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Page 16
"Oh, to think that I should have done that poor man such an
injustice! It is terrible, terrible! This house has been ghastly
these days. His poor aunt knows that he is innocent--she could
never believe otherwise--she has felt the hideous suspicion in my
mind--it has made her suffering worse--will they ever forgive me?"
"Her joy, if I can free her nephew, will make her forget everything.
Go to her now, Miss Roemer, comfort her with the assurance that you
also believe him to be innocent. I must hasten back to G-- and go
on with this quest."
The girl stood at the doorway shaded by the overhanging branches of
two great trees, looking down the street after the slight figure of
the detective. "Oh, it is all easier to hear, hard as it is, easier
now that this horrible suspicion has gone from my mind--why did I
not think of that before?"
Alone in the corner of the smoking compartment in the train to G--,
Muller arranged in his mind the facts he had already gathered. He
had questioned the servants of John Siders' former household, had
found that the dead man received very few letters, only an
occasional business communication from his bank. Of the few others,
the servants knew nothing except that he had always thrown the
envelopes carelessly in the waste paper basket and had never seemed
to have any correspondence which he cared to conceal. No friend
from elsewhere had ever visited him in Grunau, and he had made few
friends there except the Graumann family.
The facts of the case, as he knew them now, were such as to make it
extremely doubtful that Graumann was the murderer. Muller himself
had been inclined to believe in the possibility of a quarrel
between the two men, particularly when he had heard that Graumann
himself was in love with his handsome ward. But the second thought
that came to him then, impelled by the unerring instinct that so
often guided him to the truth, was the assurance that in a case of
this kind, in a case of a quarrel terminating fatally, a man like
Albert Graumann would be the very first to give himself up to the
police and to tell the facts of the case. Albert Graumann was a
man of honour and unimpeachable integrity. Such a man would not
persist in a foolish denial of the deed which he had committed in
a moment of temper. There would be nothing to gain from it, and
his own conscience would be his severest judge. "The disorder in
the room?" thought Muller. "It'll be too late for that now. I
suppose they have rearranged the place. I can only go by what the
local detectives have seen, by the police reports. But I do not
understand this extreme disorder. There is no reason why there
should be a struggle when the robber was armed with a pistol. If
Siders was supposed to have been interrupted when writing a letter,
interrupted by a thief come with intent to steal, a thief armed
with a revolver, the sight of this weapon alone would be sufficient
to insure his not moving from his seat. I can understand the open
drawers and cupboard; that is explained by the thief's hasty search
for booty. But the torn window curtain and the overturned chairs
are peculiar.
"Of course there is always a possibility that the thief might have
entered one room while Siders was in the other; that the latter
might have surprised the robber in his search for money or valuables,
and that there might have been a hand-to-hand struggle before the
intruder could pull out his revolver. Oh, if I could only have seen
the body! This is working under terrific difficulties. The marks
of a hand-to-hand struggle would have been very plain on the clothes
and on the person of the murdered man. But this letter? I do not
understand this letter at all. It is the dead man's handwriting,
that we know, but why did not the friend to whom it was addressed
come forward and make himself known? As far as I can learn from the
police reports in G--, there was no personal interest shown, no
personal inquiries made about the dead man. There was only the
natural excitement that a murder would create. Now a family,
expecting to make a pleasure excursion with a friend in a day or
two and suddenly hearing that this friend had been found murdered
in his lodgings, would be inclined to take some little personal
interest in the matter. These people must have been in town and at
home, for the excursion spoken of in the letter was to occur two
days after the murder. Miss Roemer's remark about the dread that
some people have as to any connection with the police, is true to
a limited extent only. It is true only of the ignorant mind, not
of a man presumably well-to-do and properly educated. I do not
understand why the man to whom this letter was addressed has not
made himself known. The only explanation is--that there was no
such man!" A sudden sharp whistle broke from the detective's lips.
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