She came back a second later, looking rather awkward.
"Well, sir, they both sounded alike. I mean to say I reely couldn't tell any difference, not to speak of."
"That proves they were both about the same weight, which is quite likely. Now, Maggie, go back again; sit where you sat on Saturday afternoon. I shall drop into this easy chair. I want to find out if the chair makes as much noise with me as it did with Mr. Eames. I mean to say"—the Superintendent bit his lip for a second—"that time you heard Mr. Eames fall into it, after he had taken his medicine. Knock once on the wall if it's not so loud, and twice if it's louder."
He listened till he heard Maggie draw up her chair, then he dropped heavily into his. Maggie knocked once. He let himself fall with all his weight, and Maggie came in.
"That's as near as no matter, sir, to the sound poor Mr. Eames made."
Pointer weighed fourteen stone and Eames he had guessed as under ten. The drug must have acted very quickly.
"And now I want to move about the room and see if I can make as little noise as Eames did later on—when you heard him come back and lock his door."
Maggie changed rooms again. Pointer took off both boots. He prided himself on his light footwork, and walking like Agag he crept around the room. Maggie knocked twice. He tried again. Again she knocked twice and then came in.
"Oh, you made ever so much more noise, sir, but then you'd make four of poor Mr. Eames. With him I didn't hear steps at all."
"You didn't hear my steps either surely," Pointer insisted, as he re-laced his boots.
"Perhaps not as steps, sir, but, dear me, with Mr. Eames on Saturday I could only hear a drawer being pulled out ever so gently and then shut, after a minute almost without a sound, as you might say. If it hadn't been for the boards creaking and papers rustling, I couldn't have believed there was anyone in there, part of the time."
"Papers rustling. As though they were being scrunched up, or turned over like this?" He illustrated both sounds with a newspaper.
Maggie nodded as he refolded a sheet and drew it out of a make-believe envelope.
"That's the sound, sir, but there's the housekeeper's bell. And for goodness' sake don't let her know that it was I who said anything to you about that man who looked like the other gentleman. She told us someone had been chattering and that the management wouldn't have it. Of course, I said like the others that it wasn't me."
"You mean about Mr. Sikes, whom you thought was Mr. Beale?"
She nodded. "Shall I come back here when she's finished giving out the towels?"
But Pointer shook his head. "Hardly worth while. By the way, what time did Miss Leslie get back the day before yesterday? Pretty late, wasn't it?"
"I don't know when she got back, sir. I found her in bed when I came to do her room, which I always leaves till last so that the water will be fresher. She did have a time on the river in all that wet. Rotten it must have been. I don't wonder she didn't want to stick it out."
"What time did you go into her room on Saturday evening, did you say?"
"After I had finished doing this one up for Mr. Beale. About eight o'clock."
"Had you been in there after you left it at six?"
"No, sir." The maid's eyes showed her wonder at the course of the questioning.
"We're still hoping to find out Mr. Eames' friends, and it's possible that someone may have been in here on Saturday to see him. That's why I asked about Miss Leslie. She might have heard a knock." He handed the maid half-a-crown. "If you remember anything else let me know. However insignificant."
"I will, thank you, sir," and Maggie closed the door behind her.
After lunch the results of the autopsy reached the Chief Inspector. Morphia had been drunk in a quantity which made the police-officer open his eyes. It would be difficult for anyone but a chemist to lay his hand on such a solution. "There is one thing," the doctor's scribble finished, "that dose could never have had its taste disguised. Or at least it would have been uncommonly difficult."
All this was what Pointer had expected, but Maggie's account of what she had heard in No. 14 gave, for the first time, a clearer pattern to the kaleidoscope. Whoever had shut and locked Eames' door—about four-thirty—had entered from the corridor and not by the window which she had heard opened much later.
So, in general terms, from four to six was the time an alibi would have to cover.
CHAPTER IV
MILLER had nothing suspicious to report in the actions of those inmates of the balcony rooms who had already visited the hotel on the other occasions. He was told off to test Mrs. Willett's alibi as far as that was possible from the hall-porter, while Pointer took a bus to a smart little bungalow in Sheen, where he hoped to find a lady, whose postcard, signed Mint, had been duly copied by the police and replaced in Miss Leslie's little bureau. It had run:
"Jack will call for you tomorrow in the car at two o'clock as you can't make it earlier, and we will be all ready for you in the launch. Hope the weather will be fine. Mint."
The "tomorrow" referred to had been the Saturday of Eames' death. A few inquiries told him that the bungalow belonged to a Major Thompson, whose record he promptly looked up in the local free library. The Major was now working at the War Office, after distinguished war services.
Mrs. Thompson was in, and very grave the Chief Inspector looked as he bowed to that young matron.
"Mr. Deane?" She glanced up inquiringly from the professional card sent in to her, which explained its owner as Mr. Deane, a solicitor of Grey's Inn Road.
"Excuse my call, Madame, but a client of ours had a motor accident on Saturday last,—August fourth. A car ran into his, and passed on without stopping near Richmond Park. You may have heard of it?" He looked at her with a legal air of being sure to find her out should she attempt any prevarication.
"I? No!"
"My client believes that he can identify the car that ran into his by the fact that he recognized a Miss Leslie in it, who is playing at the Columbine Theatre. From inquiries made at the theatre it appears that the gentleman who was driving the car in question must have been Major Thompson."
"But our car didn't run into anything," protested the lady. "I drove it myself all morning. And, besides, my husband and Miss Leslie weren't anywhere near Richmond Park. What time is this accident supposed to've happened?"
Mr. Deane looked pained.
"My client, Madame, was run into at between half-past four and a quarter to five."
"There you are!" exclaimed Mrs. Thompson in triumph. "Major Thompson—he's out on the links this afternoon—fetched Miss Leslie about two o'clock from the Columbine, and drove her here, where my son and I were waiting in the launch. We had intended to go for a picnic up the river, but the weather was so shocking that we gave it up, and played bridge instead. Miss Leslie refused to let my husband or son take the car out again, and took a taxi back to her hotel just before dinner."
"So Miss Leslie was here in the house at the time my client's car was run into—about half-past four?"
Mrs. Thompson turned a deep red.
"Miss Leslie was here from two-thirty till she left about half-past seven," she said very distinctly. "If you care to go up to the golf links you'll find my husband there and the car! You can examine both at your leisure."
"Madame,