Part 4 (2/2)
”Then let me tell you--”
But he would have dinner first.
However, a little later we had a comfortable chat. Mr. Gryce had made a discovery, and the papers were full of it. It was one which gave me a small triumph over George. The suggestion he had laughed at was not so entirely foolish as he had been pleased to consider it. But let me tell the story of that day, without any further reference to myself.
The opinion had become quite general with those best acquainted with the details of this affair, that the mystery was one of those abnormal ones for which no solution would ever be found, when the aged detective showed himself in the building and was taken to the room, where an Inspector of Police awaited him. Their greeting was cordial, and the lines on the latter's face relaxed a little as he met the still bright eye of the man upon whose instinct and judgment so much reliance had always been placed.
”This is very good of you,” he began, glancing down at the aged detective's bundled up legs, and gently pus.h.i.+ng a chair towards him. ”I know that it was a great deal to ask, but we're at our wits' end, and so I telephoned. It's the most inexplicable--There! you have heard that phrase before. But clews--there are absolutely none. That is, we have not been able to find any. Perhaps you can. At least, that is what we hope. I've known you more than once to succeed where others have failed.”
The elderly man thus addressed, glanced down at his legs, now propped up on a stool which someone had brought him, and smiled, with the pathos of the old who sees the interests of a lifetime slipping gradually away.
”I am not what I was. I can no longer get down on my hands and knees to pick up threads from the nap of a rug, or spy out a spot of blood in the crimson woof of a carpet.”
”You shall have Sweet.w.a.ter here to do the active work for you. What we want of you is the directing mind--the infallible instinct. It's a case in a thousand, Gryce. We've never had anything just like it. You've never had anything at all like it. It will make you young again.”
The old man's eyes shot fire and unconsciously one foot slipped to the floor. Then he bethought himself and painfully lifted it back again.
”What are the points? What's the difficulty?” he asked. ”A woman has been shot--”
”No, not shot, stabbed. We thought she had been shot, for that was intelligible and involved no impossibilities. But Drs. Heath and Webster, under the eye of the Challoners' own physician, have made an examination of the wound--an official one, thorough and quite final so far as they are concerned, and they declare that no bullet is to be found in the body. As the wound extends no further than the heart, this settles one great point, at least.”
”Dr. Heath is a reliable man and one of our ablest coroners.”
”Yes. There can be no question as to the truth of his report. You know the victim? Her name, I mean, and the character she bore?”
”Yes; so much was told me on my way down.”
”A fine girl unspoiled by riches and seeming independence. Happy, too, to all appearance, or we should be more ready to consider the possibility of suicide.”
”Suicide by stabbing calls for a weapon. Yet none has been found, I hear.”
”None.”
”Yet she was killed that way?”
”Undoubtedly, and by a long and very narrow blade, larger than a needle but not so large as the ordinary stiletto.”
”Stabbed while by herself, or what you may call by herself? She had no companion near her?”
”None, if we can believe the four members of the Parrish family who were seated at the other end of the room.”
”And you do believe them?”
”Would a whole family lie--and needlessly? They never knew the woman--father, maiden aunt and two boys, clear-eyed, jolly young chaps whom even the horror of this tragedy, perpetrated as it were under their very nose, cannot make serious for more than a pa.s.sing moment.”
”It wouldn't seem so.”
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