Tanner said, with studied reasonableness, “All these guards must’ve had the hell of a check-up by the FBI you’re so sold on before they qualified for this job. Sure, any security system can slip up. But for it to slip twice on four men is mighty long odds for me to swallow. I’d rather see if ever’body else has an alibi first. Like you gentlemen, for instance.”
Professor Rand made a little sound that was almost a polite snort.
“Really, Marshal, if you think the guards were so carefully checked, you can imagine the kind of clearance we must have had, to be actually working on this project.”
“I remember a scientist named Klaus Fuchs,” Simon murmured, “who went over to the Russians with stuff that’s supposed to have cut down our lead in atomic weapons by five years. Why shouldn’t you give the marshal your alibis — if you have any?”
There was another, more searching pause.
“I suppose I had better come clean,” Soren boomed at last. “I have none. Oakridge and I were working in the main workshop. He went to the drafting room to check some specifications on a final drawing, and I went on with what I was doing. But of course, you have only my word for it.”
“When I came in,” Marjorie Tanner said, speaking for the first time in a clear, impersonal voice, “I went straight to the office and went on with some typing that I hadn’t finished yesterday. But I couldn’t prove that I stayed there.”
“I heard the typewriter,” said Rand. “But I couldn’t swear that it never stopped. For that matter, I couldn’t prove what I was doing myself. While Soren and Oakridge went to the main workshop, I had something to do in the other room where I told you I was. But I haven’t any witness.”
“And anyone,” said the Saint, “could have gone up or down that corridor, from any room to another, without being seen and probably without being heard.”
Tanner threw Simon a grateful glance of restored confidence.
“There you are,” he said. “It sets up four possible suspects, including my own daughter.”
“You needn’t be quite so generous, Marshal,” Rand said with scarcely veiled sarcasm. “It’d be hard to make anyone believe that Miss Tanner committed murder in the horrible way that we’ve seen. And there’s still only one of us who can be called a cop.”
Tanner turned heavily to the young man in uniform.
“Well, Jock,” he said, “if you don’t have an alibi, you’re no worse off than anybody else.”
“I don’t,” Ingram said steadily. “After I left the gate, I made the round of the fence. I didn’t hurry — there wasn’t any reason to. Then I went most of the way around again the way I’d just come — that’s a trick we pull sometimes. Then I came up to the house and checked the emergency light plant and batteries. Then I went in the kitchen and got a coke—”
“We keep soft drinks and stuff to make sandwiches for lunch in the icebox,” Marjorie Tanner said, telling it to the Saint.
“Then I came in and talked to Marj for a few minutes. That was about nine-thirty. I stayed five or ten minutes—”
“It was nearer fifteen,” she said.
“Then I walked out around the house, and I happened to look in a window and saw Mr Oakridge on the floor, and I came back in and found he was dead.”
“So for ten or fifteen minutes, anyway, you two got alibis for each other,” the marshal said.
Simon shook his head.
“Don’t let’s kid ourselves, Harry,” he said with genuine regret. “You know as well as I do that that doesn’t mean a thing. No autopsy is going to fix the time of death as accurately as that.”
“I am not sure,” Soren said with measured resonance. “We all know how it is between Miss Tanner and this guard. We can only sympathize with Mr Tanner’s natural instinct to give his prospective in-law every legal break.”
“But not with trying to cover up for him,” Rand said, his eyes snapping hard and bright behind his glasses. “I’ve tried to be patient, but I’m finding it more difficult all the time to understand your reluctance to concentrate on the most obvious suspect. I’ll tell you frankly that from the moment we saw the circumstances of the murder, Dr Soren and I have felt it our duty to drop everything else and keep this young man under our personal surveillance. If you’re so anxious to take a hand in this investigation, I suggest that your first and most useful contribution would be to take him into custody.”
“If I’m investigating, I’ll do it my own way,” Tanner growled. “I saw that word COP, too, but I didn’t see any proof Oakridge wrote it. Somebody else could of dipped Oakridge’s finger in the blood and done it.”
It was a weak try, and they all knew it. Rand simply clamped his lips tighter, in an expression of pitying impatience. Soren condescended to consider it more respectfully, his lustrous eyes peering up intently from under lowered brows, but he finally said, “I would not have tried to frame him like that. A clever killer would feel safer if everyone could be suspected. Why narrow it down to only one — who might have been the one to have a perfect alibi?”
“That’s pretty good criminal thinking,” said the Saint, with the detached appreciation of a connoisseur. “I’ll take it a little further, for what it’s worth. I think the murderer’s instinct would be to get away as quickly as possible — at least to be somewhere else when the body was found, even if he didn’t have an alibi—”
“Then how can anyone have this stupid idea that Jock did it,” said the girl quickly, “when he found the body?”
“There are exceptions,” Soren said, not unkindly. “He is one person who might have thought he could get away with it.”
“With what? Writing something on the floor that would only point to himself?”
For a moment everything sagged into the vertiginous hiatus which can yawn before the most brilliant minds in the presence of a feminine lunge towards total confusion.
Simon took a final pull at his cigarette and chuckled. He put it down and said, “Let’s stay on the rails. With that screwdriver still in the wound, Oakridge would have taken a few minutes to bleed as much as we saw externally. Of course, the murderer might have had the nerve to stand there and wait till there was enough blood to write with; anything’s possible. But let’s try the things that are easier to believe first. Assuming that Oakridge wrote the word, is there anything else he could have been trying to say, besides accusing Ingram?”
Tanner swung around towards Soren.
“Your first name is Conrad, isn’t it?” he said. “He could just as well have been starting to try to write that, and his hand slipped—”
“No,” said the Saint scrupulously. “It’s as definite a ‘P’ as I ever saw. It could never by any stretch of imagination have set out to be an ‘N.’ ”
“But it might perhaps have been an unfinished ‘R,’ ” Soren retorted. “And if the ‘C’ was really a crude ‘L,’ the finger would be on Loretto.”
“No again,” said the Saint judicially. “The ‘C’ is round and positive — almost a complete circle. It couldn’t be anything else.”
The marshal turned to Rand almost pleadingly.
“Could those letters stand for anything to do with your work?” he asked. “I mean, if they were chemical symbols, or something mathematical...”
Rand stared at him without any softening but visibly forced himself to give the suggestion a conscientious mental review. Then he glanced at Soren, who responded only with a slight blank shrug.
“No,” Rand said, turning back to Tanner more stonily than ever. “I’m sorry — absolutely nothing.”
Tanner took a compulsive lumbering step in one direction, then in another, not going anywhere, but rather in helpless stubborn rebellion against the inexorable walls of logic that were crowding him closer on every side except one. But his resistance was beginning to have some of the tired hopelessness of the last minutes of a beleaguered bull.