I was agonized by her terror.
“They know you to be innocent. Your innocence has been proved,” I cried out fiercely. “You have what the law calls an alibi; you were more than a hundred miles away when the crime was committed—if there was a crime. Good heavens, Violet, can you believe that I shouldn’t have given myself up to justice the very moment it was necessary to clear you?”
Her expression softened more than I could have hoped.
“I know that, Bertrand,” she said in a low voice. “Only I don’t understand why you are here. What does Sir Frank Tarleton want with me?”
“He wanted two things. One was to make sure that you really were here on Wednesday night. He is now quite satisfied of that. The other is to ask you if you can explain something that has puzzled us in Weathered’s appointment-book. Whenever your name appears it is followed by a number, and we don’t know why.”
Violet lowered her eyes with a frown.
“He gave me that number to sign my letters by when I wrote to him. He told me that it would help me to write more freely if I used a number instead of a name.”
I started in alarm. “But why should you need that? What were the letters about?”
The poor girl’s eyes still refused to meet mine.
“He made me tell him the whole story in letters. He said that was the only way to get it off my mind.”