“You can hardly expect the law to recognise the principle of poetic justice for all that,” Alec objected.
“I don’t see why not,” Roger retorted. “However, we won’t go into that at present. Well, to my mind there were two chief difficulties in this Stanworth business. The first one was that at the beginning there didn’t seem to be any definite motive for killing him; and afterwards, when we’d found out about him, there were far too many. All those people in the house, Mrs. Plant, Jefferson, Lady Stanworth, the butler (who, by the way, appears to be a murderer in a small way already, as I gather from Jefferson; that was the hold which Stanworth had over him)—all of them had every reason to kill him; and the case began to take on the aspect not so much of proving who did it, but, by a process of elimination, of finding out who didn’t. In that way I managed eventually to dismiss Mrs. Plant, Jefferson, and Lady Stanworth. But besides the people actually under our noses in the house, there were all the others—goodness only knows how many of them!—of whose very existence we knew nothing; all his other victims.”
“Were there many of them, then?”
“I understand that Stanworth’s practice was a fairly extensive one,” Roger replied ironically. “Anyhow, I was able to narrow down the field to a certain extent. Then I began to go over once more the evidence we had collected. The question I kept asking myself was—is there a single item that gives a definite pointer towards any certain person, male or female?”
“Female?” Roger repeated surprisedly.
“Certainly. In spite of everything—the footprint in the flower bed, for example—I was still keeping before me the possibility of a woman being mixed up in it. It didn’t seem altogether probable, but I couldn’t afford to lose sight of the bare possibility. And it’s lucky I did, for it was just that which finally put me on the right track.”
“Good Lord!”
“Yes; I admit I was slow in the uptake, for the fact had been staring me in the face the whole time, and I never spotted it. You see, the key to the whole mystery was that there was a second woman in the library that night.”
“How on earth do you know that?” Alec asked in consternation.
“By the hair we found on the settee. I put it away in the envelope, you remember, and promptly forgot all about it, assuming it to have been one of Mrs. Plant’s. It struck me suddenly in the garden just now that it wasn’t anything of the sort; Mrs. Plant’s hair is very much darker. Of course that opened up an entirely new field for speculation.”
“Good Lord!”
“Yes, it is rather surprising, isn’t it?” Roger continued equably. “That set my brain galloping away like wildfire, I need hardly tell you; and five minutes later the whole thing became absolutely plain to me. I’m a little hazy about some of the details, of course, but the broad lines are clear enough.”
“You mean you guessed who the second woman was?”
“Hardly guessed. I knew at once who she must be.”
“Who?” Alec asked, with unconcealed eagerness.
“Wait a bit. I’m coming to that. Well, then I began to put two and two together. I’d got a pretty shrewd idea already of the personal appearance of the man himself.”
“Oh, it was a man then?”
“Yes, it was a man right enough. There was never any doubt that a man must have done the actual killing. No woman would have been strong enough for the struggle that must have taken place. Stanworth was no weakling, so that gives us the fact that the man must have been a strong, burly sort of person. From the footprint and the length of those strides across the bed he was evidently both tall and largely built; from the clever way in which everything was left he must have been possessed of a fund of cunning; from the manner in which he left that window fastened behind him it was clear that he was thoroughly accustomed to handling lattice windows. Well, what does all that give us? It looked obvious to me.”
Alec was staring intently at the speaker, following every word with eager attention. “I think I see what you’re getting at,” he said slowly.
“I thought you would,” said Roger cheerfully. “Of course there were other things that clinched it. The disappearance of that footprint, for instance. That must have been done by somebody who knew what he was doing. And somebody who heard me say that I was going to fit every male boot in the house into the mark, you remember. Of course it was that which made me so sure at first about Jefferson, because I jumped to the conclusion that it must have been Jefferson whom we saw edging out of the library door. After that I more or less had Jefferson on the brain.”
“I did my best to put you off that track,” said Alec with a slight smile.
“Oh, you did. It wasn’t your fault that I clung to him so persistently.”
“I tried hard to stop you putting your foot in it, if you remember.”
“I know. And I daresay it’s lucky you did. I might have put things a good deal more plainly to him, with extremely awkward results, if you hadn’t dinned it into me so hard.”
“Well,” Alec said slowly, “what are you going to do about it, now you’ve presumably got at the truth at last?”
“Do about it? Forget it, of course. I told you my views just now, when I said the man who killed Stanworth ought to be acclaimed as a public
