“We are up against some one cleverer than we are, Sperry,” I acknowledged.
“And who has more to lose than we have to gain,” he added cheerfully. “Don’t worry about that, Horace. You’re a married man and I’m not. If a woman wanted to hide some letters from her husband, and chose a curtain for a receptacle, what room would hide them in. Not in his dressing-room, eh?”
He took the candle and led the way to Elinor Wells’s bedroom. Here, however, the draperies were down, and we would have been at a loss, had I not remembered my wife’s custom of folding draperies when we close the house, and placing them under the dusting sheets which cover the various beds.
Our inspection of the curtains was hurried, and broken by various excursions on my part to listen for the watchman. But he remained quiet below, and finally we found what we were looking for. In the lining of one of the curtains, near the bottom, a long, ragged cut had been made.
“Cut in a hurry, with curved scissors,” was Sperry’s comment. “Probably manicure scissors.”
The result was a sort of pocket in the curtain, concealed on the chintz side, which was the side which would hang toward the room.
“Probably,” he said, “the curtain would have been better. It would have stayed anyhow. Whereas the bag—” He was flushed with triumph. “How in the world would Hawkins know that?” he demanded. “You can talk all you like. She’s told us things that no one ever told her.”
Before examining the floor in the hall I went downstairs and listened outside the kitchen door. The watchman was stirring inside the room, and groaning occasionally. Sperry, however, when I told him, remained cool and in his exultant mood, and I saw that he meant to vindicate Miss Jeremy if he flung me into jail and the newspapers while doing it.
“We’ll have a go at the floors under the carpets now,” he said. “If he gets noisy, you can go down with the fire-tongs. I understand you are an expert with them.”
The dressing-room had a large rug, like the nursery above it, and turning back the carpet was a simple matter. There had been a stain beneath where the dead man’s head had lain, but it had been scrubbed and scraped away. The boards were white for an area of a square foot or so.