‘This is the weapon which killed Mr Rennick.’ I fancied I heard a gasp as she spoke. Although I whirled almost on the instant, however, I could detect no signs of it in the faces behind me.
‘I propose to conduct a short experiment, which I assure you is absolutely necessary to my chain of reasoning,’ Madelyn continued. ‘You may or may not know that the body of a calf practically offers the same degree of resistance to a knife as the body of a man. Dead flesh, of course, is harder and firmer than living flesh, but I think that, adding the thickness of clothes, we may take it for granted that in the quarter of veal before us, we have a fair substitute for the body of Raymond Rennick. Now watch me closely, please!’
Drawing back her arm, she plunged her knife into the meat with a force which sent it spinning on its hook. She drew the knife out, and examined it reflectively.
‘I have made a cut of only a little more than three and a half inches. The blow which killed Mr Rennick penetrated at least five inches.
‘Here we encounter a singularly striking feature of our case, involving a stratagem which I think I can safely say is the most unique in my experience. To all intents, it was a woman who killed Mr Rennick. In fact, it has been taken for granted that he met his death at the hand of a female assassin. We must dispose of this conclusion at the outset, for the simple reason that it was physically impossible for a woman to have dealt the death blow!’
I chanced to be gazing directly at Fletcher Duffield as Madelyn made the statement. An expression of such relief flashed into his face that instinctively I turned about and followed the direction of his glance. His eyes were fixed on his sister, Beth.
Madelyn deposited the knife on the stand.
‘Indeed, I may say there are few men – perhaps not one in ten – with a wrist strong enough to have dealt Mr Rennick’s death blow,’ she went on. ‘There is only one such person among the fourteen in this room at the present time.
‘Again you will recall that the wound was delivered from the rear just as Mr Rennick faced about in his own defence. Had he been attacked by a woman, he would have heard the rustle of her dress several feet before she possibly could have reached him. I think you will recall my demonstration of that fact yesterday morning, Mr Duffield.
‘Obviously then, it is a man whom we must seek if we would find the murderer of your secretary, and a man of certain peculiar characteristics. Two of these I can name now. He possessed a wrist developed to an extraordinary degree, and he owned feet as small and shapely as a woman’s. Otherwise, the stratagem of wearing a woman’s slippers and leaving one of them near the scene of the crime to divert suspicion from himself, would never have occurred to him!’
Again I thought I heard a gasp behind me, but its owner escaped me a second time.
‘There was a third marked feature among the physical characteristics of the murderer. He was near-sighted – so much so that it was necessary for him to wear glasses of the kind known technically as a “double lens”. Unfortunately for the assassin, when his victim fell, the latter caught the glasses in his hand, and they were broken under his body. The murderer may have been thrown into a panic, and feared to take the time to recover his spectacles; but it was a fatal blunder. Fortune, however, might have helped him even then in spite of this fact, for those who found the body fell into the natural error of considering the glasses to be the property of the murdered man. Had it not been for two minor details, this impression might never have been contradicted.’
Madelyn held up a packet of newspaper illustrations. Several of them I recognized as the pictures of the murdered secretary that she had shown me at the ‘Roanoke’. The others were also photographs of the same man.
‘If Mr Rennick hadn’t been fond of having his picture taken, the fact that he never wore glasses on the street might not have been noticed. None of his pictures, not even the snap-shots, showed a man in spectacles. It is true that he did possess a pair, and it is here where those who discovered the crime went astray. But they were for reading purposes only, the kind termed a .125 lens, while those of his assailant were a .210 lens. To clinch the matter, I later found Mr Rennick’s own spectacles in his room where he had left them the evening before.’
Madelyn held up the red leather case she had found on the mantelpiece, and tapped it musingly as she gave a slight nod to Inspector Taylor.
‘We have now the following description of the murderer – a slenderly built man, with an unusual wrist, possibly an athlete at one time, who possesses a foot capable of squeezing into a woman’s shoe, and who is handicapped by near-sightedness. Is there an individual in this room to whom this description applies?’
There was a new glitter in Madelyn’s eyes as she continued.
‘Through the co-operation of Inspector Taylor, I am enabled to answer this question. Mr Taylor has traced the glasses of the assassin to the optician who gave the prescription for them. I am not surprised to find that the owner of the spectacles tallies with the owner of these other interesting articles.’
With the words, she whisked from the stand at her elbow, the long, narrow-bladed dagger, and a pair of soiled, black suede slippers.
There was a suggestion of grotesque unreality about it all. It was much as though I had been viewing the denouement of a play from
