She adds a detail of considerable interest. This is that she noticed that the plateful of strawberries had disappeared. She adds that this fact was noticed by her quite half an hour before Mr. Garlett went up to his wife’s room.
Sir Harold Anstey, when cross-examining Agatha Cheale, naturally plays up to the story she has told. His object now is to increase, not diminish, the witness’s credit. He draws out of her her very high opinion of both Mr. and Mrs. Garlett. She tells the Court what a devoted couple they were, and how excellent a husband Mr. Garlett was. In fact, she can’t speak too well of them.
Then Miss Cheale has a few unpleasant moments to live through while she is re-examined by Sir Almeric. He presses her very hard, very ruthlessly, about her mysterious stranger. Does she really believe that the stranger she saw hastening down the passage committed the murder? She answers emphatically that yes, she does believe it. Has she anything that could account for such a monstrous and motiveless crime on an unknown man’s part? She replies that there is a type of criminally minded human being who does commit motiveless crimes. Criminal lunatic asylums are full of them.
II
“Call Miss Prince!”
There is a look of tense excitement on almost every face in the crowded court-house when the tall, angular figure of Miss Prince steps up, composedly, into the witness-box. Even the dullest witted of the spectators present is aware by now that her evidence will be crucial, one way or the other, to the prisoner.
While she is being sworn, the man in the dock, Henry Garlett, looks at her with a long, steady, rather sad look. The sight of Miss Prince reminds him with painful vividness of his wife, of “poor Emily.”
He is the one person in Court who does not realize the fearful import of the evidence she is about to tender. For one thing, he is well aware that he has only been to the Thatched Cottage on one occasion in two years, and he does not yet understand how very difficult it is to prove a negative.
Sir Almeric Post, for the Prosecution, begins his examination of this witness in a conversational tone. It is almost as if he were calling on Miss Prince in her own house, and asking her a number of not very important questions. And she also answers in a clear, decided voice, the voice that some of the people of Terriford know only too well. It is the voice of the admonitory Miss Prince, not that of Miss Prince the eager gossip.
Briefly she admits she is the daughter of the late Dr. William Prince, that she helped her father in his dispensary, and that when there came the break-up of her home and the sale of the practice to Dr. Maclean, she thought it within her right to take with her to the Thatched Cottage what drugs were left in her father’s dispensary.