"Do we tell the police this?" Mrs. Sharpe asked.
"No. It doesn't prove anything; just solves the problem of how she knew about you. When she needed an alibi she remembered you, and risked your not being able to prove that you were somewhere else. When you bring your car to the door, by the way, which side of the car is nearest the door?"
"Whether I bring it round from the garage or in from the road the off side is next the door, because it's easier to get out of."
"Yes; so that the near side, with the darker paint on the front wheel, would be facing the gate," Robert said conclusively. "That is the picture she saw. The grass and the divided path, the car at the door with the odd wheel, two women-both individual-the round attic window in the roof. She had only to look at the picture in her mind and describe it. The day she was using the picture for-the day she was supposed to have been kidnapped-was more than a month away and it was a thousand to one against your being able to say what you had done or where you had been on that day."
"And I take it," Mrs. Sharpe said, "that the odds are very much greater against our being able to say what she has done or where she has been in that month."
"The odds are against us, yes. As my friend Kevin Macdermott pointed out last night, there is nothing to hinder her having been in Sydney, N.S.W. But somehow I am far more hopeful today than I was on Friday morning. We know so much more about the girl now." He told them of his interviews in Aylesbury and Mainshill.
"But if the police inquiries didn't unearth what she was doing that month—"
"The police inquiries were devoted to checking her statement. They didn't start, as we do, with the premise that her statement is untrue from beginning to end. They checked it and it checked. They had no particular reason to doubt it. She had a blameless reputation, and when they inquired from her aunt how she had spent her holiday time they found that it had consisted of innocent visits to the cinema and country bus-rides."
"And what do you think it consisted of?" Mrs. Sharpe asked.
"I think she met someone in Larborough. That, anyhow, is the obvious explanation. It's from that supposition that I think any inquiry of ours should start."