“Because she was too scared to think. Some one with a pistol was on the other side of the table.” He rose and went to the entrance facing the Point. “And the person with the pistol shot at her from here—winged her as she ran.” He turned to Bassett. “That’s why you saw no one when you looked out after you first heard the shot. The murderer was in here lying low.”
“Yes.” Bassett thought back over the moment when he had stood in the living-room doorway. “That’s the only place he could have been or I’d have seen him. But they wouldn’t have been any time together—couldn’t have had a quarrel or a scene. According to Mrs. Cornell it was only six or seven minutes after she saw Sybil go out that she heard the shot. That would give them only two or three minutes in here.”
“Time enough to draw a gun and back it up with a few sentences. It bears out what I’ve thought from the start—not an accidental meeting but a date, to which the woman came unsuspecting and the other primed to kill.”
“Then Mrs. Stokes got on to that date,” said Williams, “and broke in on it. And there’s only one person that date could have been with—Stokes.”
Bassett’s nerves were raw with strain and anxiety. This reiteration of a rendezvous with Stokes maddened him:
“But it couldn’t have been. I’ve told you. I knew Miss Saunders well. I know what she felt about the man, and besides I have the evidence of my own eyes that she avoided him in every way she could. Make an appointment to meet him alone! She’d as soon make an appointment with Satan.”
Neither of the men answered him for a moment. Williams regarded his sentiment with respect. He had been a friend of the dead girl’s and it was natural he should stand up for her, whether rightly or wrongly Williams was not yet sure. Rawson was impressed; he had formed a high opinion of the director’s candor and truthfulness and his words weighed with him:
“I go a good deal by what you say, Mr. Bassett, and as to this meeting of which I’m convinced—whom it was with I don’t know. Williams here has made up his mind and worked out his case. I don’t agree with him. I believe Mrs. Stokes is telling the truth. What she says hangs together all right. I think her explanation of the passage of time when she was on the shore is entirely plausible. That she may know something is possible, but I don’t think she’s guilty.”
“Then you must think it’s Stokes,” said Williams with some heat. “There’s nobody else it could be.”
Rawson considered before he spoke: