ith her living
husband about an hour before. Martin, I perceived, could only have
seen the man's back, as he sat crouching over the telephone; no doubt
a characteristic pose was imitated there. And the man had worn his hat,
Manderson's broad-brimmed hat! There is too much character in the back
of a head and neck. The unknown, in fact, supposing him to have been of
about Manderson's build, had had no need for any disguise, apart from
the jacket and the hat and his powers of mimicry.

I paused there to contemplate the coolness and ingenuity of the man.
The thing, I now began to see, was so safe and easy, provided that
his mimicry was good enough, and that his nerve held. Those two points
assured, only some wholly unlikely accident could unmask him.

To come back to my puzzling out of the matter as I sat in the dead man's
bedroom with the tell-tale shoes before me. The reason for the entrance
by the window instead of by the front door will already have occurred
to any one reading this. Entering by the door, the man would almost
certainly have been heard by the sharp-eared Martin in his pantry just
across the hall; he might have met him face to face.

Then there was the problem of the whisky. I had not attached much
importance to it; whisky will sometimes vanish in very queer ways in a
household of eight or nine persons; but it had seemed strange that it
should go in that way on that evening. Martin had been plainly quite
dumbfounded by the fact. It seemed to me now that many a man--fresh,
as this man in all likelihood was, from a bloody business, from the
unclothing of a corpse, and with a desperate part still to play--would
turn to that decanter as to a friend. No doubt he had a drink before
sending for Martin; after making that trick with ease and success, he
probably drank more.

But he had known when to stop. The worst part of the enterprise was
before him: the business--clearly of such vital importance to him, for
whatever reason--of shutting himself in Manderson's room and preparing
a body of convincing evidence of its having been occupied by Manderson;
and this with the risk--very slight, as no doubt he understood, but how
unnerving!--of the woman on the other side of the half-open door awaking
and somehow discovering him. True, if he kept out of her limited field
of vision from the bed, she could only see him by getting up and going
to the door. I found that to a person lying in her bed, which stood
with its he