Wendover intervened with a suggestion.
“Perhaps the burglars heard you coming and switched off.”
Sir Clinton had evidently heard all he wished to know about the light.
“And what happened next, Mr. Shandon?”
“When I came to the bottom of the ladder, I said to myself: ‘Burglars.’ You remember you’d been talking about how easy it would be to get into Whistlefield, that very night, in the museum. Then I had an idea. I took away the ladder as quietly as I could. That would prevent them getting out of the window again, you see? And then I went off back to the front door, let myself in, and roused Stenness and young Torrance. I was very nervous, you understand. Anyone might be, after getting a surprise like that.”
He took a fresh cigarette and lighted it with care. As he was about to continue his narrative, Sir Clinton arrested him and turned to Stenness.
“Perhaps you could give us your experiences, Mr. Stenness.”
“I’d gone to bed at the usual time, and fell asleep. I was waked up by someone knocking at my door; and when I got up I found it was Mr. Shandon. He said there were burglars in the room that Mr. Neville Shandon’s body was lying in. Mr. Shandon had on a cap and a light overcoat. As soon as he had waked me, he went off to wake Mr. Torrance. I looked at my watch. It was 2:35 a.m. I picked up the poker from my fireside and went out of my room. Mr. Torrance was there, too, by that time. I suggested that he had better get a poker as well, or else go down to the gun-room and get something better. He got a poker. Then all three of us went to Neville Shandon’s room. The door was locked; but we burst it in without making much of a noise. It’s an old door, and the lock fitted very poorly. There was no light on in the room when I got to it.”
“I’m almost sure, now I think over it, that there wasn’t any light at the window,” Ernest began again. “I couldn’t have helped seeing it, could I? Of course, all the rest of the house was dark, so if that window was dark it wouldn’t catch my eye and I wouldn’t remember about it. But if it had been lit up, I’d have noticed it at once.”
Stenness took no notice of the interruption.
“Somebody had evidently been in the room. Everything was upside down. All the drawers had been ransacked and their contents had been thrown about. Neville Shandon’s attaché case had been treated in the same way. The whole place was in confusion.”
“Did you make out what the thieves had been searching for?”
“Well, his writing-case had been torn open and most of the contents had been strewn about the floor. They’d been in a great hurry over their work. And his pocketbook was pitched over into one corner of the room as if someone had been through the contents and had chucked it away.”
“What about money? His notecase was lying on the dressing-table. I put it there myself when I searched his body yesterday.”
“Some notes were lying on the floor amongst the rest of the stuff. I didn’t count them. In fact I didn’t touch anything. I thought you’d better see things as they were.”
“The window was still open?”
“Yes.”
“It looks as though the burglar (or burglars) had got away before Mr. Shandon saw the ladder, then. They’d cleared out and left the ladder in position. What about the key of the door?”
“It hasn’t turned up.”
“And what happened after that? Why didn’t you ring up the police at once?”
Stenness suppressed a sardonic smile with evident difficulty.
“Mr. Shandon was to look after that part. I went back to my room, put on some clothes, and kept myself awake by reading till the morning. We hadn’t roused the rest of the people in the house.”
Sir Clinton turned to Ernest.
“Couldn’t you get through to the police-station, Mr. Shandon? I must see about this. It’s a serious matter for my subordinates.”
Ernest seemed completely taken aback by this view of the question.
“Well, Sir Clinton, I suppose I ought to have rung up the police; but it was very late, you know. I was awfully sleepy; and as I was walking along, I turned into my own bedroom. I was very shaken up by the whole affair. It hasn’t happened to me before, you see. And somehow, I must have begun to undress quite without thinking about it—you know how one does things unconsciously …”
Then, with disarming frankness, he admitted the truth:
“I went to bed. And after a minute or two, I remembered I ought to have rung up the police. But that would have meant getting out of bed again and putting on some clothes to go down to the phone. It would have been a lot of trouble. And it didn’t seem to me that it mattered very much really. So while I was thinking about it, I fell asleep. But I rang you up as soon as I got up this morning.”
Sir Clinton made no comment on Ernest’s methods. He had got all the information he needed apparently, for now he turned to Stenness and suggested that they should go upstairs and look at the scene of the burglary.
Neville Shandon’s room bore out Stenness’s description of it. Everything seemed to have been turned over and left higgledy-piggledy. The floor was littered with a confused mass of clothes, papers, contents of drawers, and other things. It seemed as though the whole place had been searched in frantic haste for some object or other; but whether the seeker had succeeded or not was apparently an insoluble problem.
Sir Clinton stepped over to the still open window and examined the sill.
“The marks of the ladder-ends are there, clear enough,” he pointed out to Wendover, “and there’s the
