“Thanks.” Mitchell turned up the collar of his overcoat as Thorne opened the front door, and stood hesitating on the threshold. “Say, doctor,” he suddenly burst out, “you were the first outside the Porter family to see Brainard yesterday morning—what struck you most forcibly about the affair?”
Thorne considered the question. “The composure of Nurse Deane,” he said finally. “The young woman who said she was the first to discover the crime.”
Mitchell stared at him open-mouthed. “What do you mean?” he demanded.
“It is an unheard of thing for a first-class trained nurse to sleep at her post.” Thorne spoke slowly, carefully. “And the transom between the two bedrooms was open.”
“But it is over Craig Porter’s bed,” objected Mitchell. “And Nurse Deane couldn’t have looked through the transom without climbing up on his bed.”
“I grant you she could not have looked through the transom,” answered Thorne. “But she could hear. The slightest sound becomes ‘noise’ at dead of night.”
Mitchell’s eyes grew bigger and bigger. “Then you think—”
“That Nurse Deane both heard the murder committed and investigated it long before she went to summon Hugh Wyndham—and in that interval she had time to partially recover from shock and exert her self-control which, for a girl of her years, appears little short of marvelous.”
There was a brief silence which Mitchell broke.
“You’ve given me a new viewpoint,” he said. “So you think Nurse Deane is an accessory after the fact?”