These were of the ordinary pattern, with a handle which shot a bolt simultaneously at the top and bottom. In addition there were small brass bolts at the bottom and top, both of which had been fastened when the window was opened that morning.
“It looks out of the question to me,” Roger muttered. “It is out of the question. Even if he had been able to turn the handle (which he couldn’t possibly have done), he couldn’t have shot the bolts as well.”
“I’m blessed if he could,” said Alec with conviction.
Roger turned away.
“Then that leaves these two windows. I don’t see how anyone could have left this little lattice one closed behind him. What about the sash one? That looks more hopeful.”
He climbed up on the window seat and examined the fastening attentively.
“Any luck?” asked Alec.
Roger stepped heavily on to the floor again. “I regret to have to confess myself baffled,” he said disappointedly. “There’s an anti-burglar fitting on that window which would absolutely prevent the thing being fastened from the outside. I’m beginning to think the fellow must have been a wizard in a small way.”
“It seems to me,” said Alec weightily, “that if the chap couldn’t have got out, as we appear to have proved, then he could never have been in here at all. In other words, he doesn’t exist, and old Stanworth did commit suicide, after all.”
“But I tell you that Stanworth can’t have committed suicide,” said Roger petulantly. “There’s far too much evidence against it.”
Alec threw himself into a chair. “Is there, though?” he asked argumentatively. “As you put it, it’s certainly consistent with murder. But it’s equally consistent with suicide. Aren’t you rather losing sight of that in your anxiety to make a murder of it? Besides, don’t forget that your motive has fallen to the ground since the safe was opened. There wasn’t a robbery here last night, after all.”
Roger was roaming restlessly about the room. At Alec’s last words he paused in his stride and looked at his companion with some irritation.
“Oh, don’t be childish, Alec,” he said sharply. “Money and jewels aren’t the only things that can be robbed. The motive still holds perfectly good if we’ve got to have a motive. It was robbery of something else; that’s all. But why stick to robbery? Make it revenge, hatred, self-protection, anything you like, but take it from me that Stanworth was murdered. The evidence is not equally consistent with suicide. Think it over for yourself and you’ll see; I can’t bother to go through it all again. And if we can’t find the way the chap got out, that’s because we’re a pair of idiots and can’t see what must be lying under our noses, that’s all.” And he resumed his stride again.
“Humph!” said Alec incredulously.
“Door, window, window, window,” Roger muttered to himself. “It must be one of those four. There’s simply no other way.”
He wandered impatiently from one to the other, trying desperately to put himself in the place of the criminal. What would he have done?
With some ceremony Alec filled and lighted his pipe. When it was in full blast he leaned back in his chair and allowed his eyes to rest approvingly on the cool greens of the gardens outside.
“Life’s too short,” he remarked lazily. “If it really was a clear case of murder, I’d be on the trail as strenuously as anyone. But really, old man, when you come to consider—calmly and sanely, I mean—how extraordinarily little you’ve got to go on and how you’re twisting the most ordinary things, why I think even you will admit in a few weeks’ time that when all’s said and done we—”
“Alec!”
Something in Roger’s tone caused Alec to turn round in his chair and look at him. He was leaning out of the lattice window, apparently intent on the garden outside.
“Well?” said Alec tolerantly. “What is it now?”
“If you come here, Alec,” said Roger, very gently, “I’ll show you how the murderer got away last night.”
XIII
Mr. Sheringham Investigates a Footprint
“Show me what?” Alec exclaimed, bounding out of his chair.
“How the murderer escaped,” Roger repeated, turning and smiling happily at his dumbfounded accomplice. “It’s extraordinarily simple, really. That’s why we never spotted it. Have you ever noticed, Alec, that it’s always the simple things of life—plans, inventions, what you like—that are the most effective? Take, for instance—”
Alec seized his too voluble friend by the shoulder and shook him violently.
“How did the chap escape?” he demanded.
Roger pointed to the window through which he had been leaning.
“There!” he said simply.
“Yes, but how do you know?” cried the exasperated Alec.
“Oh, is that what you meant? Come, friend Alec.” Roger took his fellow-sleuth by the arm and pointed triumphantly to the windowsill. On the surface of the white paint were a few faint scratches. “You see those? Now look at that!” And he indicated something on the flower bed beneath. “I said it must be lying under our noses all the time,” he added complacently.
Alec leaned out of the window and looked at the bed. Just below the window was an unmistakable footprint, the toe pointing towards the window.
“You said escaped, didn’t you?” he asked, withdrawing his head.
“I did, Alexander.”
“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you and all that,” said Alec, in a tone that curiously belied his words, “but nobody escaped this way. Someone got in. If you look again, carefully this time, you’ll see that the toe is pointing towards the window; not the heel. That means that somebody stepped from the ground to the window-ledge, not vice versa.”
“Alec, you are on your day today, aren’t you?” said Roger admiringly. “Precisely the same thought occurred to myself at a first glance. Then, looking carefully, as you so kindly suggest, I noticed that the indentation of the heel is very
