“Yes. I don’t mind telling you, sir, that the case is over, so to speak.”
“Is it now?”
“It is. You were quite right, sir. It was some one belonging to the house. I can’t tell you more now. I’m off back to town. I’ll see you later, sir.”
Anthony raised his eyebrows. Things were going too fast. Had Boyd found out anything about Her?
“Shalt not leave me, Boyd.” He raised a protesting hand. “ ‘The time has come, the Walrus said——’ You’re too mysterious. Be lucid, Boyd, be doosid lucid.”
The detective glanced at his watch with anxiety. He seemed torn between the call of duty and desire to be frank with the man who had helped him.
“I’ll have to be very short, then, sir,” he said, pushing the watch back into his pocket. “Ought to have started ten minutes ago. This is very unofficial on my part. I’m afraid I must ask you——”
“Don’t be superfluous, Boyd.”
“Very well, sir. After I left you in the garden this morning, I asked them all—the household—some more questions, and elicited the fact that one of what you called the ‘cast-iron’ alibis was a dud, so to speak. It was like this, sir: one of the maids had told me she’d seen Mr. Deacon—that’s the deceased’s secretary—go to his room just after ten. That coincided with what he told me himself, and also with what Sir Arthur Digby-Coates said. Now, this girl spent the time from ten until about a minute before the murder was discovered working—arranging things and what not, I take it—in the linen-room. Apparently it took her so long because she’d been behindhand, so to speak, and was doing two evenings’ jobs in one. This linen-room’s just opposite Mr. Deacon’s room, and the girl said last night that she knew he hadn’t come out because, having the door of this linen-room open all the time, she couldn’t have helped but see him if he had.
“But she told a different tale this morning, sir, when I talked to her after you’d left me. I wasn’t thinking about Deacon at all, to tell you the truth, when out she comes with something about having made a mistake. ‘What’s that?’ I said, and told her not to be nervous. Then she tells me that she hadn’t been in the linen-room all that time after all. She’d left it for about ten minutes to go downstairs. She was very upset—seemed to think we’d think she was a criminal for having made a slip in her memory.” Boyd laughed.