“Well, Mr. Ames didn’t want Mr. Tracy to marry her.”
“Did Mr. Ames favour the lady himself?”
“Oh, no, sir. He’s a woman hater. Or at least he says so. No, but he didn’t want Mr. Tracy to marry anybody for fear he might cut him, Mr. Ames, out of his will.”
“How do you know all these things?”
“Well, I drive the car, you see, and they talk these matters over, and I can’t help hearing them. They make no bones of it, they talk right out. I never repeat anything I hear, in an ordinary way, but as you ask me, sir——”
“Yes, Louis, tell all you know. So Mr. Ames would suffer financially if Mr. Tracy married?”
“I don’t know that, sir, but I know he thought he would. And I suppose he knew.”
“It seems to me,” Farrell said, “we ought to know the terms of Mr. Tracy’s will as it might help us to get at the truth.”
“We can’t do that at the moment,” Hart said, “and anyway, this is merely a preliminary inquiry to get the main facts of the situation.”
But the other servants had no more information to impart than those hitherto questioned. A chambermaid, one Sally Bray, convinced us that all the queer decorations spread on the bed had been already in the room and were, therefore, not brought in by the murderer.