“I don’t like the way all these theories keep pointin’ the finger at me, Sam,” said McPhee. “Jokes is one thing, but this feller here wants to put a noose around my neck.”
“Relax, Ed,” said Mr. Clemens. “I’m not pointing any fingers yet—just listing possibilities. The problem with that theory is that Martha would’ve had to know in advance what was going to happen. That young lady’s poker face is near as good as yours, but I swear she was caught off her guard when the doctor was killed, and I don’t think she could’ve pulled that off if she’d known. Besides, I’ve got better cards to play.”
“I hope they’re better than what you’ve shown so far,” said Tony Parkhurst. “These two needn’t have known the fellow they let in meant to kill my father. They might have thought it was all for a prank—or perhaps that he meant to rob the party.”
“Good thinking, Tony, but still not the whole story,” said Mr. Clemens. He stood up and leaned his hands on the table. “There are problems with the idea that McPhee let in some outsider to kill the doctor, or just to play a prank. When Wentworth and I first started working on this case, we thought maybe somebody had come in the back window and shot him from there—either coming along a ledge from one of the other apartments, or coming up a ladder from the ground.”
“We looked into that,” said Lestrade. “The other flat on this floor is occupied by a vicar and his wife. They were at home the entire evening. I think we can be quite certain nobody used their windows to gain entry here. As for climbing up from the ground, we’ve checked the back garden. There was no sign of a ladder being used, and the ground was soft—a ladder would have left marks.”
“What about the front window?” asked Sir Denis. “A ladder wouldn’t have left marks on the paving.”
“That would’ve been noticed,” said Lestrade. “This is a busy street, you know. A person climbing a ladder up to a front window is irregular enough for one of the neighbors to have noted it—not to mention a passing constable. We’ve looked into those possibilities, and we’re satisfied it had to be an inside job.”
“Good, I’m glad you did something sensible,” said Mr. Clemens. There was an appreciative chuckle from Villiers, along with a malicious grin. For his part, Lestrade gave my employer a nasty look but held his tongue when Mr. Clemens hastened to add, “Actually, that’s not fair. You’ve done a lot of sensible things, and they’ve narrowed down the field a good bit. You just haven’t taken the next step, which is to see what’s left after you’ve eliminated all the impossibilities.”
“That’s the problem with you amateurs,” said Lestrade. “You always want to discount common sense in favor of some notion so esoteric it needs an Oxford don to puzzle it out. Well, your criminal mastermind is a creature of bad fiction. The real article is usually an ill-bred fellow whose main thought is for his next tot of gin and a girl of his own sort. That lot’s not going to devise some complicated way to kill a man.”
“True enough,” said Mr. Clemens. “But there are murderers who don’t fit your image. And I think we’ve got one here. Just the choice of setting shows that this killer was more resourceful than the average. In fact, that’s one of the things that exonerates Ed and Martha, in my mind.”
“I’m not certain we should take that as a compliment, Mr. Clemens,” said Martha. “But if it leads to my husband’s release, I will take no offense at it.”
“Take it however you want,” said Mr. Clemens. “My point is, whoever killed Dr. Parkhurst had a long-standing grudge against him, and time to cook up a remarkably complex plot. How long have you been in the country, Mrs. McPhee? Not even long enough to meet the doctor—it was the first time he’d even gone to a séance, and that was at his wife’s urging. Am I right, Mrs. Parkhurst? Did your husband ever even meet Ed or Martha before that night?”
“Certainly not to my knowledge,” said the widow. “Of course, I did mention the new medium, Mrs. McPhee, to him when Ophelia and I were urging him to come. And it is possible that one of them visited his surgery, of course.”
“If they did, his partner didn’t know about it,” said Mr. Clemens. “My point is, they hardly knew him well enough to have any grudge against him—or even to sympathize with somebody else’s grudge. They’re both too mercenary to get tied up in somebody else’s problems with no profit to themselves.”
“You don’t know that,” said Lestrade. “They may have been promised money when the whole affair blows over. Except we’re here to make certain it won’t.”
“Well, Martha’s staying in the place where a man was killed because she’d lose the month’s rent if she moved out,” said my employer. “That isn’t how somebody acts when she expects a lot of money to be coming in. But let’s get back to how the murder was committed.”
“Yes, by all means,” said Cedric Villiers, in his usual bored tone. “And could you try to make it more amusing than you’ve been so far? I’m having to forgo a very promising art opening, you know.”
“Don’t worry, there’s a stinger at the end of it,” said Mr. Clemens. “Let’s get rid of the outsider theory once and for all. The biggest problem for an outsider coming in here after the lights were off is that they wouldn’t know where the doctor
