“Gloves?”
“Oh, of course you think it was murder. Still, if it was murder it should have been the murderer who turned it on and off. Why did he conceal his traces in one case and not in the other?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, it was Mottram who turned the gas on. At the main, that is. The tap of the standard seems to have been on all the time, at least there were no marks on it. That’s queer too.”
“Yes, if he wanted it to be known that he committed suicide. But if he didn’t, you see, the whole business may have been bluff.”
“I see, you want it to be suicide masquerading as accident. I want it to be murder masquerading as suicide. Your difficulty, it seems to me, is explaining how the tap came to be turned off.”
“And yours?”
“I won’t conceal it. The door was locked, with the key on the inside.”
“How did anybody get in, then, to find the corpus?”
“Broke down the door. It was rotten, like everything else in this house, and the hinges pulled the screws out. You can see, there, where we’ve put fresh screws in since.”
“Door locked on the inside. And the window?” Bredon crossed to the other side of the room. “Barred, eh?” It was an old-fashioned lattice window with iron bars on the inside to protect it from unauthorized approach. The window itself opened outward, its movement free until it reached an angle of forty-five degrees; at that point it passed over a spring catch which made it fast. It was so made fast now that Bredon examined it.