“At a quarter to five yesterday afternoon Sarah Gittings left this house.
She was back in half an hour, according to the butler. She asked for an early dinner and left the house again at five minutes after seven.
“But following that return of hers, Sarah Gittings did two peculiar things.
She went down to the cellar, took a chair from the laundry there and carried it into the room where the firewood is stored; it is there now.
And according to the laundress, she cut off from a new clothes line an undetermined amount of rope. The line had been neatly rolled and replaced, but she is a sharp woman, that laundress.”
Wallie had been following this intently, and it seemed to me that he looked relieved.
He had stopped twirling his ring.
“I see,” he said.
“She tied the dogs to the tree herself.”
“It looks like it.”
Judy was watching him. “Feeling better, Wallie?” she asked, looking more cheerful herself. “Weight off the old mind, and all that?”
But he did not even hear her.
He drew a long breath and lighted a cigarette.
“I don’t mind saying,” he said to the detective, “that this thing is vitally important to me.
I—you’ve relieved me more than you know.”
But I had been thinking.
“If she took that piece of rope, it was not to tie the dogs up; I can assure you of that.
She had not expected to take them. I don’t think she wanted to take them.
And as for this man on the stairs,” I went on, rather tartly, “you tell me that that was Sarah Gittings, who had left the house only a half hour before, and who could get in at any time!
I am to believe that Sarah went to that empty lot, tied up the dogs, put on a pair of dark trousers, broke her way in through the drawing room door, and deliberately let me see her on the staircase!
Remember, she knew about that mirror.”
“But that’s where the man in the case comes in,” said Judy, maliciously.
“Sarah’s lover.
He met her at the lot and found she’d forgotten her toothbrush.
Naturally, he refused to elope with her without her toothbrush.
It’s all perfectly simple.”
Mr. Harrison smiled.
“Still,” he said, rising, “she did take the rope.
And now we’ll look at that broken door.”
But with the peculiar irony of events which was to handicap all of us through the entire series of crimes, all traces of footprints in the ground near the steps—there is no walk there—had already been obliterated.
The rain was over, and Abner Jones had commenced his spring cleaning up of the lawns and had carefully raked away any possible signs.
Nevertheless, Judy maintained that Mr. Harrison had found something on the steps.
“When he stooped over to tie his shoe,” she said, “he stooped and picked up something very small and shiny.
It looked like the point of a knife.”
By noon there was still no news of Sarah.
All reports had been negative, and I believe that the Inspector found no further clues.
Judy reported once that he and the officer in uniform were going through the trash barrel in the service yard and taking out the glass from the broken window.
But the rain must have washed it fairly clean.
Clara had been told to put Sarah’s room in order again, but when that had been done Inspector Harrison advised me to lock it and keep the key.
He left us at noon.
It was raining hard, but some time later I saw him, in a dripping mackintosh, moving slowly around in the Larimer property.
When I looked out again, an hour later, he was still there, but he seemed to have exchanged his soft hat for a cap.
It was not until the figure had disappeared over the hillside that I decided that it was not the Inspector, but some one else.
Chapter Five
THE VAST MAJORITY OF crimes, I believe, are never solved by any single method or any single individual.
Complex crimes, I mean, without distinct clues and obvious motives.
Certainly in the case of Sarah Gittings, and in those which followed it, the final solution was a combination of luck and—curiously enough—the temporary physical disability of one individual.
And I am filled with shuddering horror when I think where we all might be but for this last.
That day, Tuesday, dragged on interminably.
I could do no work on the biography, and Mary Martin was shut up in her room with a novel.