So I got the key to the garage and went out.
I thought I heard something in the shrubbery behind me once, but it might have been a rabbit, I don’t know.
“The tool room light had burned out, so I lighted a match when I went in.
The door was not locked, but the key was in it.
There was nobody in the tool room, unless they were behind the door when I opened it.
I lighted a fresh match, and just then the door slammed behind me and blew out the match.
I said ‘damn,’ and—that’s all I remember.”
To add to our bewilderment and my own secret anxiety, Joseph brought forth something when he carried up the ice; something which was odd, to say the least.
This was that just before ten o’clock, when he let the dogs out the back door, he heard them barking in the shrubbery.
This barking, however, ceased abruptly.
“As though they’d recognized the party,” said Joseph, who now and then lapsed into colloquial English. “Jock now, he’d never let up if it was a stranger.”
But there was something horrible in that thought; that any one who knew us would attack Judy, and the situation was not improved by Norah’s declaration the next day that, at two o’clock in the morning, four hours after the attack on Judy, she had seen some one with a flashlight in the shrubbery near the garage.
The night had been cool and she had got out of bed to close her window.
Then she saw the light, and because it was rather ghostly and the morale of the household none too good, she had simply got back into bed and drawn the covers over her head.
Inspector Harrison had come early at my request, and Norah repeated the story to him.
The flashlight, she said, was close to the ground, and almost as soon as she saw it, it went out. Up to that moment I think he had been inclined to lay Judy’s condition to accident, the more so as she refused to explain why she had been in the garage.
“Come now, Miss Judy.
You had a reason, hadn’t you?”
“I’ve told you.
I wanted to get the foot rule.”
“Did you tell Joseph you wanted to see the ladder?”
“I may have,” she said airily.
“Just to make conversation.”
“This ladder,” he persisted. “It is the one Walter Somers used in the lavatory?”
Judy yawned.
“Sorry,” she said.
“I lost some sleep last night.
Is it the same ladder, Elizabeth Jane? You tell him.”
“It is,” I said flatly, “and you know it perfectly well, Judy.
You’re being silly.”
But she had no more to say, and the Inspector stamped down the stairs in no pleasant mood and inclined to discredit her whole story. For which I did not blame him.
He did however believe Norah.
She was looking pale and demoralized, and she said something about witch lights and then crossed herself.
The result was that he at once commenced an investigation of the shrubbery, and that his men almost immediately discovered footprints in the soft ground to the right of the path and where Norah had seen the light.
There were four, two rights and two lefts, and when I went out to look at them the Inspector was standing near them, surveying them with his head on one side.
“Very neat,” he said.
“Very pretty.
See anything queer about them, Simmons?”
“They’re kind of small, if that’s it.”
“What about the heels?”
“Very good, sir. Clear as a bell.”
The Inspector drew a long breath.
“And that’s all you see, is it?” he demanded violently.
“What the hell’s the use of my trying to teach you fellows anything?
Look at those heels!
A kangaroo couldn’t have left those prints. They’ve been planted.”
He left the discomfited Simmons to mount guard over the prints and to keep the dogs away from them, and not unlike a terrier himself, set to work to examine the nearby ground and bushes.
“The fellow, whoever he was, stepped off the path there when Miss Judy came along.
But he left footprints, and later on he remembered them.
He came back, smoothed them over and planted false ones.