Roger stepped heavily on to the floor again. “I regret to have to confess myself baffled,” he said disappointedly. “There’s an anti-burglar fitting on that window which would absolutely prevent the thing being fastened from the outside. I’m beginning to think the fellow must have been a wizard in a small way.” “It seems to me,” said Alec weightily, “that if the chap couldn’t have got out, as we appear to have proved, then he could never have been in here at all. In other words, he doesn’t exist, and old Stanworth did commit suicide, after all.” “But I tell you that Stanworth _can’t_ have committed suicide,” said Roger petulantly. “There’s far too much evidence against it.” Alec threw himself into a chair. “Is there, though?” he asked argumentatively. “As you put it, it’s certainly consistent with murder. But it’s equally consistent with suicide. Aren’t you rather losing sight of that in your anxiety to make a murder of it? Besides, don’t forget that your motive has fallen to the ground since the safe was opened. There wasn’t a robbery here last night, after all.” Roger was roaming restlessly about the room. At Alec’s last words he paused in his stride and looked at his companion with some irritation. “Oh, don’t be childish, Alec,” he said sharply. “Money and jewels aren’t the only things that can be robbed. The motive still holds perfectly good if we’ve got to have a motive. It was robbery of something else; that’s all. But why stick to robbery? Make it revenge, hatred, self-protection, anything you like, but take it from me that Stanworth _was_ murdered. The evidence is _not_ equally consistent with suicide. Think it over for yourself and you’ll see; I can’t bother to go through it all again. And if we can’t find the way the chap got out, that’s because we’re a pair of idiots and can’t see what must be lying under our noses, that’s all.” And he resumed his stride again. “Humph!” said Alec incredulously. “Door, window, window, window,” Roger muttered to himself. “It must be one of those four. There’s simply no other way.” He wandered impatiently from one to the other, trying desperately to put himself in the place of the criminal. What _would_ he have done? With some ceremony Alec filled and lighted his pipe. When it was in full blast he leaned back in his chair and allowed his eyes to rest approvingly on the cool greens of the gardens outside. “Life’s too short,” he remarked lazily. “If it really was a clear case of murder, I’d be on the trail as strenuously as anyone. But really, old man, when you come to consider—calmly and sanely, I mean—how extraordinarily little you’ve got to go on and how you’re twisting the most ordinary things, why I think even you will admit in a few weeks’ time that when all’s said and done we——” “Alec!” Something in Roger’s tone caused Alec to turn round in his chair and look at him. He was leaning out of the lattice window, apparently intent on the garden outside.