Evelyn, who had been growing more and more bewildered, pushed the hair out of her eyes and stared at H.M.'s curious expression.
"What about it?" she asked. "It seems straightforward enough. Stone was right after all. The murderer climbed in here after they'd gone to bed-"
"And yet, d'ye know," said H.M., "I'm inclined to doubt whether that lock was busted from outside."
He waddled into the room at his near-sighted stride, pulling the glasses up and down his nose. This time he consented to take off his hat, which restored the old H.M. Returning to his chair, he sat down and looked at the skull facing him on the desk-blotter; he was very nearly as bald as the skull itself; and they were a queer pair to be looking at each other in the hygienic, unloved light of a doctor's office.
"All I'm sure of," he added blankly, "is that the murderer's under this roof right now.
"Y'know, my fatheads, every time I play this game of chase-the-murderer I find I'm in a new path or two. I learn something. You've called this case a sort of puppet show affair; and, by a stroke of intelligence that ain't usual with any of you, you're right in more senses than one. It's also like a Punch and Judy show in that everything is the wrong way around. In an ordinary murder-investigation, first of all we stumble over the corpse on the floor, with six suspects gibberin' around it. Then we line up the suspects, and we question 'em thoroughly. If you, Ken, were chroniclin' the case, you'd devote the first half-dozen chapters to an exhaustive questioning giving intimate details about the suspects, a suggestive leer or two they might make, and their replies to the query as to where they were on the night of June fifteenth. Afterwards you could go skylarkin'. Afterwards you could go off to the house in the marches, the fight in the dentist's office, the rescue of the wench (if any), and let the evidence rest until it had to be pulled out of the hat at the end.
"That's normal. But, burn me, in this business we got it all turned round backwards. The skylarkin,' the Harlequinad-ein-Suburbia, had to come first. You acted your summer pantomime before anybody (including myself) quite knew what was goin' on. And when we did learn what was goin' on it still didn't make sense about the murder. Consequently, at long last, we start to question the suspects.
"We couldn't have questioned 'em before this, because we didn't have the vital evidence. It wouldn't have been any good to fire the where-were-you-between-the-hours-of question at 'em: we still don't know just when and how that poison was handed over to Hogenauer. It all whittles down to that one point. And we've got to attack 'em with the new evidence that's been discovered. That new evidence consists of two wildly unrelated questions: (1) Is L. alive, or isn't be? (2) How does the presence or absence of L. concern the question of the counterfeit money? Uh-huh. At first glance it seems like tryin' to find the relation of a cactus-plant to a bucket of herring: but when we relate them two facts together we're goin' to have the truth. So the people will be brought in here, one by one-and we've got to find the truth before dawn."
"And I suppose you've got some notion as to what the truth is?" Charters asked irritably.
"Me? Sure I have, son."