“What’s up now?”
“I’ve just had a brain wave. Look here, Alexander Watson, it seems to me that we’ve been tackling this little affair from the wrong end.”
“How’s that?”
“Why, we’ve been concentrating all our energies on working backwards from suspicious circumstances and people. What we ought to have done is to start farther back and work forwards.”
“Don’t quite get you.”
“Well, put it another way. The big clue to any murder must after all be supplied by the victim himself. People don’t get murdered for nothing—except by a chance burglar, of course, or a homicidal maniac; and I think we can dismiss both of those possibilities here. What I mean is, find out all you can about the victim and the information ought to give you a lead towards his murderer. You see? We’ve been neglecting that side of it altogether. What we ought to have been doing is to collect every possible scrap of information we can about old Stanworth. Find out exactly what sort of a character he had and all his activities, and then work forwards from that. Get me?”
“That seems reasonable enough,” Alec said cautiously. “But how could we find out anything? It’s no good asking Jefferson or Lady Stanworth. We should never get any information out of them.”
“No, but we’ve got the very chance lying close to our hand to find out pretty nearly as much as Jefferson knows,” Roger said excitedly. “Didn’t he say that he was going through all Stanworth’s papers and accounts and things in the morning room? What’s to prevent us having a look at them, too?”
“You mean, nip in when nobody’s about and go through them?”
“Exactly. Are you game?”