“None. I’m a light sleeper as a rule, and wake at the slightest sound,” the woman replied. “But I heard absolutely nothing.”
“Anyone, in order to enter the dead man’s room, must have passed your door, I think?”
“Yes, and what’s more, the light was burning and my door was ajar. I always kept it so in order to hear if my patient wanted anything.”
“Then the murderer could see you as he stood on the landing?”
“No. There’s a screen at the end of my bed. He could not see far into the room. But I shudder to think that to-night I’ve had an assassin a dozen feet from me while I slept,” she added.
Finding that she could throw no light upon the mysterious affair, the officer turned his attention to the four frightened domestics, each in turn.
All, save one, declared that they heard not a single sound. The one exception was Alice, the under housemaid, a young fair-haired girl, who stated that during the night she had distinctly heard a sound like the low creaking of light shoes on the landing below where they slept.
This first aroused our interest, but on full reflection it seemed so utterly improbable that an assassin would wear a pair of creaky boots when on such an errand that we were inclined to disregard the girl’s statement as a piece of imagination. The feminine mind is much given to fiction on occasions of tragic events.
But the girl over and over again asserted that she had heard it. She slept alone in a small room at the top of the second flight of stairs and had heard the sound quite distinctly.
“When you heard it what did you do?”