Lieutenant Valcour caught his breath sharply. It fitted surprisingly well—the motive—the crime—the fact that the girl might have retained her key to the servants’ entrance and her husband have got hold of it. And her husband would readily enough have believed the talk about his wife and Endicott—husbands had a habit of doing just that. To the man’s way of thinking, it wouldn’t have been anything so ephemeral as a maternal grandmother who had driven his wife insane: it would have been Endicott.
Madame Velasquez’s innuendoes against the true identity of anybody came back to Lieutenant Valcour with annoying force. What about Hollander? Hollander was a blond, and obviously of a different level in education and position than the Endicotts. And who had identified Hollander? Nobody. Endicott and his wife were the only two in the house who could, and Endicott was dead, and Mrs. Endicott had not seen Hollander at all, if her unbelievable statement were true: that she had not gone out onto the balcony and along it to the window from where the shot had been fired.
Suppose the man who had sat with Endicott had just been posing as Hollander but had been, in reality, the husband of this unfortunate girl. Suppose he had been waiting outside for an opportunity to reenter the house, had waylaid Hollander and forced his errand from him, had taken his driver’s licence and cards from him and had shown them to O’Brian at the door to gain admittance. …
No—there still arose that fundamental question: what had the attacker been searching for among Endicott’s papers? This girl’s husband surely would have nothing for which to search, unless it would be for problematic evidence of his wife’s infidelity, and that theory was pretty thin. …
“What became of this girl’s husband, Mrs. Siddons?”