“Humph!” said Alec, gazing out of the window. “I wonder! You’re really sure of that?”
“Absolutely,” said Roger with decision. “Anything else would be ludicrous under the circumstances. We won’t discuss that side of it again.”
There was a little pause.
“The—the second woman,” Alec said tentatively. “How were you able to identify her so positively?”
Roger drew the envelope out of his breast pocket, opened it, and carefully extracted the hair. He laid it across his knee for the moment and contemplated it in silence. Then with a sudden movement he picked it up and threw it through the open window.
“There goes a vital piece of evidence,” he said with a smile. “Well, for one thing, there was nobody else in the house with just that particular shade of hair, was there?”
“I suppose not,” Alec replied.
There was another silence, rather longer this time.
Then Roger, glancing curiously across at his companion, remarked very airily:
“Just to satisfy my natural curiosity, Alec, why exactly did you kill Stanworth?”
XXVIII
What Really Did Happen
Alec contemplated the tips of his shoes for a moment. Then he looked up suddenly. “It wasn’t exactly murder, you know,” he said abruptly.
“Certainly not,” Roger agreed. “It was a well-merited execution.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I mean, if I hadn’t killed Stanworth, he would probably have killed me. It was partly self-defence. I’ll tell you the whole story in a minute.”
“Yes, I should like to hear what really happened. That is, if you feel yourself at liberty to tell me, of course. I don’t want to force confidences about—well, about the second lady in the case.”
“About Barbara? Oh, there’s nothing that reflects on her, and I think you ought to hear the truth. I always meant to tell you the whole thing if you found out that I did it, and of course, if you were intending to take any drastic step, such as telling the police or trying to get Jefferson arrested. That’s why I made you promise to tell me before you did anything like that.”
“Quite so,” Roger nodded understandingly. “A good many things are plain to me now. Why you hung back so much and were so unenthusiastic and threw cold water on everything and pretended to be so dull and refused to believe that a murder had been committed at all, although I’d proved it to you beyond any shadow of doubt.”
“I was trying to keep you off the right track all the time. I really never thought you’d find out.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have done if the significance of that hair hadn’t dawned on me at last. After that everything seemed to come in a series of flashes. Even then I might not have hit on the truth with such certainty if two particular photographs hadn’t suddenly developed themselves in my mind.”
“Tell me all your side of it, then I’ll tell you mine.”
“Very well. As I said, that hair was the clue to the whole thing. I’d taken it quite idly out of my pocket out there in the garden and was having a look at it, when it suddenly struck me that whosoever it might be it was certainly not one of Mrs. Plant’s. I stared at it hard enough then, I can tell you, and the second realization occurred to me that, from the colour at any rate, it looked uncommonly like one of Barbara’s. Then the first of the pictures flashed across my mind. It was of Graves sorting the post just before lunch yesterday. He had only three letters, and they were all of exactly the same appearance; same shaped envelopes and typewritten addresses. One was for Mrs. Plant, one for Jefferson—and one for Barbara. The first two I’d already accounted for, now I seemed to be accounting for the third. Add to all that Barbara’s ill-concealed agitation the next morning and the fact that, for no apparent cause whatever, she broke off her engagement to you at the same time, and the thing was as plain as daylight—Barbara was also in the library that night and for some reason or other the poor kid had got into Stanworth’s clutches.”
“She hadn’t,” Alec put in. “It was—”
“All right, Alec; you can tell me all that in the proper place. Let me finish my story first. Well, having got so far, of course I asked myself—What light does this throw on Stanworth’s death? Does it give a definite pointer to any person? The answer was obvious. Mr. Alexander Grierson! I gasped at first, I can assure you, but when I got rather more used to the idea, daylight simply flooded in. First of all, there was your hanging back all the time; that began to take on a very significant aspect. Then there was your height and your strength, which fitted in very nicely, and I knew that your place in Worcestershire, where you must have spent most of your boyhood, is liberally supplied with lattice windows, so that you might be expected to be up to all the tricks of the trade regarding them. So far, in fact, so good.”
“But what about that footprint? I thought I’d managed that rather neatly. By Jove, I remember the shock you gave me when you discovered that and the way I got out of the library that night. I’d thought that was absolutely untraceable.”
“Yes, that did give me an awkward couple of minutes, until I remembered that you’d run back to get your pipe while I was talking to the chauffeur! And that’s where the second of my little pictures comes in. The scene flashed across my mind on that flower bed just after you had stepped on to the path when we were trying to find out who had been in the library and before you smoothed out the fresh footprints you’d
