I suspect the Barkers. You know, that story about Mrs. B. letting Mr. B. get into his without warning him was pretty thin. Can you imagine an English wife doing a thing of that kind? If you can it ought to be a ground for divorce under the new Bill. But you can’t. Then all that stuff about the rheumatism--clever but unconvincing. Mr. Barker stayed in his room all the next morning _when the awkward questions were being asked_. Not well; oh, no! But he was down for lunch and conducting for a glee-party in the drawing-room afterwards, as perky and active as a professional. Besides, the really unanswerable problem is, who could have _dared_ to make the Barkers’ apple-pie beds? And the answer is, nobody--except the Barkers. And there must have been a lady in it, it was so neatly done. Everybody says no _man_ could have done it. So that shows you it couldn’t have been me--I.... VI I suspect Mr. Winthrop. Mr. Winthrop is fifty-three. He has been in the hotel since this time last year, and he makes accurate forecasts of the weather. My experience is that a man who makes accurate forecasts of the weather may get up to any deviltry. And he protests too much. He keeps coming up to me and making long speeches to prove that he didn’t do it. But I never said he did. Somebody else started that rumour, but of course he thinks that I did. That comes of being a professional humorist. But I do believe he did it. You see he is fifty-three and doesn’t dance, so he had the whole evening to do it in. To-night we are going to have a Court of Inquiry.... VII We have had the Inquiry. I was judge. I started with Denys and Joan in the dock, as I thought we must have somebody there and it would look better if it was somebody in the family. The first witness was Mrs. Barker. Her evidence was so unsatisfactory that I had to have her put in the dock too. So was Mr. Barker’s. I was sorry to put him in the dock, as he still had rheumatics. But he had to go. So did Mr. Winthrop. I had no qualms about him. For a man of his age to do a thing like that seems to me really deplorable. And the barefaced evasiveness of his evidence! He simply could not account for his movements during the evening at all. When I asked him what he had been doing at 9.21, and where, he actually said he _didn’t know_. Rather curious--very few people _can_ account for their movements, or anyone else’s. In most criminal trials the witnesses remember to a minute, years after the event, exactly what time they went upstairs and when they passed the prisoner in the lounge, but nobody seems to remember anything in this affair. No doubt it will come in time. The trial was very realistic. I was able to make one or two excellent judicial jokes. Right at the beginning I said to the prosecuting counsel, “What _is_ an apple-pie bed?” and when he had explained I said with a meaning look, “You mean that the bed was not in _apple-pie order_?” Ha, ha! Everybody laughed heartily.... VIII