"I quite thought you might have. I shouldn't have been altogether surprised had you asked to see me."
"No? Are you concerned in those adventures?"
"Actually, I'm not, but Neville, who, you may have noticed, is rather reptilian, told the Sergeant, in his artless way, that I had plans for opening Ernie Fletcher's safe."
"And had you?"
"Well, yes and no," said Sally guardedly. "If I'd had my criminal notebook with me, and time to think it out, I believe I could have had a stab at it. But one very valuable thing this case has taught me is that in real life one just doesn't have time. Of course, if I'd been writing this story, I should have thought up a perfectly plausible reason for the fictitious me to have had the means at hand of concocting the stuff you call soup. I should have turned myself into a scientist's assistant, with the run of his laboratory, or something like that. However, I'm nothing of the sort, so that wasn't much good."
Hannasyde looked at her with a good deal of interest. "Mr. Fletcher's story was true, then, and not an attempt to keep the police amused?"
"You seem to have weighed him up pretty accurately," commented Sally. "But, as it happens, he really did come here to tell Helen (a) that his uncle had been murdered, and (b) that he hadn't managed to get hold of her IOUs. That, naturally, looked very bad to me. Of course, it was idiotic of my sister to co-opt Neville in the first place: she'd have done better to have put me on to it. You won't misunderstand me when I tell you that I was all for abstracting those IOUs from the safe before you could get your hands on them. Unfortunately, there was a policeman mounting guard over the study, which completely cramped my style."
"I quite see your point," said Hannasyde. "But if you've made a study of crime you must know that it would have been quite culpable of you to have abstracted anything at all from the murdered man's safe."
"Theoretically, yes; in practice, no," responded Sally coolly. "I knew that the IOUs had nothing whatsoever to do with the case. Naturally you can't be expected to know that, and just look at the trouble they're causing you! Not to mention the waste of time."
"I appreciate your point of view, Miss Drew, but, as you have already realised, I don't share it. It seems to me that the IOUs may have a very direct bearing on the case."