"Did you remark the gold and blue? Rather a familiar combination, eh? Here's the true significance of that very charming room."
Holding up his hand, he dangled before my eyes a tiny yellow satin sachet bag embroidered in blue, a satin sachet whose fragrance was the fragrance of Rose Jacqueminot!
CHAPTER XXIX
THE REWARD
Cunningham and the fragrance of Rose Jacqueminot! Cunningham and a yellow satin sachet embroidered in blue!
These words kept pounding in my brain and though I went over them in the light of the facts which we had gleaned, I could see no plausible reason for Cunningham's having committed that murder. He could have no possible motive for wanting to harm Ruth since he did not know her, nor could I believe, despite the gold and blue room, that he was in love with Cora Manning. He had evidently never called on her at Gramercy Park or her landlady would have described him to us, and it was not likely that being engaged to Lee, Cora Manning would have received the advances of other men, at least so I judged from the manner in which Ruth had spoken of her.
Cunningham's explanations, too, had been eminently satisfactory, and had cleared him even in McKelvie's eyes, as far as I could judge last night. Besides, it wasn't as though Cunningham were the sole possessor of one of those sachets.
McKelvie was in much the same position as that robber in "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," of which I used to be fond in my childhood days, that robber who led his chief to the cross-marked house only to discover that all the neighboring houses were also cross-marked. As a clue, then, the fragrance of Rose Jacqueminot and the yellow satin sachet were as useless as the robber's chalk-mark.
It might also be that Cunningham's use of that particular fragrance, and his acquaintance with a woman who also affected yellow satin sachets embroidered in blue, was one of those coincidences that often occur in life, where truth is in many cases stranger than fiction.