“Possibly,” she said.
“Still, as it’s the sort Elizabeth Jane uses herself, with the point looking as though she’d sharpened it with her teeth, I see nothing to write home about.”
That annoyed him.
“All right,” he told her.
“We’ll see.
It may have fingerprints.”
“I thought you’d decided he wore gloves!
Why don’t you try to find how he got in?
That’s more to the point.
And also how he got out?”
It seems strange to be writing all this; the amiable bickering between Wallie and Judy; the light-hearted experiment to find if a pencil dropped from the third floor made the sound I had heard, and my own feeling that it did not; and the final discovery of the shattered pane in the rear French door of the drawing room, and our failure to see, lying on the step outside, that broken point of a penknife which Inspector Harrison was to find the next morning. Strange, almost frivolous.
It was Judy who found the broken pane, hidden as it was behind the casement curtains on the door, and who pointed out the ease with which our intruder had reached in and turned the key.
There is another door at the back of the drawing room, a sort of service entrance which opens into the rear hall beside the servants’ staircase, and it was evident that he had used this to gain access to the upper floors.
“Easy enough,” said Judy.
“But he couldn’t get out that way.
Clara was coming down to her dinner, so he hid on the front stairs.”
“And I suppose he was not in the light shaft at all?” Wallie demanded.
“I don’t say he wasn’t,” said my surprising Judy.
“I only say that the pencil is not proved.
I think it very likely he did hide in the shaft.
He’d retreated before Joseph as far as he could go.”
“But what did he want?” I demanded.
“I don’t suppose he broke in here to drop a pencil.
If he was coming down when I saw him—”
“Well, he might have been going up,” said Judy practically.
“A good burglar might start at the top and work down. Like housecleaning.”
Wallie had sealed the pencil in an envelope for the police, and I daresay all of this had not taken much more than half an hour.
It must have been at nine o’clock or thereabouts, then, that I sent the maids to their beds and watched them as they made a nervous half-hysterical start, and nine-thirty before Joseph and Wallie had placed a padlock on the broken door in the drawing room.
Then I ordered Joseph to bed, but he objected.
“Miss Sarah has not come in.”
“She has a key, Joseph.”
But I was uneasy.
In the excitement I had forgotten Sarah.
Wallie looked up sharply from the door. “Sarah!” he said.
“Is she still out?”
“Yes.
And she has the dogs. Where could she stay until this hour with two dogs?
She has no friends.”
I left Wallie and Judy in the drawing room, and wandered out and down the steps.
It was a cold night, without a moon but with plenty of starlight, and I walked down the drive.
I remembered that as I walked I whistled for the dogs.
Sometimes she loosened them and they preceded her home.
It seemed to me that I heard a dog barking far off somewhere, but that was all. I was vaguely inclined to walk in that direction.
The dog seemed to be at the far end of the Larimer lot or beyond it, in the park.
But at the gate I met Mary Martin, hurrying home.
She had been out somewhere for dinner, and she was slightly sulky; it was a continued grievance with her that Sarah had a key to the house and she had none, but I have an old-fashioned sense of responsibility to the people in my employ, and Mary was a still young and very pretty girl.
On the way to the house I told her about our burglar, and she relaxed somewhat.
“I don’t think you should be out here alone,” she said.
“He may still be about.”
“I was looking for Sarah,” I explained.