“I deeply regret now that I did not write to the prosecution direct. But the Garletts had been my nearest neighbours and friends, and I hoped against hope that my arsenic had not been in question. I tried, in a quiet way, to find out if Mr. Garlett had ever been seen in my house, and I found that, as far as anybody knew, he never had been in my house—with the one exception when he came to see me about his cut finger—for two years or more.”
“I put it to you, Miss Prince”—Sir Harold looks at her fixedly—“that any one, by walking from the road into the grounds of the Thatched House, could obtain access to your house through the garden door?”
“That is so,” assents Miss Prince eagerly.
“Were any of your friends in the habit of using that door?”
“Yes, my friend Miss Agatha Cheale—Mrs. Garlett’s housekeeper—always came into my house that way. So of course did any servant bringing a message or a note from the Thatched House to the Thatched Cottage. But you must remember that there was the back door, used by the tradesmen each morning, also the front door. I should like to repeat my conviction that Mr. Garlett would not naturally have thought of coming into my house by the garden door. The time he came to see me after cutting his finger he came to the front door.”
Sir Harold makes a note of this fact, and it is in a pleasant voice that he asks:
“As far as you know—and I gather you had many opportunities of knowing—Mr. and Mrs. Garlett were on very good terms the one with the other?”
“Excellent terms,” says Miss Prince emphatically.
Deep in her heart she knows that her evidence has gone far to ensure a conviction for murder against Henry Garlett, and now she is anxious to give him the benefit of every doubt that has ever assailed her during the last difficult anxious weeks.
And then Sir Harold makes one of the few mistakes of his brilliant professional life.