“You!” he exclaimed. “You didn’t obey orders. You didn’t stay where you were told to stay! Why did you leave this door at all?”
“S’ ’elp me, sir, I didn’t, Mr. Drew. If I did it wasn’t farther than the foyer or the downstairs steps. I took very careful pains to call the second-man, sir, when I went after you.”
Drew’s eyes smoldered with inner fire. “I told you,” he repeated, “I told you to stay by this door and not leave it—even for a minute. You went after the second-man, by your own admission. You went to the foyer hall. You went to the staircase leading down to the lower part of the house. In other words, you didn’t watch the door, and you lost your master through your own foolishness!”
“But, sir, nobody could ’ave gotten through the door. Hit was locked and bolted on the hinside, sir! I ’e’rd Mr. Stockbridge do that when you left ’im! I did, sir!”
“We may have been mistaken when we thought we heard that! Perhaps he just fumbled with the locks, and left it unlocked.” Drew eyed the servant’s red face with a keen-lidded glance. He waited.
“That cawn’t be right, sir,” said the butler, after thought and a wild glance about. “’Ow can that be right? I tried the door when the telephone loidy called me hup! I tried hit twice. James tried hit! ’E fixes hall the locks in the ’ouse, sir. ’E says it was most excellently secured, sir.”
“How about that?” asked Drew, turning to the second-man. “What of that, James?”
“’E’s right. I’m a little of everythin’ about the ’ouse. I tends the door and I watches the lights and locks, sir. I was born in Brixton, sir, where the old man kept a lock-shop, sir. That’s twenty years, and more ago, sir. Beggin’ your pardon, sir.”
Drew swung upon the butler. The second-man was the living picture of truth. His dereliction, if any, might consist in sly tapping of the wine-cellar. His nose attested to this habit, in a brilliant rosette.
“You’re partly to blame!” Drew told the butler. “There’s nobody in this room who could have committed the murder. There was nobody here when we left Mr. Stockbridge. There is no way for anybody to get in, save through this door. The same applies in getting out—escaping. If you were awake and always here, and if you were honest,” he added, “I could presume that the master was slain by—well, let us say, unnatural causes. Such things do not exist. This is a material age. Nothing as much as a pin-head or point was ever moved save through a natural cause. No bullet could be fired into a man’s brain without a hand which planned or pulled the trigger.”