“I don’t know. I heard it, but I didn’t look at it.”

Tony was quiet, watching them gravely as they worked. It was Jim’s theory, and Dwight Elliott agreed, that after Maud had been shot an attempt had probably been made to put her fingerprints on the gun. But, as Jim said, such prints are not reliable. It is hard to simulate the desperate grip of a suicide on the weapon he uses.

“What he did—I say he, although it may have been a woman—was to drop the gun, and then turn the water on. The gun was close to where the water came in, so the current would more or less wash it. It was a fool idea at that, but I imagine he or she went kind of haywire about that time.”

Then they held a conference in the living room. It was cold and Tony lit the fire. None of them doubted that Maud had been murdered, but they did not get much further than that. Lydia herself, looking white and tired, had no idea why Maud had wanted to see her, except that she had said it was important.

“She said nothing about her jewels?”

“Nothing at all.”

It came down in the end to one of two things: either Maud had had an earlier appointment or somebody knew she meant to meet Lydia and was determined to prevent it. The nail in the tire had not kept her from coming, but it had at least delayed her. The garage was not locked. Anybody could have had access to it.

“Did she say anyone else was to be present?” Jim asked.

“No. I understood she wanted to see me alone.”

“How about the telephone? Most of the phones up there are on the same line. Could she have been overheard in the house?”

“I suppose so. Her second message was about seven o’clock in the evening. That was when she changed the time to eleven-thirty.”

They made a note then of the people in the house at seven o’clock. There were the servants, but no list was made of them. At seven o’clock, too, Bessie’s cocktail party was in full blast. It was a heterogeneous crowd. Even Reynolds, called to assist, knew only one or two of them. The ones who had stayed for dinner had left fairly early, at eleven, and so far as he knew none of them were habitués of the house. Outside of them there were only Bessie, who had gone up to bed as soon as the party was over, and myself.

It was a dead end. When Bill Sterling came for Lydia they gave it up. “We haven’t helped Stoddard much,” Jim said, getting into his overcoat. “They’ve got their case. If we prove a second murder they’ll only hang it on him. They’ll claim Margery had told Mrs. Wainwright, so he had to—well, get her out of the way. He knew this place too. His kids swam here last summer. We’d better keep this under our hats for a while anyhow.”