“Well, I must be getting along now,” said Anthony, and went.
Roger regarded the closed door for a moment. “It’s nice to be young,” he said, from the depths of his thirty-six years.
“Humph, yes; but there’s a rude awakening coming, I’m afraid,” replied the inspector with surprising gloom.
“Your profession seems to have made a pessimist of you, Inspector,” Roger smiled.
The inspector meditated this. “Well, perhaps it has; but there’s one thing I have learnt—things are seldom in reality as they appear on the surface! And that’s a thing youth never has and never will learn.”
“Hark to the disillusionment of middle-age!” Roger laughed, refusing to echo the other’s suddenly serious tone.
They settled down to a comfortable discussion of the case.
“There’s only one thing that still puzzles me,” Roger said a little later. “Everything else falls into place neatly enough, but what on earth is a pair of Mrs. Russell’s shoes doing in the jig-saw?”
“I was wondering when you’d come to them,” the inspector agreed.
“There are ways in which the chap could get hold of them, of course,” Roger mused. “I did myself. Or I suppose he could have bought them at a jumble sale, or picked them out of the ash-bin. But why? And why Mrs. Russell’s?”