The one anomalous object I found turned out to be the picture that swung aside to uncover the peephole. Mr. Clemens came over to give it a cursory examination, then nodded and went back to his own search. Neither he nor Martha McPhee had discovered anything worth drawing attention to, either.
Finally, after about an hour of searching, Mr. Clemens got up off his knees (he had been prowling under the large table at which we’d sat for the séance), put little Jean’s magnifying glass back in his pocket, and stood up. It looked very much as if he were favoring a crick in his back. He rubbed a spot just above his coattails and said, “Damnation! This whole silly Sherlock business is overrated. I’ve looked at a couple of acres of floor, and the underside of the table and every single one of the chairs, and tapped things and shook ’em and looked at ’em through the magnifier, and I haven’t found so much as one Trichinopoly cigar ash, let alone anything to help me find a murderer. Hell, if I had to prove somebody’s shot a gun off in here, I don’t think I could. If the police can make a case out of dripped candle wax and scuffed carpet, let ’em do it. Sam Clemens is out of his depth, and not too proud to admit it.”
Martha was down on her knees in the far corner of the room. She gave a sudden sneeze, presumably from the dust she had been inspecting. “Excuse me!”
She stood up and continued. “I haven’t found anything, either. But I have a personal stake in this question, you know. If this avenue is closed, there must be another open. What do we do to find it?”
“Perhaps we are wasting our time attempting to duplicate the work of the police,” I suggested. “Their detectives perform searches all the time, and I would be surprised if any important physical evidence escaped Inspector Lestrade’s notice—if it did, it is likely to be something small enough to escape our notice, as well.”
Mr. Clemens paced a few steps back and forth, stretching out his arms to work out the kinks in his back. “I hate to admit that weasely-looking fellow might be smarter than I am, but I reckon you have a point, Wentworth. When it comes to searching a place, he’s got years of experience and I’m a pup. So I reckon I’ve got to steer my own boat and see if I can get to the dock ahead of him. Let’s go back to the beginning, Martha. Sit down and tell me everything that happened last night, just as you saw it.”
“Very well, Mr. Clemens,” said Martha, settling into one of the armchairs near the doorway. “But a great deal happened last night, as you know. Where should I begin?”
“Start with the guests arriving,” said Mr. Clemens. He plopped himself in a chair opposite her, and gestured to me to take out my notebook. It looked as if we were in for a long session.
10
“Who was the first to arrive last night?” asked Mr. Clemens. He had taken out his old corncob pipe and was scraping it with some sort of pipe-cleaning tool. I had grown to suspect that he enjoyed fiddling with the pipe almost as much as actually smoking it. It was an excellent excuse for a conversational pause, gaining him useful time to think.
“Cedric Villiers was first,” said Martha McPhee. “He lives not far from here, and came over after supper. Next were Sir Denis and Lady Alice. They brought Hannah Boulton with them. The Parkhursts—and Mrs. Parkhurst’s sister, Miss Donning—arrived about the same time as you and your family.”
“Good, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Mr. Clemens. “I want to go through the guests one at a time. How did you meet Villiers? How did he get invited to the séance?”
“Cedric was one of the first people Edward and I met in London,” said Martha, touching her chin with the tip of one finger. “He expressed a great interest in spiritualism, and that led very naturally to my telling him about my mediumship. Later, he introduced me to others who shared that interest, and in fact most of those who came to the sitting were people we met through his kind offices. He has been a great help to me.”
“Surprising,” said Mr. Clemens, looking up from the pipe. “I’d have thought he was way too wrapped up in his own cleverness to much notice anybody else.”
“Oh!” said Martha. “Cedric is a bit of a snob, isn’t he? He and Edward have never really gotten along—as you saw last night, I think. But in spite of all that, he’s been my entree into English society”—she paused, and her expression turned sober—“though after what happened last night, I fear many of those doors will close to me.”
“Well, if we prove you and Ed didn’t have anything to do with the murder, I reckon you’ll be all right,” said Mr. Clemens. “But let’s stay on track, now. Villiers—did he help you any way besides introducing you to people?”
“Oh, yes,” said Martha. “He found this apartment for us—a flat, he called it, and it took Edward a while to understand what he meant. We’d been living in a much less suitable place closer to the City, and he told us this one was available—I think someone he knows had looked at it, but ended up not taking it. And he let us borrow a few bits of furniture, too, so we could have enough chairs for all of the people we’d have in for a sitting, and candles, and
