It was a bright cool spring day, made for lovers, and he teased her.
It was a part of the game.
“I suppose that horse can see things we can’t see!” he said.
“Why not?
Dogs can.”
And at that moment Jock, beside the base of the structure, suddenly raised his head and let out a long wail.
They were rather incoherent about what happened after that.
It was Dick who finally got to the top and looked down.
At first he could see nothing. Then he made out what looked like a bundle of clothing below, and Judy knew by his face.
Even then of course they were not certain it was Sarah.
They did not come home; they got the park police at once, and Dick did not let Judy wait after that. He brought her back, whimpering, and I put her to bed and waited.
It was Sarah.
They never let me see her, and I was glad of that.
She had been murdered.
There were indications of a heavy blow on the back of the head, not necessarily fatal; but the actual cause of death, poor creature, was two stab wounds in the chest.
One had penetrated to the right ventricle of the heart, and she had died very quickly.
Only later on was I to have the full picture of that tragic discovery; the evidence that the body had been dragged along beside the bridle path for almost a quarter of a mile, a herculean task; the inexplicable fact that the shoes had been removed and thrown in after the body; the difficulty of explaining how that inert figure had been lifted seven feet in the air to the top of the sewer to be dropped as it was found, head down, into that pipe-like orifice; and strangest and most dreadful of all to me, that the very rope with which the dogs had been tied when I found them, had been fastened under her arms and used to drag the body.
The homicide squad, I believe, was early on the scene, a cordon of police thrown out, and the path closed from the Larimer lot to a point beyond the sewer.
But the heavy rain and the fact that the path had been used had obliterated all traces save those broken branches down the hillside which apparently proved that Sarah had been killed on or near the Larimer property.
The body had been found at three o’clock, and the medical examination took place as soon as it could be removed.
The crime detection unit, a group of specialists, had been notified before that removal, but of the seven only one found anything to do there, and that was the photographer.
And a gruesome enough exhibit those pictures made; the waiting ambulance, the mounted men holding back the curious who attempted to break the line, and close-up photographs of that poor body in its incredible resting place.
Inspector Harrison, sitting gravely in my library that night, was puzzled and restless.
“It’s a curious case,” he said.
“Apparently motiveless.
She was not robbed; the purse was found with the body, although—you say she carried a key to this house?”
“Yes.
Inspector, I have been wondering if she did leave her bedroom door unlocked that night when she went out.
If that man on the stairs hadn’t already killed her and taken both keys.”
“I think not. And I’ll tell you why.
Now the time when you saw that figure on the stairs was at seven-thirty-five, approximately.
You’d finished a seven o’clock dinner and had got to your coffee.
That’s near enough, anyhow.
But Sarah Gittings did not die until around ten o’clock.”
“I don’t understand.
How do you know that?”
“By the food in the stomach. It had been in the stomach for approximately four hours before she died.
The autopsy showed us that.
But it does not show us where Sarah Gittings was between seven o’clock and ten. Three hours between the time she left this house and the time of her death.
Where was she?
What was she doing during that three hours?
Once we learn that, and the identity of this Florence, we will have somewhere to go.”
“I have wondered if a maniac, a homicidal maniac—”
“On account of the shoes?
No, I think not, although there may have been an endeavor to make us think that. No.
Why did Sarah Gittings take a chair from the laundry and place it in the wood-cellar?
Why did she agree to take the dogs, and at the same time take a rope with which to tie them?
What was in her room that would justify breaking into this house to secure it?
Those are the questions we have to ask ourselves, Miss Bell.
“About this rope,” he went on thoughtfully.