“Well, all I can say,” replied Peter, exercising his full powers of recovery, “I don’t believe Miss Lennox has anything to do with the dreadful business and that she can give a perfectly reasonable account of how her handkerchief got there.” He seemed very dogged as he made this last remark. But Anthony had not finished with him yet awhile.
“But she won’t,” he proceeded airily. “She was approached about having been in the library. And she lied about it, Daventry. It’s no use disguising the fact, she lied about it—and then made an attempt to get into the library—presumably to look for her handkerchief.”
“Do they suspect her—do you suspect her, Bathurst?” demanded Peter, “it seems impossible——that girl—mixed up in a monstrous affair of this sort”—he stopped at a loss for words to express his indignation adequately.
“I can’t answer your first question—I can’t answer for them,” said Anthony, “but I certainly suspect her of knowing more than she has told us. For instance—why has she deliberately accused Morgan Llewellyn?”
“What?” muttered Peter again. “When?”
“To Sergeant Clegg when he first spoke to her—what do you make of that, Daventry?” Peter was non-committal. “Again,” continued Bathurst relentlessly, “why were her initials in front of the dead man—scrawled by the dead man in his last conscious moments?”
“They mightn’t have been intended for hers—you can’t be certain,” defended Peter.
“Of course not!” Anthony slapped him on the back. “As a matter of fact they weren’t!”
Peter could hardly believe his ears at this sudden revelation. “How can you know that?” he demanded.
“Well, I don’t know, Daventry,” came the prompt reply, “but all the same, I’m pretty sure.”