No, no! If trees could speak, they would declare her innocence.
Not trees but men would be her judges, cunning men, who might weave about her a web of suspicion with strands as fine and strong as silk.
Scotland Yard might be waiting for us when we returned; that is, a brisk, clear-headed, observant, utterly unprejudiced investigator, a person whose mind as nearly as might be resembled an inductive and deductive machine. He would sweep the ground clear of the débris of false starts and idle speculations, and construct anew.
The deaths: what would the lynx of justice discover immediately in respect of them? He would hear of a motive, money. How should he know better than to impute a sordid impulse to this high-minded girl? He would hear of a quarrel on the afternoon of Cosgrove’s death. How should he know that there had been more than mere anger in her mood when she parted from us, that there had been dignity, aloofness, a temper far above reprisal?
But there was worse, much worse. She may have been with Cosgrove the moment he was struck down!
Belvoir, coming toward the towers, had seen the Irishman with canvas lifted regarding the puny battle-axe. In the mixed light, Belvoir had not been positive he had seen Cosgrove, but the likelihood was that he had attested to less rather than more than the truth. The American girl might have been beyond the Irishman at that moment, concealed partly by his bulk, partly by the darkness of her gown in the twilight. I, of course, had come past the spot afterward and found the lawn empty, but the two might easily have gone through one of the entrances of the House and re-emerged shortly after I had made my reconnaissance from the parapet. What brief, passionate scene could then have taken place, such as would have ended by Cosgrove’s turning away and her hammering him with a rough-and-ready chunk of rock snatched up from the rim of the flower-bed, I left to the professional imagination.
In Heatheringham’s death, we knew her insistence that she had disobeyed his bidding, and her declaration of what she had seen. But, again, there was not a tittle of proof of her assertion that she had remained on the edge of the strawberry trees. Quite safely she could have slipped back into the House. I wondered, in spite of the arm thrust through the glass, if the detective might not have been outside the House when he pressed the trigger, and that straightway he rushed into the Hall (pursuing something?)—to meet his death. Who waited for him there? No one could have, save Paula Lebetwood.
Black—it was black.
I tried to gain comfort from the obscurities that would confront Scotland Yard if he tried to build up a theory in this wise. I recalled the bone, the laugh, the pig’s gore, and other unsolved conundrums. But Scotland Yard, being an experienced hand, would be sure to fit them in somewhere. I was sick at heart.
Yes, I must protect her against the world, and, if need be, against herself. The proof would be in action. I began wondering whom I could trust.