“Wait a bit. I’m coming to that. Well, then I began to put two and two together. I’d got a pretty shrewd idea already of the personal appearance of the man himself.”
“Oh, it was a man then?”
“Yes, it was a man right enough. There was never any doubt that a man must have done the actual killing. No woman would have been strong enough for the struggle that must have taken place. Stanworth was no weakling, so that gives us the fact that the man must have been a strong, burly sort of person. From the footprint and the length of those strides across the bed he was evidently both tall and largely built; from the clever way in which everything was left he must have been possessed of a fund of cunning; from the manner in which he left that window fastened behind him it was clear that he was thoroughly accustomed to handling lattice windows. Well, what does all that give us? It looked obvious to me.”
Alec was staring intently at the speaker, following every word with eager attention. “I think I see what you’re getting at,” he said slowly.
“I thought you would,” said Roger cheerfully. “Of course there were other things that clinched it. The disappearance of that footprint, for instance. That must have been done by somebody who knew what he was doing. And somebody who heard me say that I was going to fit every male boot in the house into the mark, you remember. Of course it was that which made me so sure at first about Jefferson, because I jumped to the conclusion that it must have been Jefferson whom we saw edging out of the library door. After that I more or less had Jefferson on the brain.”
“I did my best to put you off that track,” said Alec with a slight smile.
“Oh, you did. It wasn’t your fault that I clung to him so persistently.”
“I tried hard to stop you putting your foot in it, if you remember.”
“I know. And I daresay it’s lucky you did. I might have put things a good deal more plainly to him, with extremely awkward results, if you hadn’t dinned it into me so hard.”
“Well,” Alec said slowly, “what are you going to do about it, now you’ve presumably got at the truth at last?”