“You don’t think he might have been—murdered?” Roger suggested tentatively.
“Murdered? How could he have been? Out of the question under the circumstances. Besides, he took jolly good care of that. I’d have murdered him myself before this—hundreds of times!—if I hadn’t known it would make things worse than before all round.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about that. Kept the evidence addressed to the interested parties, didn’t he? I suppose everyone knew that?”
“You bet they did. He rubbed it in. No, Stanworth never meant to be murdered. But my God, I had a fright when I saw him lying there dead and the safe locked.”
“You were going to try and open it when I interrupted you yesterday morning, of course?”
“Yes, properly caught out then,” Jefferson smiled ruefully. “But even if I’d found the keys, I didn’t know the combination. Lord, what a relief that note of his was. You know about that, I suppose?”
“You got a note by the post before lunch, did you?”
“That’s right. Saying he was going to kill himself. Rum business. Can’t explain it. Almost too good to be true. I feel another man.”
“And so are a good many other people, I imagine,” Roger said softly. “And women, too. His activities were fairly widespread, weren’t they?”
“Very, I believe. Never knew much about it, though. He kept all that sort of thing to himself.”
“That butler now,” Roger hazarded. “He looks a pretty tough customer. I suppose Stanworth employed him as a sort of bodyguard?”
“Yes, something like that. But I don’t know about ‘employed.’ ”
“What do you mean?”
“He was no more employed than I was. That is to say, we got a salary and we did our work, but it wasn’t a sort of employment either of us could leave.”
Roger whistled softly. “Oho! So friend Graves was another victim, was he? What’s his story?”
“Don’t know all the details, but Stanworth could have had that man hanged, I believe,” Jefferson said coolly. “Instead he preferred to use him as a sort of bodyguard, as you say.”
“I see. Then Graves hadn’t much cause to love him either, I take it?”
“If he hadn’t known what would happen afterwards, I wouldn’t have given Stanworth ten minutes of life in Graves’s presence.”
Roger whistled again.
“Well, thanks very much, Jefferson. I think that’s all I wanted to know.”
“If you’re trying to look for someone who induced Stanworth to shoot himself, you’re wasting your time,” Jefferson remarked. “Couldn’t be done.”
“Oh, there’s a little more in my quest than that,” Roger smiled, as he let himself out of the room.
He hurried upstairs, glancing at his watch as he did so. The time was nearly five minutes to four. He scurried down the passage to Alec’s room.
“Finished packing?” he asked, putting his head round the door. “Good, well come along to my room while I do mine.”
“Well?” Alec asked sarcastically, when they were once more ensconced in Roger’s bedroom. “Has Jefferson written out his confession?”
Roger paused in the act of laying his suitcase on a chair.
“Alec,” he said solemnly, “I owe friend Jefferson an apology, though I can’t very well tender it. I was hopelessly wrong about him, and you were hopelessly right. He didn’t kill Stanworth at all. It’s extremely annoying of him considering how neatly I solved this little problem of ours; but there’s the fact.”
“Humph!” Alec observed. “I won’t say, ‘I told you so,’ because I know how annoying it would be for you. But I don’t mind telling you that I’m thinking it hard.”
“Yes, and the most irritating part is that you’re fully entitled to do so,” Roger said, throwing his pyjamas into the case. “That’s what I find so irksome.”
“But I suppose you’ve found somebody else to take his place all right?”
“No, I haven’t. Isn’t it maddening? But I’ll tell you one significant fact I’ve unearthed. That butler had as much cause as anyone, if not more, to regret the fact that Stanworth was still polluting the earth.”
“Had he? Oh! But look here, how do you know that Jefferson didn’t do it?”
Roger explained.
“Not much so far as actual hard-and-fast-evidence goes, I’m afraid,” he concluded, “but we greater detectives are above evidence. It’s psychology that we study, and I feel in every single bone in my body that Jefferson was telling the truth.”
“Lady Stanworth!” Alec commented. “Good Lord!”
“Some men are brave, aren’t they? Still, I daresay she’ll make an excellent wife; I believe that’s the right thing to say on this sort of occasion. But seriously, Alec, I’m absolutely baffled again. I think I shall have to turn the case over to you.”
“Well, do,” Alec retorted with unexpected energy, “and I’ll tell you who killed Stanworth.”
Roger desisted from his efforts to close the lid of his bulging case in order to look up in surprise.
“You will, eh? Well, who did?”
“Some unknown victim of Stanworth’s blackmail, of course. The whole thing stands to reason. We were looking for a mysterious stranger at first, weren’t we? And we thought he might be a burglar. Translate the burglar into the blackmailer’s victim and there you are. And as he burnt the evidence himself, and we haven’t the least idea who was on Stanworth’s blackmailing list, we shall never find out who he was. The whole thing seems as clear as daylight to me.”
Roger turned to his refractory case again. “But why did we give up the burglar idea?” he asked. “Aren’t you rather overlooking that? Chiefly because of the disappearance of those footprints. That must mean either that the murderer came from inside the house or that he had an accomplice there.”
“I don’t agree with you. We don’t know how or why the footprints disappeared. It might have been pure chance. William might have raked the bed over, somebody might have
