“It looked as though the fat was in the fire.
“After he had talked to her, Walter saw that the game was all up.
He threw up his hands and told her he’d go to his father the next day and tell him the whole story.
But he begged her not to tell Jim Blake.
If his stepmother ever heard this story he was through.
She agreed to this.
“But she would not give him the copy of the will.
Said she’d left it in the house.
And he didn’t trust her.
She had never liked him. He didn’t even believe her.
“But she showed him her hand bag, and the will was not in it.
“‘I’ll give it back to you after you’ve seen your father,’ she told him, and she left him standing there in the drive.
“He says, and I believe him, that he never saw her alive again.
“I’m not defending Walter for trying to get into the house and to get the will.
He did get in, although he broke the point of his knife in doing so.
While he was working at the putty of the door back there he says he heard her whistling and calling for Jock, who appeared to have wandered off.
She was, he thought, in or near the Larimer lot, and later on, when his errand had been fruitless and Joseph had helped him to escape from the house, he thinks he still heard her.
“I imagine he is right about that.
The dog had run off, and she hunted him.
Then, instead of going on to the house on Halkett Street, she may have been coming back here to telephone and call off that meeting.
In any event, perhaps because she was tired with the climbing she had done, on the way back she seems to have sat down on that log to rest.
“And that was where Norton found her, at or about the very time the officer had arrived and the house was being searched.
He probably heard the dogs, and so located her.
He struck her down from behind, so that she never saw him, and he thought she was dead.
Later on, at ten o’clock, he went back to look and she was still living, although unconscious.
Then he finished the job.
With a knife this time, a knife with a blade approximately four and a half inches long.
“Something scared him about that time, and he ran.
He didn’t see Blake on the hill, coming back after waiting at the Halkett Street house for her until twenty minutes to ten.
He didn’t see Blake, but Blake saw him.
And now remember this.
He—Norton—still had that wig like Howard Somers’ own hair, and he was going back to see if that job needed finishing.
Also very likely he hadn’t got the will that first time.
I believe he put that wig on his head before he went back to the lot.
“He didn’t know what had happened in the interval.
She might have been found, there might be a policeman there.
So he put on that disguise of his, and he fooled Jim Blake; evening clothes, longish white hair and so on.
It isn’t hard, when the story began to come out, to see who Jim Blake thought he saw that night.
“It put him to bed, and it damned near sent him to the chair.”
“Then this Norton, or whoever he is, killed her for the will?”
“Partly.
Partly, too, because, although Walter Somers was sick of the whole thing, Norton was determined that it go on.
It was that determination, that the will stand, that was behind all the other murders.
“If Florence had kept quiet, she might have lived.
He may have thought she would.
She’d taken that will from the safe, and she might keep quiet about it.
But she tried to see you, and that was fatal.
Also, there was something else which marked her for death.
Sarah had told Walter about her records for those two days, and when repeated searchings of this house didn’t turn them up, this Norton concluded that Florence had them.
“Under the pretext of bringing her here to you, he lured her into a car.