Part 11 (2/2)
”Quite sure. I counted every stroke. You see, I wanted to know how long the night was going to be, seein' I'd have to sleep in that shed. I was in the garden just exactly an hour. I came out of the shed as it struck ten and it wasn't but a few minutes before I was in the street again.”
”And when was it that you saw the woman in the garden next door?”
”H'm, I don't just know when that was. I'd been in on the bench quite a while.”
”And the man? When did you see the man?”
”He came past a few minutes after the woman had gone towards the little house in the garden.”
”Ah! there you see, that's where you made your mistake. It is more than likely that these two did not go to the little house, but that they went somewhere else. Did they walk slowly and quietly?”
”Not a bit of it. They ran almost... Went past as quick as a bat in the night.”
”Then they both appeared to be in a hurry?”
”Yes indeed they did.”
”Ah, ha, you see! Now when any one's in a hurry he doesn't go the longest way round, as a rule. And it would have been the longest way round for these two people to go from the big house to the gardener's cottage--for the little house you saw was the gardener's cottage. There is tall thick hedge that starts from the main building and goes right down through the garden, quite a distance past the gardener's cottage.
The vegetable garden is on the left side of this hedge and in the middle of the vegetable garden is the gardener's cottage. But you could have seen the man and the woman only because they pa.s.sed down the right side of the hedge, and this would have given them a detour of fifty paces or more to reach the gardener's house. Nov do you think that two people who were very much in a hurry would have gone down the right side of the hedge, to reach a place which they could have gotten to much quicker on the left side?”
”No, that would have been a fool thing to do.”
”And you are quite sure that these people were in a hurry?”
”That's dead sure. I scarcely saw them before they'd gone again.”
”And you didn't see them come back?”
”No, at least I didn't pay any further attention to them. When I thought it wouldn't be any good to look about in there I turned around and dozed off.”
”And it was during this dozing that you thought you heard the shot?”
”Yes, sir, that's right.”
”And you didn't notice anything else? You didn't hear anything else.”
”No, nothin' at all, there was so much noise anyway. There was a high wind that night and the trees were rattling and creaking.”
”And you didn't see anything else, anything that attracted your attention?”
”No, nothing--” Knoll did not finish his sentence, but began another instead. He had suddenly remembered something which had seemed to him of no importance before. ”There was a light that went out suddenly.”
”Where?”
”In the side of the house that I could see from my place. There was a lamp in the last window of the second story, a lamp with a red shade.
That lamp went out all at once.”
”Was the window open?”
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