“Well, sir,” said the detective, as the man and woman turned away from the window and vanished, “what do you make of ’em? Do you recognize ’em?”
“I recognize the man,” I replied, “and I believe I have seen the woman before, but they aren’t the people I expected to see.”
“Oh, dear!” said he. “That’s a bad look-out. Because I don’t think there is anybody else there.”
“Then,” I said, “we have made a false shot—and yet—well, I don’t know. I had better think this over and see if I can make anything of it.”
I turned into the studio, where I found Marion—who had been listening attentively to this dialogue—in markedly better spirits.
“It seems a regular muddle,” she remarked cheerfully. “They have come to arrest the wrong man and now it appears that he isn’t there.”
“Don’t talk to me for a few minutes, Marion, dear,” said I. “There is something behind this and I want to think what it can be. I have seen that woman somewhere, I feel certain. Now where was it?”
I cudgelled my brains for some time without succeeding in recovering the recollections connected with her. I re-visualized the face that I had seen through the glass, with its deep-set, hollow eyes and strong, sharply-sloping eyebrows, and tried to connect it with some person whom I had seen, but in vain. And then in a flash it came to me. She was the widow whom I had noticed at the inquest. The identification, indeed, was not very complete, for the veil that she had worn on that occasion had considerably obscured her features. But I had no doubt that I was right, for her present appearance agreed in all that I could see with that of the woman at the inquest.
The next question was, Who could she be? Her association with the bottle-nosed man connected her in some way with what Thorndyke would have called “the case”; for that man, whoever he was, had certainly been shadowing me. Then her presence at the inquest had now a sinister suggestiveness. She would seem to have been there to watch developments on behalf of others. Could she be a relative of Mrs. Morris? A certain faint resemblance seemed to support this idea. As to the man, I gave him up. Evidently there were several persons concerned in this crime, but I knew too little about the circumstances to be able to make even a profitable guess. Having reached this unsatisfactory conclusion, I turned, a little irritably, to Marion, exclaiming:
“I can make nothing of it. Let us get on with some work to pass the time.”