“Why, the murderer, setting the room to rights afterwards, thinks he’d better have a look in the basket. The first thing he spots is that piece of paper. ‘Aha!’ he thinks. ‘The very thing I wanted to put a finishing touch to the affair!’ Smoothes it carefully out, puts it in the typewriter and types those few words above the signature. What could be simpler?”
“By Jove, I wonder! It’s jolly ingenious.”
Roger’s eyes were sparkling. “Ingenious? Yes; but in its very simplicity. Oh, that’s what happened, sure enough. There’s plenty of corroboration, when you come to think of it. The way the whole thing’s got into the top half of the sheet of paper, for instance. That isn’t natural, really, is it? It ought to be in the middle, with the signature about two thirds down. And why isn’t it? Because the signature was in the middle already, and the fellow had to work upwards from that.”
“I believe you must be right,” Alec said slowly.
“Well, don’t be so grudging about it. Of course I’m right! As a matter of fact, those scratches on the blotting paper gave me the idea as soon as I saw them. I’d been puzzling after a way of getting round that confession. But when I found that second sheet in the waste-paper basket of course the thing was as plain as a pikestaff. That was a bad blunder of his, by the way; not to look through the rest of the basket’s contents.”
“Yes,” Alec agreed seriously. “And supposing the inspector had found it. It might have given him something to think about, mightn’t it?”
“It might and it mightn’t. Of course from the inspector’s point of view there’s been nothing to afford the least question as to the plain fact of suicide; except the absence of motive, of course, and that’s really nothing, after all. He hasn’t had his suspicions aroused more or less by accident, as it were, like we have.”
“We’ve had the luck, all right,” Alec remarked, possibly in his rôle of brake.
“Undoubtedly, but we haven’t let it lie about untouched,” Roger said complacently. “In fact, I think we’ve done very well indeed up to now,” he added candidly. “I don’t see how we could have done more, do you?”
“No, I’m dashed if I do,” said Alec with decision.