Then she had said she was in pain and had called sharply for Lily, and he had come away.
“But she knows something,” he told me.
“Not necessarily that the husband has anything to do with it.
She knows something.
She had a queer look about her.
I’ve seen it before.”
“What sort of look?”
“I saw it once before in the face of a man just before he jumped out of a tenth story window.”
And so, like everything else which might have helped in the defense, that too had come to nothing.
I believe the Inspector made at least one other attempt to see her, but either she was frightened, or more likely she had been warned, for she told him nothing.
And before our mystery was cleared up she was dead.
By the tenth of June Jim’s trial began.
Public opinion and the prosecution had done everything possible to expedite the proceedings, and the defense was equally anxious.
Jim was not bearing the confinement well.
The jail was dark and airless, and the general feeling against him so strong and so infuriated that the authorities could do nothing to ameliorate his situation.
There had been leaks of various sorts.
It was known that Jim’s clothing had shown minute blood stains in spite of Amos, and that he had been on the hillside the night of Sarah’s death at ten o’clock.
Two persons, a man and a woman, had come forward to state that they were coming up the path that night, and that they had seen a man in light golf clothing, standing beside the path and wiping something from his hands with a handkerchief.
The man, named Francis X.
Dennis, made his statement unwillingly enough.
“I didn’t want to be mixed up in this,” he told the reporters, “but my wife thinks we’d better speak up.
We’d been taking a walk, and we came along to the foot of the hill about five minutes to ten.
“My wife’s hearing is better than mine, and she stopped and said there was somebody scrambling through the bushes overhead.
We listened, and it seemed like somebody was running along the hillside.
We didn’t start up until it got quiet again, and my wife was kind of nervous.
“Well, when we’d got about halfway up there was a man.
He was about ten feet off the path on our right and I saw that he had on a light golf suit and cap.
He didn’t pay any attention to us.
He seemed to be busy with his hands, wiping them.
“After we’d got up the hill my wife said:
‘He’s cut himself.
He’s tying up his hand.’
I said maybe he’d slipped and fallen when he was running, and—well, I guess that’s about all.”
It was a body blow for the defense, coming when it did and with a detail the more convincing because it was unstudied.
Both these people believed that it was Jim they had heard running along the hillside below the Larimer lot toward the path, and Godfrey Lowell threw up his hands in despair.
“This case is being tried in the press,” he said.
“We’ll have a verdict before we even get into court!”
But I have thought about Godfrey since, sitting in his office and talking to the imposing array of counsel who were to help him, and going home at night to lie awake for hours, studying the darkness for some weakness to attack, some point to be made:
“And I say to you, gentlemen of the jury—”
What?
What could he say?
That Jim was a good fellow who gave good dinners and played excellent bridge?
That he was a decent citizen, who had spent that evening conversing harmlessly with another woman who had since been murdered?
And that he was given to nosebleed, which would account for the blood on his clothes?
Jim still stubbornly silent, and Godfrey lying there and wondering.
Was Jim innocent, after all?
I believe that until the day before the trial he was uncertain.
Then I was able to give him a little, a very little help.
Small as it was it heartened him, and on it he hung his defense, but even then he was not sure.
It was an odd conversation I had with the Inspector that second evening before Jim’s trial.