“No,” grunted the detective. He took out a cigar—bit off the end with a
savage snap of teeth—lit it—resumed his pacing.
“You should, sometimes,” continued Miss Cornelia, watching his troubled
movements with a faint light of mockery in her eyes. “I find it very
helpful.”
“I don’t need knitting to think straight,” rasped Anderson indignantly.
Miss Cornelia’s eyes danced.
“I wonder!” she said with caustic affability. “You seem to have so much
evidence left over.”
The detective paused and glared at her helplessly.
“Did you ever hear of the man who took a clock apart—and when he put it
together again, he had enough left over to make another clock?” she
twitted.
The detective, ignoring the taunt, crossed quickly to Dale.
“What do you mean by saying that paper isn’t where you put it?” he
demanded in tones of extreme severity. Miss Cornelia replied for her
niece.
“She hasn’t said that.”
The detective made an impatient movement of his hand and walked away—as
if to get out of the reach of the indefatigable spinster’s tongue. But
Miss Cornelia had not finished with him yet, by any means.
“Do you believe in circumstantial evidence?” she asked him with seeming
ingenuousness.
“It’s my business,” said the detective stolidly. Miss Cornelia smiled.
“While you have been investigating,” she announced, “I, too, have not
been idle.”
The detective gave a barking laugh. She let it pass.
“To me,” she continued, “it is perfectly obvious that _one_
intelligence has been at work behind many of the things that have
occurred in this house.”
Now Anderson observed her with a new respect.
“Who?” he grunted tersely.
Her eyes flashed.
“I’ll ask you that! Some one person who, knowing Courtleigh Fleming
well, probably knows of the existence of a Hidden Room in this house
and who, finding us in occupation of the house, has tried to get rid of
me in two ways. First, by frightening me with anonymous threats—and,
second, by urging me to leave. Someone, who very possibly entered this
house tonight shortly before the murder and slipped up that staircase!”
The detective had listened to her outburst with unusual thoughtfulness.
A certain wonder—perhaps at her shrewdness, perhaps at an unexpected
confirmation of certain ideas of his own—grew upon his face. Now he
jerked out two words.
“The Doctor?”
Miss Cornelia knitted on as if every movement of her needles added one
more link to the strong chain of probabilities she was piecing
together.
“When Doctor Wells said he was leaving here earlier in the evening for
the Johnsons’ he did not go there,” she observed. “He was not expected
to go there. I found that out when I telephoned.”
“The Doctor!” repeated the detective, his eyes narrowing, his head
beginning to sway from side to side like the head of some great cat
just before a spring.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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