“Well, I was sayin’—you have to allow for chance. There was a lot of luck about.”
“What are you thinking of?”
“The time, Mrs. Beach. Yes, the flight of time. We’d better go to bed.”
But he did not go to bed. He stirred the fire in his bedroom and composed himself by it. The affair annoyed him. He did not want to be bothered by work and his mind insisted on working. Something like this. “Philosophically time is an illusion. ‘Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.’ Highly divers, yes. Time is the trouble, Colonel. Why was there such a long time between the first scream and the second scream? Sally tumbled down. Sally was fumbling in the dark: but it don’t take many minutes to get from her room to the stairs. She took as long as it took the chauffeur to run to the powerhouse. He started some while after the first scream, he had found what was wrong and put the light on again within a minute of the second. Too much time for Sally—and too little. How did Sally’s burglars get off so quick? Faulks ran up at the second scream. The rest of us were there next minute. They were there to hit Faulks. When we came, we saw no one, heard no one and found no one.” He shook his head at the firelight. “And yet Sally’s rather a dear. I wonder. No, it didn’t go according to plan. But I don’t like it, my child. It don’t look pretty.”
He sat up. Somebody was moving in the corridor. He went to his table for an electric torch, slid silently across the room, flung open the door and flashed on the light. He caught a glimpse of legs vanishing round a corner, legs which were crawling, a man’s legs. A door was closed stealthily.
Reggie swept the light along the floor. It fell at last on some spots of candle grease dropped where the fallen Sally was examined. Thereabouts the legs had been. He moved the light to and fro. Close by stood an old oak settle. He swept the light about it, saw something beneath it flash and picked up Mrs. Faulks’s big ruby brooch.
The early morning, which he does not love, found him in the garden. There under Sally’s window the ladder still stood. “That came from the potting sheds, sir,” his factotum Sam told him. “Matter of a hundred yards.” Together they went over the path and away to the little powerhouse by the stream. The ground was still hard from the night frost.
“Not a trace,” Reggie murmured. “Well, well. Seen anybody about this morning, Sam?”
“This morning, sir?” Sam stared. “Not a soul.”
“Have a look,” said Reggie and went in shivering.