“Damn you,” Bertha said, “do you mean to say that I poured my good whisky down that cop’s throat and—” Bertha spluttered herself into indignant silence.
A smile twitched Sergeant Sellers’ mouth, “Exactly, Bertha.”
“Why, damn you. That was customers’ whisky. I keep it for my best clients.”
“That’s what Jack said. Said it was the first break I’d ever given him in ten years.”
Bertha sought for words. While she was groping for the proper epithets, Sellers went on. “I had a couple of men out in front of the place so they could follow you when you left.” His face darkened. “Damned if you didn’t lose them. Those are a couple of boys that are going back to pavement-pounding.”
Bertha said, “They were damned slick. I didn’t know they were on my tail. I just took precautions.”
“I’ll say you took precautions! They said you went around like a flea on a hot stove until you finally ditched them... All right, then you came here. What happened?”
Bertha said, “You won’t believe me if I tell you.”
“I think I will,” Sellers said. “ I don’t think you bored that hole. And what’s more, I think the hole was bored from the bedroom through to the garage. If you’d bored it, you’d have bored it from the garage through to the bedroom—”
Sergeant Sellers broke off as a door-bell sounded, listened to the faint sounds of excited feminine voices, then went on patiently, “Now, Bertha, you’ve got to give me the low-down about Mrs. Belder’s removable bridge — and how it came into your possession. That was one of the things we couldn’t understand. When we made a post-mortem on the body we found a removable bridge was missing. That wasn’t a particularly significant fact, it was simply a pertinent fact. But when we find that bridge in your office in Mrs. Belder’s spectacle case, that’s something else. Now we want to know where you got that bridge.”