“What he had to tell,” Joan replied. “It was not very much; but it makes everything different. Let us go back and talk it over.”
Lucas drove straight back to Liskeard House, and there, in Joan’s room, the three held a consultation. “He was not here at all,” she told them. “I mean he did not come back to the house on Tuesday night. The telephone message must be all a mistake.”
“Do you mean that he knows nothing at all about it?” asked Ellery.
“I am quite sure that he knows nothing. He has told me exactly what he did after leaving here and up to the time when he went back to his Club.”
“You may think I ought not to ask this, Joan,” said Lucas; “but are you quite sure of what you say?”
“Absolutely sure. He was telling me the truth, I know.”
“Then I suppose,” Ellery put in, “we can produce witnesses to prove that he was somewhere else when he was supposed to be here. But who the devil did send that telephone message if he did not?”
Lucas put in a word. “Never mind that for the moment. The main thing now is to prove that he did not send it. Who was with him and where was he?”
“Ah, that’s just the difficulty. He has told me exactly where he went; but I don’t see how we can find anyone to prove it.”
“Do you mean that he was alone all the time, and no one saw him?” asked Ellery.
“Well, not quite that; but something very like it, I’m afraid.”
Then Joan was allowed to tell her story. Walter Brooklyn, after being refused an interview with Sir Vernon, had left Liskeard House at about a quarter past ten. He had stopped for a minute or two outside the Piccadilly Theatre, wondering what to do next. Then he had walked slowly along Piccadilly and into the Circus. There again he had hung about for a few minutes, and had then gone slowly along Coventry Street as far as Leicester Square. He had walked round the Square, and outside the Alhambra had stopped for a few minutes to talk to a woman of his acquaintance—“not at all a nice woman, I am afraid—and he knows no more about her than that her name is Kitty, and that she is often to be found about there. He doesn’t even know her surname. It was about a quarter to eleven when he met her.”
Then he had gone on past the Hippodrome and up Charing Cross Road as far as Cambridge Circus. He had stopped for a few minutes outside the Palace, but had not spoken to anyone, and then he had walked down Shaftesbury Avenue and back into Piccadilly Circus. In Cambridge Circus he had lighted a cigar with his last match; but it had gone out. Just outside the Monico he had stopped a man he did not know—“fellow came out of the place, he looked like a waiter, don’t you know”—and had borrowed a match and re-lighted his cigar. Then he had crossed the Circus again, and walked back down Piccadilly as far as the turning leading to Liskeard House. He had half a mind, he said, to go in and ask to see Prinsep; but after hanging about for a few minutes he had given up the idea, crossed the road, and walked down St. James’s Street with the idea of looking in at his other Club. But he had decided not to go in, and had walked past the door down Pall Mall and into Trafalgar Square. At the top of Whitehall he had looked at his watch, and the time had been 11:45. Just before that, he had hung over the parapet on the National Gallery side of the Square for a minute or two; but he had no conversation with anyone. On leaving the Square, he turned up Regent Street and made his way, walking a good deal faster, along Jermyn Street and up St. James’s Street, and so back to his Club in Piccadilly. He had thus again passed Liskeard Street, but on the opposite side of the road. When he got in, he had gone straight to bed.
This account of Walter Brooklyn’s movements was quite convincing to Joan and her two listeners; but they had to admit that there was not much in it to persuade others of its truth. According to his own account, he must have been in the neighbourhood of Liskeard House at 11:30 when the phone message was supposed to have been sent; and not one of his movements between 10:15 and midnight seemed to be at all easy to confirm by any independent testimony. When Joan had finished her narrative, they all felt that, if Walter Brooklyn’s vindication was to depend on an alibi, his chances were not particularly good. Still, if he had not been in the house, the police could after all have very little against him beyond a suspicion.
At this point Mary Woodman came into the room to say that Sir Vernon would be very pleased if Mr. Lucas would come and sit with him for a while, and Lucas, promising to obey her order to be very quiet and not to allow the patient to excite himself, was led off to the sick room.
“I tell you what, Joan,” said Ellery, who had been sitting still, with a prodigious frown on his face, trying to think the thing over, “we’ve jolly well got to establish that alibi. We don’t know what else the police may have; but we’re safe enough if we can prove that he wasn’t here that evening. Unless we can establish positively that he wasn’t there, the circumstantial evidence will go down with a jury.”
“But how can we establish it? I only wish we could.”
“We’re going to. We’re going to find those people he spoke to, and we’re going to hunt London for people who
