“They’ve taken away the door,” he said.
“What door?”
“There was a door there by my right hand.
It’s on the other side of the bed now.”
We all stood there, stupidly staring at the door.
None of us, I fancy, had the remotest idea of its significance at that moment.
It was Katherine who realized it first.
“Are you certain you were in this room, Mr. Waite?”
“I don’t know.
They all look alike.
Of course they are always changing these places about.”
And I think to Katherine must go the credit of that discovery, although Inspector Harrison had known it for at least a week.
She was very calm, very quiet, as she went into the hall and called Miss Todd again.
“You are certain that this was my husband’s bedroom?”
“Oh, yes, indeed, Mrs. Somers.”
“And it has not been altered since?
No changes have been made?”
“Only the new curtains at the windows.”
“Thank you.”
Miss Todd retired, her sharp eyes giving us a final survey as she closed the door.
Not until she was gone did Katherine move, and then it was to cross the sitting room and glance into the bedroom there.
Then she called to us, quietly enough.
“I think this is where you came, Mr. Waite,” she said.
“To Walter’s bedroom, where an accomplice of Walter’s impersonated his father and drew that will.”
And only then was there a ring of triumph in her tired voice.
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew it.
My poor Howard!”
Chapter Thirty-one
OF THE PLOT WHICH lay behind that discovery we had no knowledge.
It was enough at the moment that there had been a conspiracy.
But later on in the day, the initial shock over, our ideas began to crystallize.
Who had been the man in the bed?
What relation did he bear to the murders?
Was he himself the murderer?
None of us, however, gathered in my library that night, believed what was the fact; that the amazing denouement was even then in preparation, and that it was a matter of only a few hours until all our questions were to be answered.
We were silent but more cheerful than we had been for days on end.
There was hope now for Jim, and Katherine’s relief was written in her face.
Jim would be saved and Howard was once again hers to mourn.
The frozen look had left her.
Judy too looked better than she had looked for weeks.
She had come in with her eyes bright and her color high, to show me a very nice but extremely small diamond on her engagement finger.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she said.
“It is indeed beautiful,” I told her gravely. For it seemed so to me, that symbol of Dick’s pride and his essential honesty.
And I was proud of Judy, that she wore that bit of stone as a queen might wear a crown.
But talking got us nowhere that night.
Again and again we went back to the scene in that hotel bedroom, with no result.
It was Judy, with Dick’s arm around her and Katherine accepting that as she had accepted the ring, who put forth the theory that the fifty thousand dollar clause which had been put in the will was to be the payment to this unknown for his services.
And it was Dick who followed that scene to its logical conclusion, and who said that a man who could put on a wig and look enough like Howard to deceive Mr. Waite under those circumstances, could easily have fooled Jim at night on the hillside.
Nevertheless, we were as far from the identity of this man as ever.
It was a broiling July night.