The confidence in his tone startled her. She looked at him almost fearfully. "How do you know?"
He bent over the table for his shot. "Bound to have wiped the finger-prints off it," he replied. "Any fool would know enough to do that."
"I suppose so," she agreed. "Whoever did it was pretty ingenious. How could anyone have got into the room? And how was the door locked afterwards?"
"Hell, how should I know?"
"How should any of us know?" she asked. "This isn't a house full of crooks! We're all ordinary people!"
"Even though one of us is an assassin," interjected Stephen.
"True; but although I'm not personally acquainted with any assassins -"
"You are personally acquainted with one assassin, my girl." He saw how quickly her eyes leaped to his, and added, with one of his mocking smiles: "Since someone in this house is one."
"Of course," she said. "It's rather hard to realise that. I was going to say that I've always imagined that a murderer could be quite an ordinary person. Not like a confirmed thief, I mean. "Which of us, for instance, would know how to open a locked door? Of course, I suppose one of the servants might be a crook, but I don't quite see why any of them should have wanted to murder Nat. They none of them gain anything by his death."
"True," said Stephen uncommunicatively.