"Now why?" she cried, almost pleadingly. "Why should he be sitting here in the dark, dead, with a little light shinning across at a gap in the bookshelves? And that's not all. Look at his desk-on the blotter."
After this spurt she had backed away again, for none of us liked the grin of the little dead man growing stiff as whale-bone in the chair. It was beginning to haunt me. The desk was swept clean of litter, except for one thing. There was a tray of pens and pencils neatly arranged, and a large desk-blotter with brown leather edges. But on the blotter, in a heap as though they had fallen from the dead man's hands, lay four pairs of silver cuff-links.
Four pairs of cuff-links. Threaded through them was a length of heavy string, as though the dead man had been trying to tie them together like beads, knotting each in the middle and knotting them closely together. There was a loop at the end. I looked from that (at least) unusual exhibit up to the gap in the bookshelves, where there were missing two volumes of an early work on aeronautics. I also remember Bowers's statement, when we first came into the room, that most of the furniture had been changed around: the desk at a different window, the clock on a different wall, the position of all the chairs altered. We seemed to have got into a homely suburban Topsy-Turvy House.
"Well?" said Mrs. Antrim quickly.
I regarded her with great stolidness. "Just so, ma'am. Did you notice all this when you first came in? Or what did you do?"
She seemed a little taken aback. "Why — yes, I suppose so, subconsciously. I remembered it, anyhow. But first I turned on the big light over the desk, and made sure Mr. Hogenauer was dead."
"And how long should you say he'd been dead when you got here?"
"It's hard to say. But only a few minutes, I should think. I got here about a quarter-past nine. -The strychnine wouldn't have taken a long time to kill him: a long time for strychnine, that is. It's usually pretty lengthy and unpleasant. He couldn't have lasted more than half an hour after he'd drunk it; probably only twenty minutes. His health was bad, and he was going on for sixty. Say he drank it about quarter to nine."
"Go on, ma'am. What did you do after you found he was dead?"
"First," she said grimly, "I looked round for the bottle labelled bromide. It was standing over there on the mantel. That was how I happened to hit that little flashlight with my elbow, and knock it off the mantel and smash it. No, and I don't mind telling you what I was going to do, either! I was going to wash that bottle and take it away with me-"
Bowers made a noise in this throat.
"And why not?" she asked defiantly. "I'd have done it, too, if the next awful business hadn't happened. I'd shut the door when I came in. So I picked up the bottle, and started out for the scullery to wash it. But the knob was loose, and wouldn't turn to unlatch the door. I suppose I must have been upset or frightened; anyhow, I began to yank and fiddle with it. Then the knob came off in my hand, and the rest of it, with that iron thingummyjig, fell out into the hall. If you can imagine anything more horrible happening to you, I'd like to have you tell me what it is."
"And the best thing that could have happened to you, too," cried Bowers accusingly. "Accessory after the fact. If you'd pinched that bottle and run away, you'd 'a' been accessory after the fact, that's what."
She looked at him coldly.
"That's about all, officer. I was shut up in here with that thing. Of course, I thought of getting out through one of the windows. But just look at them! Apparently poor old Hogenauer always kept the sashes up but the shutters closed. The bolts of the shutters have rusted in the sockets, and I couldn't budge them. If I got panicky, you can't blame me. I even thought of picking up a chair and trying to break the shutters open. It's all very well to be bold, bloody, and resolute; but I'm not strong enough for that sort of work, and, besides, I should have roused the whole neighbourhood. Still, I was just on the point of wanting to try it when I heard a horrible commotion out at the back somewhere, and dogs barking or men running or something. I was so jumpy that I simply reached up and unscrewed the light out of the socket, hot as it was. In a minute you came in at the back; and talked to some woman in the next house about a murderer being loose hereabouts." She made a grimace. "I think you know everything else, although I don't think you know how I felt being shut up in the dark with it."
"Thank you very much," I said with an official air, and only wished I had a notebook to make it look right. "There's just one thing, Mrs. Antrim. When Mr. Hogenauer was at your house last night, didn't he tell you he meant to go to Bristol this evening?"
She opened her eyes. "He certainly didn't tell me that. He may have told my husband. And, anyway, we're jolly sure he didn't go."
"We are. But," I said to Bowers, "that's what he told you?" "It is! And all the rest of the things I've told you is true, too!"
"But you didn't see him go; you didn't drive him to the station or anything like that?"
"I told you I didn't! I told you the last time I saw the governor alive was just after tea, maybe six o'clock, when he said I could go out if I liked. Then was when he said again to come in early, becos we would probably have a visitor that night."
Here I tried to get the muddle straightened. "He told you he intended to call on Dr. Keppel in Bristol, and that he had every reason to hope Dr. Keppel would be out. In fact, Keppel is here in Moreton Abbot somewhere, and Mr. Hogenauer believed that Keppel would come here to-night. Is that what you understood? Yes. But Hogenauer doesn't go to Bristol, and Keppel doesn't come here."
"Maybe 'e's come," muttered Bowers in a sinister voice, "and gone."
"You mean he might have had something against your employer?"
That word "employer" struck another note of suspicion, but Bowers only looked sullen. "How should I know? They always talked German."
"What's Dr. Keppel like?"
"Like? I dunno. Something like the governor, little and thin, except he's got a limp in the leg and a lot of greyish hair all stuck out. Besides, whoever changed them bottles, and put the poison in place of the bromide, was back in the doctor's house in Torquay. There's where you want to look, old cock."
"You little liar," said Mrs. Antrim.
It seemed doubtful whether I could spin out this questioning much longer, for they were both waiting for me to do something. Yet Bowers's dark hint about Dr. Keppel permitted me to do without suspicion exactly what I had been sent here to do: search the room, and particularly the desk, under pretext of looking for something missing. Though I searched with considerable thoroughness, there was nothing
at all in the room, either suspicious or otherwise. The desk itself was almost empty. The room was very neat except for a sprawled newspaper, evidently the paper Mrs. Antrim had used in her jugglery with the key to this room, lying beside the desk.
But there was something on the blotter. I picked up the string of cuff-links and put it to one side, to see whether there might be anything under the blotting-pad; and there were a few lines of very clear letters where something had been blotted on the white surface. There were other smudges and occasional letters criss-crossing, but these seemed to stand out. They appeared to be in English.
"Hold it up to a mirror!" said Bowers excitedly. "He was writing a letter this morning. I seen 'im at it."
"Writing a letter to whom?"
"I dunno. He posted it himself. But he wrote a lot of letters." Bowers pointed to the book of stamps. "Always at it. What's more, those words weren't on that blotter yesterday: I remember, becos I looked at the blotter to see whether it wanted changing. Hold it up to a mirror!"