“I called you here to see if you would assist me,” he said. “I want to know how she acted the morning you proposed to her. Did she say anything about Ballau?”
“Nothing,” answered De Medici, “except that she knew he would be overjoyed.”
Norton nodded and looked grim. De Medici, studying the floor, was thinking. “She was nervous. Yes, I remember something ... about Ballau. Her manner changed. She asked what he had said ... two or three times. And she wept when I left her.... White-faced and weeping in front of the theater.... Preposterous! Not Florence. There’s something else. This creature paws clumsily with surfaces....”
The voice of Dr. Lytton interrupted his musings.
“You haven’t finished, I hope,” the doctor smiled.
“No. A few more things,” Norton answered testily. “They may interest you. The scene of the crime, eh? The disorder and the mysterious props? Well, the murder suddenly committed—committed during a moment of despair and passion—the young woman stood beside the body of the man she had killed and some sort of a notion of planting evidence to throw the police off the track came into her head. A notion typical of the woman who has spent her life in the theater. You’ll remember she was beside herself at this moment, that whatever she did in the half hour following the slaying of Ballau would naturally be the things an innocent and imaginative woman, and not a hardened criminal, would do in an effort to cover up the crime. She began to tear things and overthrow things. She went about it bewilderedly. Her idea was to make it seem as if a terrific struggle had taken place so that suspicion would not fall on a woman but on some powerful assailant. But you saw yourself how she bungled it in her distraction. The books, curtains, pictures: the crucifix and the candle—all unconvincing. The table idiotically set as for a supper for two. All things that a distracted, imaginative and hysterical young woman with a theatrical training would do.”
“Excellent,” breathed Dr. Lytton. “Your psychology stands on firm ground. We might even go a step further. We might even say that a very clever murderer or murderess would have arranged that scene not to give the police false clews for a crime, but to make it seem as if Ballau had killed himself—and arranged the entire scene to convince the police a crime had not been committed. She might have figured out something of that nature, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I thought of that,” Norton said slowly, “but I doubt it. She hadn’t time.”
“Unless,” Dr. Lytton objected, “unless the murder was committed as soon as she entered the room. Or, let us say, before....”
Norton looked indignantly at the scientist.