“I am sorry to say that is true. The key did not work properly, and as I am constantly taking things out of my medicine cupboard, cough mixture and so on, for the village folk who come to consult me, I did get into the bad habit of leaving the cupboard door unlocked.”
“It is also a fact, is it not, Miss Prince, that you are constantly in and out of your house—in other words in and out of Terriford village?”
“That is so.”
“And during the month of April you were constantly in attendance on a dying woman who had been, or so I understand, for many years in your father’s service. Now, who looked after the house while you were out?”
“During some of the time,” says Miss Prince hesitatingly, “I only had a woman from the village to come in and do for me; therefore, the house was frequently left empty. But when that was the case one of Mr. Garlett’s gardeners was generally about the place.”
“Still, the house was often empty. Do you always lock your back door and your garden door as well when you leave home, or are they sometimes left open? Be careful, Miss Prince, as to your answer to this question.”
Miss Prince hesitates, but only for a moment. She knows only too well what her answer must be.
“I always locked the back door, that giving access to the kitchen, when I left the house empty,” she says in a low voice. “The garden door, which only communicates with the garden of the Thatched House, was generally left open.”
There follows a long pregnant silence. And then there runs a strange convulsive sigh through the Court, for the majority of those present realize that by the admission she has just made Miss Prince has gone far to sign Henry Garlett’s death warrant.
“That means,” goes on Sir Almeric in the same quiet, emotionless tone, “that any one last May could gain access to the Thatched Cottage, and of course to your medicine room, so long as he or she came through the grounds of the Thatched House? It is, is it not, a fact that this entrance to your house—I mean the garden-door entrance—is more or less concealed by an evergreen hedge?”