“I had it; Mr. Conroy had turned it over to me. I unlocked the door of the cottage myself, and we all went in together.” The crisp, assured young voice implied that a murder more or less was all in the day’s work to the state police.
“Did you drive directly up to the cottage door?”
“No; we left the motorcycle and the car just short of the spot where the little dirt road to the cottage hits the gravel road to the main house and went in on foot, using the grass strip that edges the road.”
“Any special reason for that?”
“There certainly was. We didn’t want to mix up footprints and other marks any more than they’d been mixed already.”
“What happened after you got in the house?”
“Well, Mr. Dutton and the doctor took charge of the body, and we helped them to move it into the dining room across the hall, after a careful inspection had been made of the position of the body. As a matter of fact, a chalk outline was made of it for further analysis, if necessary, and I took a flash light or so of it so that we’d have that, too, to check up with later. I helped to carry the body to the other room and place it on the table, where it was decided to keep it until the autopsy could be performed. I then locked the door of the parlour so that nothing could be disturbed there, put the key in my pocket, and went out to inspect the marks in the dirt road. I left Mr. Dutton and Dr. Stanley with the body and sent Wilkins down the road to a gas station to telephone Mr. Bellamy that his wife had been found in the cottage. There was no telephone in the cottage, and the one at the main house had been disconnected.”
“Sergeant, was Mr. Bellamy under suspicion at the time that you telephoned him?”
“I didn’t do the telephoning,” corrected Sergeant Johnson dispassionately; and added more dispassionately still; “Everyone was under suspicion.”
“Mr. Bellamy no more than another?”