Ann's rooms were upon the second floor with the windows upon the
garden, a bedroom and a sitting-room communicating directly with one
another. They were low in the roof, but spacious, and Hanaud, as he
looked around the bedroom, said in a tone of doubt:
"Yes ... after all, if one were frightened suddenly out of one's
wits, one might stumble about this room in the dark and lose one's
way to the light switch. There isn't one over the bed." Then he
shrugged his shoulders. "But, to be sure, one would be careful that
one's details could be verified. So----" and the doubt passed out of
his voice.
The words were all Greek to the Commissary of Police and his
secretary and Monsieur Bex. Maurice Thevenet, indeed, looked sharply
at Hanaud, as if he was on the point of asking one of those questions
which he had been invited to ask. But Girardot, the Commissary who
was panting heavily with his ascent of two flights of stairs, spoke
first.
"We shall find nothing to interest us here," he said. "That pretty
girl would never have asked us to pry about amongst her dainty
belongings if there had been anything to discover."
"One never knows," replied Hanaud. "Let us see!"
Jim walked away into the sitting-room. He had no wish to follow step
by step Hanaud and the Commissary in their search; and he had noticed
on the table in the middle of the room a blotting-pad and some
notepaper and the materials for writing. He wanted to get all this
whirl of conjecture and fact and lies, in which during the last two
days he had lived, sorted and separated and set in order in his mind;
and he knew no better way of doing so than by putting it all down
shortly in the "for" and "against" style of Robinson Crusoe on his
desert island. He would have a quiet hour or so whilst Hanaud
indefatigably searched. He took a sheet of paper, selected a pen at
random from the tray and began. It cost Ann Upcott, however, a good
many sheets of notepaper, and more than once the nib dropped out of
his pen-holder and was forced back into it before he had finished.
But he had his problem reduced at last to these terms: