“Certainly, if you make it a condition!” I said a little more stiffly. The man recognised the change in my voice or manner, and said apologetically:
“Excuse me, sir, but I am going outside my duty in speaking to you at all on the subject. I know you, however, of old; and I feel that I can trust you. Not your word, sir, that is all right; but your discretion!”
I bowed. “Go on!” I said. He began at once:
“I have gone over this case, sir, till my brain begins to reel; but I can’t find any ordinary solution of it. At the time of each attempt no one has seemingly come into the house; and certainly no one has got out. What does it strike you is the inference?”
“That the somebody—or the something—was in the house already,” I answered, smiling in spite of myself.
“That’s just what I think,” he said, with a manifest sigh of relief. “Very well! Who can be that someone?”
“‘Someone, or something,’ was what I said,” I answered.
“Let us make it ‘someone,’ Mr. Ross! That cat, though he might have scratched or bit, never pulled the old gentleman out of bed, and tried to get the bangle with the key off his arm. Such things are all very well in books where your amateur detectives, who know everything before it’s done, can fit them into theories; but in Scotland Yard, where the men aren’t all idiots either, we generally find that when crime is done, or attempted, it’s people, not things, that are at the bottom of it.”
“Then make it ‘people’ by all means, Sergeant.”
“We were speaking of ‘someone,’ sir.”