"But you will leave my key with me?" she said, as I was about to take leave.
"I think I cannot do that, Mrs. Altonstall," I said, "as it was entrusted to me by official authority. But I promise to return it to Mr. Leroy, which, I trust will be satisfactory to you."
The lady agreed to this, though a little unwillingly, and I went away, newly perplexed at this most recent development.
So then, Graham Leroy had been in possession of this key. So then, he must have left it in Robert Pembroke's bedroom. He would not have done this purposely, of course, therefore he must have dropped it there without knowing it. It was found on Robert Pembroke's bed. Not under the pillow,—the suggestion that it had been under the pillow was mere supposition. It might have been dropped on the bed from the pocket of one leaning over the sleeping man.
But Graham Leroy! the thought was preposterous!
And then again, the old, ever insoluble question,—how could he get in?
But really it was scarcely more impossible to conclude how he got in, than to imagine Graham Leroy getting in at all, except in correct and ordinary fashion.
My brain worked quickly. To be sure, he might have dropped the key in that room when calling there, as he did, on Tuesday night.
But I had asked Charlotte when Mr. Pembroke's bedroom had last been swept, and she had told me that she had swept it Wednesday morning, and had then emptied the waste basket. This had seemed to me to prove that all the clues I had found, had been brought into the room after that sweeping. But again, the key being found in the bed it had nothing to do with the sweeping of the room. However, Charlotte could not have made up the bed without seeing the key, so the only possible deduction was that Mrs. Altonstall's key had been left in Robert Pembroke's room after noon of Wednesday, the day he was murdered!
It was all too much for me! I had undertaken to trace the clues that I had myself found, but if they were to lead me to such extraordinary discoveries as this, I felt I must appeal to more practical detective talent.