“I’d hate to carry an automatic in my jacket pocket continuously,” he remarked softly. “Look how his pocket’s pulled all out of shape by the thing. Very untidy.”
With a gesture he stopped the comment that rose to Wendover’s lips, and then followed Fordingbridge downstairs. Wendover led the way out into the garden, where he selected a quiet spot.
“There’s one thing that struck me about Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux’s evidence,” he said, as they sat down, “and that is: It may be all lies together.”
Sir Clinton pulled out his case and lit a cigarette before answering.
“You think so? It’s not impossible, of course.”
“Well, look at it squarely,” Wendover pursued. “We know nothing about the woman. For all we can tell, she may be an accomplished liar. By her own showing, she had some good reason for wanting Staveley out of the way.”
“It wouldn’t be difficult to make a guess at it,” Sir Clinton interjected. “I didn’t want to go beyond our brief this morning, or I’d have asked her about that. But I was very anxious not to rouse her suspicions, and the matter really didn’t bear directly on the case, so I let it pass.”
“Well, let’s assume that her yarn is mostly lies, and see where that takes us,” Wendover went on. “We know she was at the cottage all right; we’ve got the footprint to establish that. We know she was on the rock, too, for her footprints were on the sands, and she doesn’t contest the fact of her presence either. These are the two undeniable facts.”
“Euclidian, squire. But it leaves the story a bit bare, doesn’t it? Go on; clothe the dry bones with flesh, if you can.”
Wendover refused to be nettled. He was struggling, not too hopefully, to shift the responsibility of the murder from the shoulders of Cressida to those of another person; and he was willing to catch at almost any straw.
“How would this fit, then?” he demanded. “Suppose that Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux herself was the murderess. She makes her appointment with Staveley at the cottage as she told us; and she goes there, just as she said she did. She meets Staveley, and he refuses to see her. Now assume that he blurts out the tale of his appointment at 11 p.m. at Neptune’s Seat with Mrs. Fleetwood, and makes no appointment at all with Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux for that evening. That part of her tale would be a lie, of course.”
Sir Clinton flicked the ash from his cigarette on to the seat beside him, and seemed engrossed in brushing it away.
“She goes to the shore near 11 p.m.,” Wendover continued, “not to meet Staveley, as she told us, but to eavesdrop on the two of them, as she confessed she did in her tale. She waits until Mrs. Fleetwood goes away; and then she sees her chance. She goes down to the rock herself then and she shoots Staveley with her own hand for her own purposes. She leaves the body on the rock and returns, as her footmarks show, to the road, and so to the hotel. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing whatever, squire, except that it omits the most damning facts on which the inspector’s depending. It leaves out, for instance, the pistol that he found in Mrs. Fleetwood’s golf-blazer.”
Wendover’s face showed that his mind was hard at work.
“One can’t deny that, I suppose,” he admitted. “But she might quite well have let off her pistol to frighten Staveley. That would account for—”
He broke off, thought hard for a moment or two, then his face cleared.
“There were two cartridge-cases: one at the rock and one at the groyne. If Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux killed Staveley, then the cartridge-case on the rock belongs to her pistol; and any other shot fired by the Fleetwoods—at the groyne. That means that Stanley Fleetwood, behind the groyne, fired a shot to scare Staveley. Then, when the Fleetwoods had gone, Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux went down and shot him on the rock. That accounts for everything, doesn’t it?”
Sir Clinton shook his head.
“Just think what happens when you fire an automatic. The ejector mechanism jerks the empty case out to your right, well clear of your shoulder, and lands it a yard or two behind you. It’s a pretty big impulse that the cartridge-case gets. Usually the thing hops along the ground, if I remember rightly. You can take it from me that a shot fired from where Fleetwood crouched wouldn’t land the cartridge-case at the point where Cargill showed us he’d picked it up.”
Wendover reflected for a while.
“Well, who did it, then?” he demanded. “If the shot had been fired on the rock, the cartridge-case couldn’t have skipped that distance, including a jump over the groyne. And there were no other footmarks on that far side of the groyne except Fleetwood’s.”
Again he paused, thinking hard.
“You said there was a flaw in the inspector’s case. Is this it, by any chance?”
Looking up, he saw the figure of Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux crossing the lawn not far from them.
“That’s very opportune,” he said, glancing after her. “Any objection to my asking your witness a couple of questions, Clinton?”
“None whatever.”
“Then come along.”
Wendover managed matters so that it appeared as though they had encountered Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux by a mere accident; and it was only after they had talked for a few minutes on indifferent matters that he thought it safe to ask his questions.
“You must have got drenched before you reached the hotel on Friday night, madame, surely? I hope there have been no ill-effects?”
“Yes, indeed!” Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux answered readily. “It was a real rain of storm—how do you say that in English?”
“Thunderstorm; heavy shower,” Sir Clinton suggested.
“Yes? Une pluie battante. I was all wetted.”
“When did the rain start, do you remember?” Wendover asked indifferently.
Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux showed no hesitation whatever.
“It was after the automobile had started to return to the hotel—a few minutes only after that.”
“You must have got soaked to
