“Walter?” I said sharply.
“He didn’t commit them, of course.
Why should he?
Leave out his affection for his father, and still he wouldn’t.
The copy of the will is missing.
To kill the witnesses wouldn’t get him anywhere.
No, Walter Somers is out.
I don’t have too much faith in alibis, but he didn’t do it.”
Before he left he told me that the Grand Jury would have the case by Friday, and that it would undoubtedly bring in a true bill.
But he did not seem particularly happy over it.
“The more I study crime,” he said, “the less I know about the criminal.
Take this case: these three murders were cold and audacious.
They were committed by a man without fear and without scruple.
They were fiendishly clever.
“Yet we run into this situation; we find and arrest the criminal, because he has not been clever at all.
He has buried his weapon in his house, although if he killed Somers he could have dropped it into a dozen streams on that trip of his.
He has absolute nerve, a thing few men possess, and he faints when he is confronted with it.
He is strong enough to get into that airshaft and to pull himself out later—a thing I couldn’t do, and I’m a strong man for my age—and here’s his doctor swearing he’s a sick man, has been sick for several years.
“I’ve built this case.
I’ve got evidence enough to convict Jim Blake and still have some left over.
But I’m not satisfied.
Not yet anyhow.”
He broke three toothpicks in rapid succession.
“Personally, I don’t believe we have scratched the surface of this thing.
Go back to the night Miss Judy was hurt.
And, by the way, has she ever told you why she went to the garage that night?”
“She said she wanted a foot rule.”
“But she asked Joseph where the ladder was kept, didn’t she?” “Yes.”
“Now what did she want with that ladder?
To look at it or to use it?”
“I haven’t an idea, Inspector.”
“Curious,” he said.
“She had something in her mind.
She’s shrewd.
Now let’s go over that night.”
“Joseph has heard the dogs barking in the shrubbery; they stop suddenly, as though they had recognized the intruder.
You and Joseph start to the garage, and Joseph hears something. He calls
‘What’s that?’
There is no answer, and you both go on.
Some one is in the shrubbery, or has passed through it. The next day I find footprints there; not the original ones. Planted.
And by the way, those prints were made by a woman’s shoe.
I’ve done some work on them!
Not shoes from this house, however.
Joseph and I have seen to that.
“But here’s the point.
Miss Judy was hurt at ten o’clock, and it was two when Norah saw this figure in the grounds.
“And here is what I want to know.
Where would Jim Blake go, between ten and two o’clock at night, to get a pair of shoes belonging to a heavy woman who walked on the outsides of her feet?
He has no women in his house. Even his laundry goes out.
“And why would Jim Blake cover those footprints as skillfully as he did, and then bury that cane in his cellar?