She got up from the chair. She was small, with a sturdy figure like a swimmer's, but she was still unsteady on her feet. She went over to the fireplace, and pointed to the hearth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Bowers, with a glass of water in his shaky hand, had come back into the room. But she paid no attention to the water, and I believe Bowers drank it himself. She was pointing to an object lying on the brown tiling of the hearth, which I had seen when I threw her cigarette into the grate, but which I believed to be an ordinary fountain-pen. It was not. I picked it up, and it was a flash-light shaped like a pen-another of the knickknacks which apparently Hogenauer had loved-with its tiny bulb smashed.
"When I came in here," Mrs. Antrim went on coolly, "the room was dark except for this, which was switched on and the switch caught. It was lying here," she put her hand on the mantelshelf, "and there was a little stream of light going diagonally past Mr. Hogenauer's body… like this."
Placing the pen diagonally on the mantel, she drew an imaginary line in the air towards the desk. It passed about two feet over Hogenauer's head, slanted over the desk on a line with the lamp-cord, and ended on one of the open bookshelves against the wall.
"I was curious," said Mrs. Antrim, with a little colour in her cheeks now, "to know what book or books that light was pointing straight to. The answer was: to none. See for yourself. There's a gap in the shelf just where it ended, and a couple of books have been taken out. You can see by the curved markings in the dust."
I followed her to the other side of the desk. The missing books were the two middle volumes of a set, elaborately tooled and gilded, of an old work on aeronautics before the invention of the heavier-than-air machine: Astra Castra, Experiments and Adventures in the Atmosphere, 1865.
"Now why?" she cried, almost pleadingly. "Why should he be sitting here in the dark, dead, with a little light shinning across at a gap in the bookshelves? And that's not all. Look at his desk-on the blotter."
After this spurt she had backed away again, for none of us liked the grin of the little dead man growing stiff as whale-bone in the chair. It was beginning to haunt me. The desk was swept clean of litter, except for one thing. There was a tray of pens and pencils neatly arranged, and a large desk-blotter with brown leather edges. But on the blotter, in a heap as though they had fallen from the dead man's hands, lay four pairs of silver cuff-links.
Four pairs of cuff-links. Threaded through them was a length of heavy string, as though the dead man had been trying to tie them together like beads, knotting each in the middle and knotting them closely together. There was a loop at the end. I looked from that (at least) unusual exhibit up to the gap in the bookshelves, where there were missing two volumes of an early work on aeronautics. I also remember Bowers's statement, when we first came into the room, that most of the furniture had been changed around: the desk at a different window, the clock on a different wall, the position of all the chairs altered. We seemed to have got into a homely suburban Topsy-Turvy House.
"Well?" said Mrs. Antrim quickly.
I regarded her with great stolidness. "Just so, ma'am. Did you notice all this when you first came in? Or what did you do?"