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If old Hooper says he wasn't here the night Sir Victor brought my lady home, don't you believe him he was, and he's been seen off and on in the grounds since. The women folks in the servants' hall, they say, as how he must have been an old sweetheart of my lady's. You go to old Hooper and worrit it out of him." Mr. Superintendent Ferrick went.
Since then, Jackson, the head groom, and Edwards, the valet, had seen him hovering about the grounds watching the house. Mr. Ferrick ponders these things in his heart, and is still.
Miss Inez, when summoned by Hooper, is ghastly pale at first, and hardly seems to know what she is doing or saying. A very pretty case of tragedy in high life, Superintendent Ferrick thinks, pursing up his lips with professional zest, and not the first murder jealousy has made fine ladies commit, either. Now if that Turkish dagger would only turn up.
Had told Superintendent Ferrick something of this next day, but this was all yes so help him, all he had heard, and just as he had heard it." James Dicksey was rigidly cross-examined, and clung to his testimony with a dogged tenacity nothing could alter or shake. He could swear positively to the name she had uttered, to the words both had spoken, if he were dying.
Could she strike this blow it is quite evident only one has been struck. "And besides," says Superintendent Ferrick, argumentatively to himself, "it's fifteen minutes' fast walking from the house to the gates. Fifteen minutes only elapse between the time Nurse Pool sees her come out of the nursery and Maid Ellen finds her mistress murdered.
"Now, my man," Mr. Ferrick says, pleasantly, "and what is it that's troubling you? Out with it every little's a help in a case like this." The lad his name is Jimmy does not need pressing his secret has been weighing uneasily upon him for the last hour or more, ever since he heard of the murder, in fact, and he pours his revelation into the superintendent's eager ear.
The Oriental dagger lies convenient to his hand on the table. "Here, now," says Mr. Ferrick to Mr. Ferrick, with a reflective frown, "which is guilty the brother or sister?" He goes and gives an order to one of his men, and the man starts in search of Mr. Juan Catheron. Mr. Catheron must be found, though they summon the detectives of Scotland Yard to aid them in their search.
Near the entrance gates there is a wilderness of fern, or bracken, as high as your waist. Hidden in the midst of this unlikely place Jones has found the dagger. It is as if the party, going down the avenue, had flung it in. "Bungler," Superintendent Ferrick says again. "It's bad enough to be a murderer without being a fool." He takes the dagger. No doubt about the work it has done.
And as the night closes in blackness over the doomed house, one of the policemen comes in haste to Superintendent Ferrick, triumph in his face. He has found the dagger. Mr. Ferrick opens his eyes rather it is more than he expected. "A bungler," he mutters, "whoever did it. Jones, where did you find this?" Jones explains.
Meantime matters were really beginning to look dark for Miss Catheron. The superintendent of the district, Mr. Ferrick, was filling his note-book with very ominous information.
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