his nerve held. Those two points assured, only some wholly unlikely accident could unmask him.
To come back to my puzzling out of the matter as I sat in the dead man's bedroom with the tell-tale shoes before me. The reason for the entrance by the window instead of by the front door will already have occurred to any one reading this. Entering by the door, the man would almost certainly have been heard by the sharp-eared Martin in his pantry just across the hall; he might have met him face to face.
Then there was the problem of the whisky. I had not attached much importance to it; whisky will sometimes vanish in very queer ways in a household of eight or nine persons; but it had seemed strange that it should go in that way on that evening. Martin had been plainly quite dumbfounded by the fact. It seemed to me now that many a man–fresh, as this man in all likelihood was, from a bloody business, from the unclothing of a corpse, and with a desperate part still to play–would turn to that decanter as to a friend. No doubt he had a drink before sending for Martin; after
