"Yes."
"Well, then, interpret Ann Upcott's story in the same way," continued Hanaud. "Suppose that sometime that day she had unlocked the communicating door! What more easy? Madame Harlowe was up during the day-time. Her room was empty. And that communicating door opened not into Madame's bedroom, where perhaps it might have been discovered whether it was locked or not, but into a dressing-room."
"Yes," Jim agreed.
"Well then, continue! Ann Upcott is left alone after Mademoiselle Harlowe's departure to Monsieur de Pouillac's Ball. She sends Gaston to bed. The house is all dark and asleep. Suppose then that she is joined by—some one—some one with the arrow poison all ready in the hypodermic needle. That they enter the treasure-room just as Ann Upcott described. That she turns on the light for a second whilst—some one—crosses the treasure-room and opens the door. Suppose that the voice which whispered, 'That will do now,' was the voice of Ann Upcott herself and that she whispered it across Madame Harlowe's body to the third person in that room!"
"The 'some one,'" exclaimed Jim. "But, who then? Who?"
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders. "Why not Waberski?"
"Waberski?" cried Jim with a new excitement in his voice.
"You asked me what had Ann Upcott to gain by this murder and you answered your own question. Nothing you said, Monsieur Frobisher, but did your quick answer cover the ground? Waberski—he at all events expected a fine fat legacy. What if he in return for help proposed to share that fine fat legacy with the exquisite Mademoiselle Ann. Has she no motive now? In the end what do we know of her at all except that she is the paid companion and therefore poor? Mademoiselle Ann!"; and he threw up his hands. "Where does she spring from? How did she come into that house? Was she perhaps Waberski's friend?"—and a cry from Jim brought Hanaud to a stop.
Jim had thought of Waberski as the possible murderer if murder had been done—a murderer who, disappointed of his legacy, the profits of his murder, had carried on his villainy to blackmail and a false accusation. But he had not associated Ann Upcott with him until those moments on the Terrace Tower. Yet now memories began to crowd upon him. The letter to him, for instance. She had said that Waberski had claimed her support and ridiculed his claim. Might that letter not have been a blind and a rather cunning blind? Above all there was a scene passing vividly through his mind which was very different from the scene spread out before his eyes, a scene of lighted rooms and a crowd about a long green table, and a fair slender girl seated at the table, who lost and lost until the whole of her little pile of banknotes was swept in by the croupier's rake, and then turned away with a high carriage but a quivering lip.
"Aha!" said Hanaud keenly. "You know something after all of Ann Upcott, my friend. What do you know?"