Not a safe, either.”
“You think I’m correct as to the records?”
“It’s probably so.
What happened is this: until Sarah learned the terms of the new will those records lay in her room.
They had no importance, no value.
But she learned the terms of the will, and then for some reason they were important.
So she hid them.
She may have hidden them first in the wood cellar; that would account for the chair.
“But before she went out that last night she hid them again.
Now let’s see.
She didn’t leave the house between her return at five-fifteen and seven, when she left again?”
“I don’t know.
I don’t think so.” “Still, that means nothing.
She didn’t die until ten o’clock.
Between seven and ten she was somewhere, and according to the colored woman she was not at the house on Halkett Street.”
I was tempted then to tell him Jim’s story to Godfrey Lowell of that evening.
But I did not.
“She went somewhere, and she hid those records,” he said.
“Find where she went and we find them, and perhaps some other things I’d like to know.
Why, for instance, with these two women dead, does the search for those records go on?
What did Sarah Gittings record on at least one of those two days which is vital to the killer?
Here’s Jim Blake under indictment, and they’re apparently still important.”
“Still very important,” I said, and then I told him about Elise and her ghost.
He asked at once to see the window, and later on he talked with Elise, while I interpreted as best I could.
It was not until he was with us in the hall on the way out that he asked me if I suspected any of the servants.
“They could be bribed, you know,” he said.
“Are you sure all this fright is genuine?”
“I have almost to put the women to bed myself, Inspector.
As to Joseph, he puts up a good front, but I notice that he draws the window shades before dark now, and I’m terrified to walk suddenly into his pantry at night, for fear he shoots me.”
“He still maintains that he was attacked?”
“He’s sure of it.”
I went out to the drive with him.
It was a warm spring night with plenty of stars, and he stopped and looked up at them.
“Mighty nice,” he said.
“I like the stars. I like nature, too.
And I’m in this sort of business!”
But a moment later he was advising me to get back into the house.
“Either Jim Blake’s guilty, or whoever is guilty is still free.
And that’s not a nice thought, Miss Bell.
It’s somebody who can think faster than the police, and see every angle and every emergency.
A dangerous mind, Miss Bell, prepared to go to any length to attain its end.
Big men in business often have it, professional gamblers have it; some traders on the Exchange have it. Lombroso says there’s a criminal type. There may be. But there is a criminal mind, and this fellow has it.”
He waited to see that I got safely back into the house, and then went on.
That was the evening of the 27th of May, and long shall I remember it.
At half past nine Judy and Dick came in.
Katherine had made it clear that Dick was not welcome at the Pine Street house, and so now and then the two of them met in my library.
On such occasions I would discreetly retire, but I think even Katherine would have found these meetings harmless enough.
Early and late the two were on the crime.
On one never to be forgotten night, for example, Dick had lowered himself into the light shaft by his hands, and found that it was just possible to obtain a precarious foothold on the iron bar beneath.
But getting him out had been a different matter, and when at last he hung panting on the sill, both Judy and I were exhausted.