his hand was strangely steady as he singled out his partner and shot him dead--and just as steady as he stepped back and turned the revolver on himself.