“Yes, yes! Of course I do,” she assented feverishly. “I wish now I had spoken right out at once. But I wanted a big American detective to undertake to get my diamonds back. My husband had promised to engage him and I wanted him to have this exclusive information. Now, we will have everybody else knowing the secret too.”
“Never mind, madam, there will be plenty for him to do,” Inspector Furnival observed consolingly. “You were telling us you noticed the hands of the man in Mr. Bechcombe's office.”
“Yes.” Mrs. Carnthwacke glanced up again at her husband and seemed to gather strength from his smile. “I just looked at his hands mechanically while we were talking, and I saw that though they were nice hands, well shaped and carefully manicured, they had one curious defect, if you can call it a defect. The thumb was unusually long, and the first—don't you call it the index finger?—was very short, so that the two looked almost the same length. It was an odd fault, and I never noticed it in any hand before, until——”
“Yes, madam, until?” the inspector prompted as she paused with a shiver.
“Until this morning in the car,” she went on, steadying her voice with an effort. “Just as he caught my hands, I saw his and I knew—I knew beyond the possibility of a doubt that my assailant was the man who stole my diamonds, and murdered Mr. Bechcombe.”
“Well, that is definite enough, anyhow,” John Steadman remarked thoughtfully. “Were both hands alike, do you know, Mrs. Carnthwacke?”
“Yes, they were,” she returned in a more positive tone than she had yet used. “I noticed that particularly.”
“Did you recognize him in any other way?” the inspector asked with his eye on his notebook.
“No, not really. I can't say I did,” Mrs. Carnthwacke said hesitatingly. “That is, I did think there was something about the eyes, though the Crow's Inn man had his hidden by smoked horn-rimmed glasses, so I couldn't have seen much of them. But there was something about his eyebrows and the way his eyes were set that I certainly thought I recognized.”
John Steadman was drawing his brows together.