Roger choked slightly, but made no reply.
“Oh, I can’t believe you thought that,” continued the inspector with relish. “Why, that was an old pair, not new like the pair that had made those footprints. A child could have seen that. Besides, they’d only been in the water an hour or two.”
“What?” Roger cried.
“Oh, didn’t you know that, sir?” asked the inspector innocently. “Oh, yes; they weren’t much more than wet through. And you don’t mean to say you never recognised them, sir? Well, dear me!”
“Rub it in, rub it in,” Roger groaned. “Dance on my body if you like. I’ve no doubt I deserve it. No, I didn’t recognise them. Would you mind explaining to my futile intelligence what exactly you mean by that?”
“Well, seeing that you’d had them in your hands not twenty-four hours before, I thought you might have recognised them. Didn’t you get hold of a pair of Mrs. Russell’s shoes, and give them to Miss Cross to give back for you?”
“Great Scott, you don’t mean to say those were the ones?”
“Indeed they were, sir, as it wouldn’t have taken you five minutes to find out, if you’d ever thought of it. The girl lost her head a bit over that. It’s easy enough to see what happened. You’d been putting forward the idea that the murderer was a man, who’d made those marks with a pair of woman’s shoes to throw us off the track. She’s getting pretty desperate by then, seeing how strongly I suspected her (I never troubled to hide that), so she makes some excuse to get away, nips back to the house, slashes the shoes up the sides to give the impression they’d been prepared for big feet, and throws them over the top of the cliff. Then she makes another excuse to get you down on to the ledge, where they can be found. Why, bless you, sir, you never found those shoes! She did!”
“It’s perfectly true,” Roger muttered. “She did. I remember.”
“Yes, it’s all plain enough as far as commonsense goes, but no good for a court of law, I’m afraid. A smart counsel could tear all that to shreds with his eyes shut. The same with the second case too.”