“You’ve relieved my mind very much,” Mr. Sharrow was speaking quite politely now. “There seemed such an extraordinary mystery about the whole thing! But what you tell me clears it up. I should like to ask you one other question. About what time did Ponting leave La Solitude?”
“I had a very long, tiring journey,” said Lily frankly, “and I went up to bed quite early, before he left. Still, I heard the Countess Polda say good-bye to him—I should think a little before ten.”
“That fits in with my theory.” Mr. Sharrow nodded. “I think he left La Solitude with the idea of catching the ten-thirty train, and that then, on his way down to the station, he was waylaid and murdered.”
“Perhaps that was what did happen.”
But Mr. Sharrow was going on, as if speaking to himself, though addressing her.
“In this cursed place,” he said, “the police are so used to coming across suicides that they won’t admit the probability of murder—that must be very convenient for the kind of bandits who infest Monte Carlo! Why, they’ve had the most awful gang of thieves here during this last fortnight. The Commissioner of Police told me himself that they were desperate men who stuck at nothing. One of them when caught yesterday made a slash at his captor with a razor, and hurt him most awfully.”
“But is it likely that any of that gang would have been in that lonely place? It’s a sort of deserted garden, with boards up, warning people that it’s private property.”
“I know—I know! Of course I’ve been there——” He spoke with a touch of impatience.
“And then,” said Lily, “surely a thief would have taken away that curious kind of gold bangle poor Mr. Ponting wore? It was by that bangle,” she went on in a low voice, “that I identified him—I didn’t see his face.”
The words she uttered brought back very vividly her terrible experience, and her lips quivered.