“I reckon that if the cops are doing their job, they’ll send somebody around to check on that,” said Mr. Clemens. “Or maybe not—Lestrade seems pretty happy with his theory, so maybe he’ll let things that might contradict it slide. But even if somebody did see our killer set up a ladder under that window last night, that doesn’t help Ed, does it? In fact, it looks even worse for him—who had a better chance to make sure that window was unlocked?”
“I, for one,” said Martha. “But I must tell you, this theory is just as farfetched as Mr. Lestrade’s. Someone who wanted to murder the doctor would have been better advised to ambush him outside his home.”
“That’s the most sensible thing anybody’s said,” said my employer, with a wry expression. “The only problem is, the killer didn’t do it the sensible way. If we’re going to solve this case, we’ve got to find out what really did happen—and to do that, we’ve got to eliminate all the loose ends.”
“Yes, I can see that,” said Martha. “I agree that we ought to speak to the other tenants in the building, and to the neighbors on the back side, just in case one of them noticed a man on a ladder, or anything else that might further our investigation.”
“I reckon you’re the best one to talk to the others in your building,” said Mr. Clemens. “Have you been here long enough to know any of them?”
“I’ve met a few in passing—coming in and out the door, or on the stairway landings,” she replied. “They seem somewhat aloof to me, but that may be simply because I am a foreigner.”
“Well, the English aren’t the easiest people to get to know,” said Mr. Clemens. “But by now, they’ll all have heard about the murder. They’ll talk to you, if only to pick up whatever gossip they can—they’re worse than Americans when it comes to minding their neighbors’ business. You can be pretty sure they’ll let you in to talk. And they may tell a pretty young lady something they won’t tell a police detective—or a white-haired Yankee writer.” He paused, then added, “Of course, they’re bound to talk all about you after you’ve gone.”
“I long ago gave up caring what people say about me behind my back,” said Martha McPhee, tossing her head—very prettily, I thought. “Given the life I have led, I should be extremely unhappy if I allowed gossip to get under my skin. Very well, then, I shall visit the neighbors and ask them if they saw anything unusual, and tell you anything useful I learn. What line of investigation do you plan to follow, Mr. Clemens?”
“First thing we’re going to do is go down in that garden and see if there’s any marks of a ladder,” he said. He pulled out his pocket watch to check the time. “After that, we’ll probably have time to visit at least one of the people who were here at the séance last night. Cedric Villiers lives here in Chelsea—I guess we’ll look in on him first. Do you have his address?”
“Yes, of course,” said Martha. “Let me go to my desk again.”
She disappeared into the other room for a moment, and returned with a slip of paper. “Here it is,” she said. “As I said, I will keep you informed of anything important I learn. Will you undertake to do the same for me?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Mr. Clemens. “It’s your husband who stands to face a jury if we can’t find something to clear him. I don’t want to see him hang if he’s not the killer. You’ll hear from me—or Wentworth—about whatever we learn.”
“Thank you, Mr. Clemens,” she said, managing a weary smile. “I am glad to have you for an ally. Godspeed.”
“Thank you, young lady,” said my employer, with a little bow. “I hope you’ll pardon my saying that if somebody had told me twenty years ago, I’d be trying to get Slippery Ed McPhee out of jail, I’d have called him a liar to his face.”
“We all change, don’t we, Mr. Clemens?” said Martha. “If you will only give Edward credit for the same ability to change as you find in yourself, perhaps all of us shall learn something form this sorry episode.”
And upon that note, we took our leave of Martha McPhee and went downstairs to look for ladder marks.
13
At the bottom of the stairs, Mr. Clemens and I looked for a way into the area behind the McPhees’ apartment building. The corridor had a numbered door on each side, evidently other apartments. But there was no sign of a doorway to afford access to the back gardens. “Damn,” said Mr. Clemens. “There’s got to be a way out to the back. Our killer can’t have just marched through one of the downstairs apartments with a ten-foot ladder and a gun. But that looks like the only way to get there from here.”
“This puts an end to the ladder theory,” I said. “I didn’t think it was very likely to begin with, though.”
“Don’t give up too quickly, Wentworth,” said my employer. “We haven’t even looked to see if there’s some easy way to get to the garden without going through the house. Let’s take a walk around the block and see if there’s an alleyway somebody could have walked down without being noticed.”
I saw a flaw in this proposition. “Even if there were, how would someone get through the streets carrying a long ladder without anybody seeing him? Surely he’d attract notice, just as readily as if he came through a downstairs apartment.”
“If he were dressed as a workman—a painter, say, or a chimney sweep—nobody on the street would think twice about it, or even remember it the next day,” said Mr. Clemens. “It’s not the same as barging through somebody’s living
