were especially nice to me, the general even spending an hour talking to me at the reception this afternoon. That’s a distinctive amateur crook trait. Ninth—after the machine gun car had been wrecked I chased its occupant. I lost him around this house. The Italian boy I picked up wasn’t him. He couldn’t have climbed up on the path without my seeing him. But he could have run around to the general’s side of the house and vanished indoors there. The general liked him, and would have helped him. I know that, because the general performed a downright miracle by missing him at some six feet with a shotgun. Tenth—you called at Hendrixson’s house for no other purpose than to get me away from there.”
That finished the left hand. I went back to the right.
“Eleventh—Hendrixson’s two servants were killed by someone they knew and trusted. Both were killed at close quarters and without firing a shot. I’d say you got Oliver to let you into the house, and were talking to him when one of your men cut his throat from behind. Then you went upstairs and probably shot the unsuspecting Brophy yourself. He wouldn’t have been on his guard against you. Twelfth—but that ought to be enough, and I’m getting a sore throat from listing them.”
She took her chin off her hand, took a fat white cigarette out of a thin black case, and held it in her mouth while I put a match to the end of it. She took a long pull at it—a draw that accounted for a third of its length—and blew the smoke down at her knees.
“That would be enough,” she said when all these things had been done, “if it were not that you yourself know it was impossible for us to have been so engaged. Did you not see us—did not everyone see us—time and time again?”
“That’s easy!” I argued. “With a couple of machine guns, a trunkful of grenades, knowing the island from top to bottom, in the darkness and in