The question of the handkerchief was unobserved by Cunningham—yet it was the first slip he had made! The lace business he realized, for he spotted me looking at it closely. I will try to describe its peculiarity. The lace of the shoe had been tied in a bow over a reef-knot. I had never seen a lace tied quite like that before, and it was only by an accident I noticed it, for it wasn’t exactly obvious to a casual observer. Well, these two facts suggested a train of thought in my mind—had Prescott been murdered—then dressed or partially dressed—and brought to the billiard room? Had he been brought there from the garden? For there was mud on his shoes but no mud on the billiard room floor—despite glaringly obvious signs of a struggle and disturbance! With that idea I paid a visit to Prescott’s bedroom. I observed there were nine stairs to be negotiated—not an impossible distance to carry a dead body—for a very powerful man. My idea you see was beginning to take shape. Prescott’s bedroom told me something else. While there, I was able to make a deduction of which I am secretly rather proud! It will be remembered that the dressing space of the room was between the entrance-door and the bed, that is to say on the right of a person lying in the bed on his back. Now when a person gets out of bed he invariably turns the bedclothes away from the side where he gets out. For example, a person leaving this bed, to dress the side of the entrance-door would undoubtedly fling the clothes away to his left—yet these clothes were all lying and trailing on the side by the door. Baddeley took this as evidence that the bed had been slept in—to me it was conclusive evidence in the other direction. I was not concerned for the moment with the missing money. I was reconstructing the crime. The next stage was the garden—the footprints under the billiard room window. For a long time these disconcerted me. There were the four sets and the two kinds. Who had been Prescott’s companion? Did Prescott come from the billiard room into the garden? Had he climbed up into the billiard room from the garden? Had the footprints any relation at all to the billiard room? Then the amazing truth hit me. There was no sign of a descent from the billiard room—the earth below was clear. The shoes didn’t show a trace of scraping—yet why on earth had Prescott put them on, and not his ordinary dress-shoes? They were on Prescott’s feet because the murderer wished us to see them there—the footprints were faked—Prescott had not been outside at all—the murderer had worn them himself. It was at this stage that Lady Considine’s pearls made their appearance or rather their disappearance, and once again the job of unraveling the two skeins presented itself. Just as I had convinced myself they were dissociated from each other, came that startling discovery of the shoe-lace in Webb’s pocket. To my mind this was Cunningham’s second slip—he managed to get it into the pocket during the struggle that preceded Webb’s arrest—but it can be argued that it might very easily have served to hang Webb. I tried hard to persuade myself that Webb must and should be the murderer, but my instinct was always in conflict and I felt that the robbery was just a coincidence. It was hard to place accurately the evidence of the noises in the night—hard, that is, at this stage of the inquiry. I will attempt to explain them later. But so far, I had gone a long way towards sorting out the conditions of the crime, but had found no direct evidence against anybody in particular. But the finding of this shoe-lace opened my eyes a bit, and began to narrow down my field of suspicion. The next point was the discovery of the I.O.U., given to Prescott by Barker. How had that got into the billiard-table pocket? For a long time I was uncertain—then once again the solution came to me. By reason and by memory. It had been put there with deliberation! Nobody had used that room—we knew—till Cunningham and I went there—by “used” I mean—played billiards there. The servants gave it a wide berth for transparent reasons. I cast my mind back to the morning Prescott had been discovered—I visualized the entire scene—what had struck me about the “billiards” part of it? I had it! The three balls were lying in the pocket near the murdered man’s hand—and the red ball was on top. The splash of color it had made against Prescott’s white hand had been vivid to me. Yet when I knocked the balls from the same pocket to commence our game—the spot ball was on top—they had been moved—surely for the secretion of the Barker I.O.U.—since the murder. This caused me to eliminate Barker from my list of “suspects” and I began to grow uneasy. I decided upon that second visit to Prescott’s bedroom for I realized I had made a mistake. I hadn’t examined the inner apartment. Here I ran across the “stub” of the cigar—my idea had almost become a certainty! Then I began to appreciate the horror of the affair to me—what had come to Bill Cunningham? Yet I clung to the hope that my trail would lead to somebody else at the end, and I dared not let him know what I suspected! Here came Cunningham’s third slip! The letter fragments he found were his own. He was getting desperate now and out to involve as many people as he possibly could—why not confuse matters more? He had an old letter from Mary Considine in his letter-case—probably retained for sentimental reasons—written years before and quite innocent. “She would meet him somewhere—the station probably—in the ‘Bean’—the car they had at the time.” He suddenly realized the significance of the time she mentioned in the letter—“faked” it to appear relevant to the murder and “discovered” it under Prescott’s bed. I saw through this very quickly—strangely, Mary can’t remember ever having written it. Still, I determined to be certain so I popped up to see Mrs. Prescott. Alas! my terrible theory received no shaking. Her son was not ambidextrous and therefore not likely to wear his handkerchief in his wrong sleeve. Also as far as she knew, he was no fancy knot-tier. Running into Baddeley there, was remarkable, and of course he was on a wild-goose chase; Barker and Hornby were merely visiting Mrs. Prescott in the hope that she would accept payment of Lieutenant Barker’s debt of honor. He told me this next morning. I made some more investigations that day that revealed the fact to me that Cunningham’s grandfather had committed suicide after making a ferocious and entirely uncalled-for attack upon a Roman Catholic priest residing in his neighborhood. This decided me. Any thought that to arrest Cunningham might savor of treachery towards a friend—was dispelled. I owed it to the community to put him away where he could wreak no more harm and I arrived home that night only to hear of his attack upon Jack. The rest is known. Now this is the matter of the murder! Cunningham’s jealousy of Prescott, born of the loss of his Cricket “blue” had been fanned into a blazing flame by the invitation of Prescott for the Considine “week” and his strenuous attentions to Mary. He felt that Prescott intended a proposal and how he hated him for what he called his cursed presumption! Prescott’s success during the week and his own failures brought matters to a climax. He’d kill him and he’d also set Anthony Bathurst a nice little problem. He borrowed the shoes from Prescott’s bedroom immediately after dinner, and when the others first adjourned to the drawing-room he constructed the “footprints,” returned the shoes and kept one of the laces. He intended to hide in the inner bedroom before Prescott came to bed and then strangle him from behind by taking him unawares. Things went well for him—he saw Barker’s I.O.U. passed over and noted it. Also he noticed Hornby fingering the Venetian dagger, so he removed that—wearing gloves—when he went up to bed—it had Hornby’s finger-prints—and also might be useful if it came to a “rough house” with Prescott. Against this, however, Dennis had seen him in the garden—without, of course, recognizing him, and Mary had been conscious of the “espionage” that was connected with the “smell of a cigar.” As a matter of fact his jealousy had caused him to follow Prescott and Mary several times before—as she told us. Arrived in Prescott’s bedroom he sought a hiding-place in the bathroom, and was there when Barker went along to bed. When the latter was being questioned by Baddeley as to the people that were upstairs when he went to bed, Cunningham stated that he answered Barker’s “good-night.” He did not, because he was in Prescott’s bedroom and not in his own. When Prescott came to bed he naturally began to undress—probably sitting on the bed with his back towards Cunningham. Waiting for a favorable opportunity the latter sprang on his victim and strangled him with the lace—leaving a cigar stub in the inner room. His fourth mistake!

Prescott, no doubt, had previously removed his coat, vest, tie, collar and shoes. In the struggle the bed-clothes were disarranged, and subsequently pushed on to the floor by Cunningham.