Victorian Villainy Read Online Free PDF Page B

under police supervision, before being hauled off to the police station. Andrea’s bed was neat and tight, and it was evident that she had not slept in it the night before.
    I decided to take a quick look in the other five rooms leading off the hall. I thought I would give Holmes and Miss Lucy their moment of privacy if they desired to use it.
    One of the rooms, fairly large and with a canopied bed, was obviously Lucy’s. It was feminine without being overly frilly, and extremely, almost fussily, neat. There were two wardrobes in the room, across from each other, each with a collection of shoes on the bottom and a variety of female garments above.
    I closed Lucy’s door and knocked on the door across the hall. Getting no answer, I pushed the door open. It was one of the two rooms rented by the boarder, Crisboy, furnished as a sitting-room, and I could see the door to the bedroom to the left. The young athletic instructor was sitting at his writing desk, his shoulders stooped, and his face buried in his arms on the desk. “Crisboy?” I said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t know you were here.” Which seemed a poor excuse for bursting in on a man, but my curiosity was probably inexcusable if it came to that.
    He sat up and turned around. “No matter,” he said, using a small towel he was holding to wipe his face, which was red and puffy from crying. “Is there any news?” he asked me.
    “Not that I am aware of,” I said.
    “A heck of a thing,” he said. “That police person thinks that John—Professor Maples—killed Andrea. How could he think that? Professor Maples couldn’t hurt anyone. Insult them, yes; criticize them, yes; pierce them with barbs of—of—irony, yes. But hit anyone with a stick? Never!”
    I backed out of Crisboy’s sitting-room with some murmured comment and closed the door. The hall door to the left was now identified as Crisboy’s bedroom. The door to the right turned out to be Andrea’s dressing room, with a small couch, a bureau, a dressing-table, and a connecting door to the master bedroom. The remaining door led to the lavatory.
    Holmes emerged from the master bedroom with the traveling-bag thrust under his arm, shook hands with Lucy, and we went downstairs and out the back door.
    “Here, this way,” Holmes said, taking me around to the side of the house. “There are markings on the path that, I believe, give some insight into what happened here. I have covered them over with some planks I found by the side of the house, to prevent them being washed away or tramped over.”
    “Clever,” I said.
    “Elementary,” he replied.
    Holmes had placed four pieces of planking on the path between the house and the cottage. We paused at the one nearest the house. “The police theory—the theory of Sergeant Meeks—is that Andrea Maples left the house to have an assignation at the cottage with an unknown suitor—if a man who trysts with a married woman may be called a suitor. They are trying to determine whom he is. Professor Maples, awakening sometime during the night and finding his wife absent, went to the cottage, caught her as the suitor was leaving, or just after he left, realized what had happened by the state of her clothes, if not by other, ah, indications, and, in an uncontrollable rage, beat her to death with his walking-stick.”
    I nodded. “That’s about the way it was told to me.”
    “That story is contravened by the evidence,” Holmes declared carefully lifting the plank. “Observe the footsteps.”
    The plank covered a partial line of footsteps headed from the house to the cottage, and at least one footstep headed back to the house. The imprint in all cases was that of a woman’s shoe.
    “Note this indentation,” Holmes said, pointing out a round hole about three-quarters of an inch across and perhaps an inch deep that was slightly forward and to the right of an out-bound shoe imprint.
    He sprinted over to the next plank and moved it, and then the next. “Look here,”