Pointer weighed fourteen stone and Eames he had guessed as under ten. The drug must have acted very quickly.
“And now I want to move about the room and see if I can make as little noise as Eames did later on—when you heard him come back and lock his door.”
Maggie changed rooms again. Pointer took off both boots. He prided himself on his light footwork, and walking like Agag he crept around the room. Maggie knocked twice. He tried again. Again she knocked twice and then came in.
“Oh, you made ever so much more noise, sir, but then you'd make four of poor Mr. Eames. With him I didn't hear steps at all.”
“You didn't hear my steps either surely,” Pointer insisted, as he relaced his boots.
“Perhaps not as steps, sir, but, dear me, with Mr. Eames on Saturday I could only hear a drawer being pulled out ever so gently and then shut, after a minute almost without a sound, as you might say. If it hadn't been for the boards creaking and papers rustling, I couldn't have believed there was anyone in there, part of the time.”
“Papers rustling. As though they were being scrunched up, or turned over like this?” He illustrated both sounds with a newspaper.
Maggie nodded as he refolded a sheet and drew it out of a make-believe envelope.
“That's the sound, sir, but there's the housekeeper's bell. And for goodness' sake don't let her know that it was I who said anything to you about that man who looked like the other gentleman. She told us someone had been chattering and that the management wouldn't have it. Of course, I said like the others that it wasn't me.”
“You mean about Mr. Sikes, whom you thought was Mr. Beale?”