“If I annoy you, why not go somewhere else?”
She lit a cigarette and looked at him.
“I don’t get it,” she said slowly.
“What’s Sarah to you?
You never cared much for her.”
“You’ll know some day.”
She cocked an eye at him.
“If eventually, why not now?”
But he merely turned on his heel and resumed his nervous pacing of the room.
Some time later he suggested that Sarah might have gone to New York, and that Judy telephone and find out.
In the end, in order not to alarm Katherine, I called up Jim Blake and told him, and he agreed to invent a message for Katherine.
Asked later about his manner over the telephone, I could remember very little.
I know he seemed surprised, and that he said he was not well, but that he would dress and come around that afternoon.
When he called back it was to say that evidently Sarah had not gone there, and that he would be around at three o’clock.
The information had a curious effect on Wallie, however.
As I watched him it seemed to me that he looked frightened; but that may be in view of what I know now.
I do, however, recall that he looked as though he had slept badly, and that day for the first time since the early days after the war I saw him begin to twist his seal ring again.
When he was not lighting a cigarette or throwing it away he was twisting his ring, turning it around and around on his finger.
Once he left us and went upstairs to look at Sarah’s room.
The policeman opened the door but would not let him enter, and I believe he spoke a few words with Mary. Indeed, I know now that he did.
But he was back in the library when the Inspector finally came in and selected a fresh toothpick, this time to make points with.
“First of all,” he said, “it is best not to jump to any conclusions.
The lady may not be dead; very probably is not dead.
We are, however, sending to the Morgue and the hospitals. But there are many reasons why people occasionally choose to disappear, and sometimes to make that disappearance as mysterious as possible.
For example, Miss Gittings had a key to the house.
It is just possible that she herself came back last night and ransacked her own room.”
“In a pair of dark trousers?” I demanded sharply.
He smiled at that.
“Perhaps!
Stranger things have been done.
But now about this key.
It was outside the door last night?”
“My secretary said so.”
“Well, it’s inside now.”
“I don’t understand it, Inspector.
Sarah always locked her door when she left the house.
Locked the door and took the key.”
“There isn’t a second key to her door?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then we’ll say that this key is hers.
It may not be, but it looks like it and wherever it was last night it’s on the inside of the door now.
Suppose for the sake of argument that she had decided to go away; to say nothing and go away. She might have forgotten something and come back for it.”
“Very probably,” said Judy. “She might have forgotten her toothbrush.”
He smiled at her.
“Precisely.
Or something she had hidden, and forgotten where she had hidden it.”
“I see,” said Judy.
“She forgot her toothbrush so she came back to get it, and as she didn’t want Joseph to know she’d forgotten it she hung in the light shaft and dropped a pencil.
It’s perfectly clear.”
“We have no proof yet that anybody was in the light shaft,” he told her, without resentment.