“He killed her and searched her, and then he went to the Halkett Street house that night and examined her room.
He made the Bassett woman help him.
It was Mrs. Bassett the Sanderson woman heard crying.
“But I want to go back to Walter.
Joseph helped him out of the house that night, and he got away down the hill behind the garage, dressed and came back here.
You were expecting him, but he had to come back anyhow.
He had dropped his fountain pen into the airshaft, and it bore his initials.
“He got it, as we know.
He was uneasy when Sarah didn’t come back, but that’s all.
He was afraid she’d left the dogs somewhere and gone on to New York.
That scared him; he wanted to do his own confessing, and when he went out and heard the dogs in the lot next door he thought she had tied them there.
He was pretty well upset, but he went back to the club and played bridge.
“That is Walter’s story, and I know that it is true in all the salient points.
When Sarah was still missing the next day he was worried, especially when you found she was not in New York. “But he still didn’t believe she was dead, and he never thought of Norton.
“When her body was found, however, he went almost crazy.
He went to Norton and Norton was shocked and grieved.
Walter just didn’t understand it, that’s all.
And when the sword-stick disappeared he began to suspect Jim Blake.
“Only why would Blake kill her?
Had she shown him that will and let him believe it was genuine?
And had Blake done it, in a passion of anger or to secure the will?
It was the only answer he had, and we have to admit that a good many people thought the same way.
“The only person who didn’t was Mary Martin, and she suspected Norton from the start.
She’d loathed the scheme from the moment she learned about it, the will and all of it.
“But Florence Gunther’s death showed Walter where he stood.
I’m not defending him for keeping silent, but it’s easy to see how he argued.
He could not bring the two women back, and how could he prove that Norton had killed them?
Norton was still protesting his innocence, calling on high heaven to show that his hands were clean.
“Then you burned the carpet from the car, and Walter was all at sea.
He didn’t know where he was.
“But Mary knew, and Norton knew she knew, or suspected.
She wasn’t safe after that, so we have her taking Joseph’s revolver and keeping it by her, and later on we have her going to New York to the Somers’ apartment. “She went out on the Brooklyn Bridge that night and threw the gun into the river.
She felt safe, after some pretty awful weeks.”
“But why go to the Somers’ apartment?” I asked, bewildered.
“Because she saw this.
She is quicker than Walter, and she believed what he still didn’t want to accept; that Norton was the killer.
She saw Norton still holding on, searching Florence’s room after her death for the records, searching this house over and over.
And by the way, there’s your ghost!
It may be helpful with your servants!
“She saw too that Mr. Somers would have to go next, before the story of that bogus will was uncovered, and that with Mr. Somers dead Jim Blake would go to the chair.
Either that or Wallie would have to tell his story, and even then that mightn’t save Blake.
Blake mightn’t have known that the will was not genuine.”
“Inspector,” I said gravely, “I want to know who Norton is.
I must know.
This is—well, it’s cruel.”
“I think it’s kindness,” he said.
“I want you to realize this man first, as he is.
The craft of him, using Jim Blake’s name to get to Howard Somers, and even dressing like him; telling Mr. Somers the proofs of Jim’s guilt, and promising for a thousand dollars to keep certain things to himself; getting Mr. Somers into his study to write that check, and putting poison into the highball while he is in that study.”
“And that is what he did?”
“That is what he did.