“Well, let’s have some others. I’m used up.”
“Well, don’t you see that a man who is burning an important document, holding it in his hand all the time, takes it up by the least important corner, probably a blank space at the top? This is the work of a man who wasn’t particularly keen on destroying all traces of the document, and he held it by the bottom right-hand corner, as one naturally would.”
“Why not the left hand, and the match in one’s right? Ha! The left-handed criminal. We are in luck.”
“Don’t you believe it. You start holding it at the left-hand corner, and then transfer it to your right hand when you’ve thrown the match away. You try, next time you’re burning your dressmaker’s bill. And here’s another point: Simmonds would have been bound to stand with his head right in the window, to keep clear of the gas fumes. Almost certainly he would have put the paper down on the window-sill and let it burn, leaving one of those curious damp marks. He didn’t, because I should have been bound to notice that; I was looking for marks on the window-sill. If he held it in his hand, he would be holding it outside the window, and he wouldn’t be such a chump as to throw away the odd corner in the room when he could pitch it out of the window. Another thing: he wouldn’t have dared to burn a light at the window like that for fear of attracting attention.”
“Well, I still think my objections were more important. But go on.”
“Well, since that piece of paper wasn’t dropped in the room before Leyland and I went into it—probably not, anyhow—it looks as if it had been dropped in the room since Leyland and I went into it. Or, at any rate, since the first police search. Because the room has been kept locked, one way and another, since then.”
“There was no deceiving this man.”
“Which makes it very improbable that the piece of paper was dropped there by accident at all. Anybody who went in there had no business to go in there, and would be jolly careful not to leave any traces. We are therefore irresistibly compelled, my dear Angela, to the conclusion that somebody dropped it there on purpose.”
“That firm grasp of the obvious. Yes?”
“He put it there deliberately to create an impression. Now, it might be to create the impression that Simmonds was the murderer. To whose advantage would that be?”