“Is ... is ... the door defective? Doesn’t it shut properly?”
The little secretary forced out the questions in an agitated voice.
The girl walked across the room and shut the door. It closed perfectly, a piece of solid, well-fitting oak.
“What does it mean?” said Mr. Jeekes in a whisper. “You understand, I should not wish what I told you just now about Mr. Parrish to be overheard ...”
They opened the door again. The dusky corridor was empty.
CHAPTER XIV.
A SHEET OF BLUE PAPER
The sight of that crumpled ball of slatey-blue paper brought back to Robin’s mind with astonishing vividness every detail of the scene in the library. Once more he looked into Hartley Parrish’s staring, unseeing eyes, saw the firelight gleam again on the heavy gold signet ring on the dead man’s hand, the tag of the dead man’s bootlace as it trailed from one sprawling foot across the carpet. Once more he felt the dark cloud of the mystery envelop him as a mist and with a little sigh he smoothed out the crumpled paper.
It was an ordinary quarto sheet of stoutish paper, with a glazed surface, of an unusual shade of blue, darker than what the stationers call “azure,” yet lighter than legal blue. At the top right-hand corner was typewritten a date: “Nov. 25.” Otherwise the sheet was blank.
The curious thing about it was that a number of rectangular slits had been cut in the paper. Robin counted them. There were seven. They were of varying sizes, the largest a little over an inch, the smallest not more than a quarter of an inch, in length. In depth they measured about an eighth of an inch.
Robin stared at the paper uncomprehendingly. He remembered perfectly where he had found it on the floor of the library at Harkings, between the dead body and the waste-paper basket. The basket, he recalled, stood out in the open just clear of the desk on the left-hand side. From the position in which it was lying the ball of paper might have been aimed for the waste-paper basket and, missing it, have fallen on the carpet.