“Nor I didn’t mean it either.” Anthony laughed. “My mind’s open, Boyd, open. Anyhow, many thanks for letting me see that. I know a lot more detail than I did. I suppose that’s a basis for a preliminary report, what?”
Boyd nodded, and fell into step as Anthony turned in the direction of the house.
Chapter V.
The Lady of the Sandal
1
Anthony was still in the garden. Anthony had found something. Clouds of pipe-smoke hung round his head in the hot, still air. Anthony was thinking.
He was alone. Boyd, indefatigable, had gone at once into the house, bent upon another orgy of shrewd questioning. This time his questions would have, in the light of what the study had told, a more definite bearing.
What Anthony had found were two sets, some eighteen inches apart, of four deep, round impressions of roughly the size of a sixpence. They were in the broad flower-bed which ran the whole length of the study wall and were directly beneath the sill of the most easterly of the three windows—the farther closed window, that is, from the open one through which it seemed that the murderer must have effected entrance to the study. The flower-bed; Anthony noticed, was unusually broad—so broad, in fact, that any person, unless he were a giant, wishing to climb into any of the three windows, would perforce tread, with one foot at least, among the flowers.
He stooped to examine his find. Whoever, in the absence of Mr. Diggle the gardener, had so lavishly watered the flower-bed on the previous day received his blessing. Had the soil not been so moist, those holes would not have been there.
Anthony thought aloud: “Finger-holes. Just where my fingers would go if I was a good deal narrower across the shoulders and squatted here and tried to look into the room without bringing either of my feet on to the bed.”
He stepped deliberately on to the flower-bed and bent to examine the low sill of the window. There was a smudge on the rough stone. It might be a dried smear of earthy fingers. On the other hand, it might be almost anything else. But as he straightened his back a bluish-black gleam caught his eye.