It was pretty clear to me that Joseph had had to help Walter out of the house the night he broke in.
“And I had had a theory that Walter knew a good bit about the attack on him at the top of the back stairs.
“Then there were some queer things about the shooting.
Joseph was sitting in the pantry with the shades drawn, ‘because it was safer,’ but he tells some cock and bull story about dropping off to sleep, and that with the kitchen door standing wide open!
“It looked fishy to me, and as I say I thought of Walter Somers.
He had had a revolver when he left, and of course at that time I didn’t know the rest of the story. So it was for Walter’s footprints that I looked the next morning, around the grounds and down the hill.
But I didn’t find them. I found something that I couldn’t make out.
“It looked to me as though a woman had climbed that hill the night before, and gone back the same way.
You’ll remember that it had been raining, and the ground was soft.
Certainly a woman had come up that hillside, walked past the garage and through the shrubbery toward the kitchen door.
And she had gone back the same way, except that she went out the front door and around back along the opposite side of the house from where the three of you were.
“But here was the queer thing.
It was a heavy-ish woman, moving slowly, and she walked on the outsides of her feet.
I’d seen prints like that before.
“Well, I had two choices, and I took the wrong one.
Young Carter had been in the house at the time the shot was fired, or close to it; he had a revolver in his car, and he had a knife with the point gone, and that broken blade fitted the bit I’d picked up on the steps back there.
And there were other things. He had an interest in that will and he was young and strong.
I don’t mind saying that I gave him considerable thought.
“It was you yourself who put me on the right track.
If it hadn’t been for that message of yours about the Bassett woman I believe this murderer, this cold and crafty assassin, would be free tonight, and not where he is.
“But we had to move slowly.
We had no proof; we had the story and the motive, but what else?
Not a fingerprint, or a track, or a weapon!
Nothing to hang the case on, and he knew it.
We went through his belongings with a fine tooth comb, and found nothing.
We could jail him for forging that will, but we wanted him for four murders!”
“Four?”
“Amos was murdered,” he said.
“He was shoved into the river and he couldn’t swim.
Because he couldn’t swim,” he amended that.
“Four murders and three murderous assaults, and we had nothing.
“Nothing that we could lay our hands on, anyhow. But it came to me one day, sitting by Walter’s bed, that if this man would do all he had done for fifty thousand dollars, he’d be likely to have kept that check for a thousand; that if he had, we had him.
“We watched him after that, day and night.
And at last he slipped up. He slipped up today.
He went today to the Commercial Bank to draw some money.
He had an account there in the name of Norton.
And he had a box there, too.
“We had the bank open that box tonight, and we found that check there; the check, and the duplicate copy of the will Sarah Gittings carried hidden the night she was killed.
“So we got him.
We’d had his house surrounded, and he hadn’t a chance.
He walked out of that house tonight in a driving storm, and got into a car, the same car he had been using all along; the car he used to visit Howard Somers and the car in which he had carried Florence Gunther to her death, under pretext of bringing her here to you.
“But he was too quick for us, Miss Bell.
That’s why I say I bungled the job.
He had some cyanide ready.
He looked at the car, saw the men in and around it, said,
“Well, gentlemen, I see I am not to have my holiday—”
“Holiday!
You’re not telling me—”
“Quietly, Miss Bell!
Why should you be grieved or shocked?