“Back where?”
“He went up to the second floor and down the back stairs.
That is, if he’s gone.”
Some rather awful thought evidently came into her mind at that moment, for she left me and ran up the stairs, her heavy legs and ridiculous heels moving with incredible rapidity.
She went all the way to the third floor, and I could hear voices there; the daughter’s, I imagined, and her own.
She came down more quietly.
“It just occurred to me,” she said breathlessly, “that—but she’s all right.
The daughter is with her.”
“What in the world did you think?”
But she seemed rather ashamed.
“It was funny, his slipping out like that, wasn’t it?” she asked.
“Maybe Clarissa saw him.”
As it turned out, however, Clarissa had already gone home.
Her kitchen was dark, and I think it took some courage on Lily’s part to go in and turn on the lights.
But it was empty, and she turned her attention to the door. She looked around at me with a startled face.
“I forgot!
He couldn’t get out here.
Clarissa takes the key with her.
It’s locked now, and the key’s gone.”
It was then that we both heard a sound from the pantry, and the swinging door into it opened and closed a few inches.
It was an uncanny thing, and I can still see poor Lily, leaning on the kitchen table and staring at it, and admire the courage with which she raised her quavering voice.
“Who’s there?”
In the silence which followed we both heard the front door softly close.
Evidently Mrs. Bassett’s husband, or whoever the stealthy visitor might be, had found himself locked in the kitchen, and when we went there had taken refuge in the pantry.
There were two swinging doors, and the opening of the one, as we found by experiment, caused the other to move.
As he escaped by the simple expedient of going forward through the dining room, this had happened.
But as Lily said, now blind to the proprieties and sitting weakly in a chair with her slippers in her hand, why escape at all?
“I don’t believe it was her husband, Miss Bell,” she said.
“Anybody could come here and say that.
That’s why I went upstairs.”
“To see if it was her husband?”
“To see if he had murdered her,” she said, and somehow my blood ran cold.
I took a taxicab home that night, and I did not feel safe until I was in my own house once more, with Joseph double barring the door and the dogs, as usual in my absences, settled on the best library chairs.
I told the Inspector the next day of that experience in the Halkett Street house, but he pooh-poohed the idea of its having any connection with the crimes.
“Why make so much of it?” he said.
“Most men tiptoe out of a sickroom.
They may raise the devil inside but they tiptoe out.
Watch that some time.
And as for his hiding, well, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. How do you know he hadn’t been crying?
He’d rather be caught without his clothes than crying.”
He was not so certain, however, after he had seen Mrs. Bassett that night.
He had arranged with Lily Sanderson as I had, and this time the daughter was out. He stopped by on his way home.
“Not that I got anything,” he said.
“But there’s something peculiar there.”
She had absolutely refused to talk.
Asked about her request for the police some time before, she denied having made it.
“I get queer ideas when I’ve had the dope they give me,” she said, and lay there quietly, looking at something he could not see.
When he tried to discuss the murder of Florence Gunther she said nothing whatever.
Nor was she much more communicative about her husband.
“My daughter’s a good girl, but the least said of him the better.”