“This too?” he asked. “Was the window just like this?”
“Just like that. Wide open, so that it’s hard to see why the gas didn’t blow out of doors almost as soon as it escaped; and there was a high wind on Monday night, Pulteney tells me. And yet, with those bars, it seems impossible that any one should have come in through it.”
“I think you’re going to have difficulties over your murder theory.”
“So are you, Bredon, over your suicide theory. Look at that shirt over there; the studs carefully put in overnight; and it’s a clean shirt, mark you; the outside buttonholes haven’t been pierced. Do you mean to tell me that a man who is going to commit suicide is going to let himself in for all that tiresome process of putting studs in before he goes to bed?”
“And do you mean to tell me that a man goes out fishing in a boiled shirt?”
“Yes, if he’s a successful manufacturer. The idea that one wears special clothes when one is going to take exercise is an upper-class theory. I tell you, I’ve seen a farmer getting in the hay in a dickey, merely to show that he was a farmer, not a farm labourer.”
“Well, grant the point; why shouldn’t a man who wants to commit suicide put studs in his shirt to make it look as if it wasn’t suicide? Remember, it was a matter of half a million to his heirs. Is that too heavy a price for the bother of it?”
“I see you’re convinced; it’s no good arguing with you. Otherwise, I’d have pointed out that he wound up his watch.”
“One does. To a man of methodical habit it’s an effort to leave a watch unwound. Was he a smoker?”
“Brinkman says not. And there are no signs of it anywhere.”