“Then somewhere in this flatlet we ought to find a ladies’ lumber jacket, heavily bloodstained. I’ll look under everything and you look inside.”
When the search had proved fruitless, Miss Paisley turned at bay.
“You don’t believe me!”
“I believe you believe it all, Miss Paisley. You felt you had to kill the man who had killed your cat. You knew you couldn’t face up to a job like murder, especially with a knife. So you had a brainstorm, or whatever they call it, in which you kidded yourself you had committed the murder.”
“Then my meat knife, my old riding gloves, and my lumber jacket have been hidden in order to deceive you?” shrilled Miss Paisley.
“Not to deceive me, Miss Paisley. To deceive yourself! If you want my opinion, you hid the knife and the gloves and the jacket because they were not bloodstained.”
Miss Paisley felt a little giddy.
“You don’t need to feel too badly about not killing him,” he said, smiling to himself. “At 7 o’clock this morning a constable found Jenkins trying to sink a bag in the river. That bag was Rinditch’s, which was kept under the bed o’ nights. And Jenkins had 230-odd quid in cash which he can’t account for.”
Miss Paisley made no answer.
“Maybe you still sort of feel you killed Rinditch?” Miss Paisley nodded assent. “Then remember this. If the brain can play one sort of trick on you, it can play another — same as it’s doing now.”
Inspector Green had been very understanding and very kind, Miss Paisley told herself. It was her duty to abide by his decision — especially as there was no means of doing otherwise — and loyally accept his interpretation of her own acts. The wretched Jenkins — an abominable man — would presumably be hanged. Things, reflected Miss Paisley, had a way of coming right...
After a single appearance before the magistrate, Jenkins was committed on the charge of murder and would come up for trial in the autumn at the Old Bailey. Miss Paisley removed her interest.
One evening in early autumn Miss Paisley was sitting in her armchair, reviving the controversy as to whether her father had made a mistake about the croquet lawn. In her eagerness she thrust her hands between the folds of the upholstery. Her fingers encountered a hard object. She hooked it with her finger and pulled up her dead cat’s collar.
She held it in both hands while there came a vivid memory of her peering through Mr. Rinditch’s window, Jenkins beside her, and seeing the collar in the wastepaper basket... The buckle was still fastened. The leather had been cut, as if with a razor. She read the inscription: her own name and address and — £1 Reward for Return.
“I took it out of that basket — afterwards!” She relived the ecstatic moment in which she had killed Rinditch. Every detail was now clear-cut. Strike UP! — as the cat had struck — then leap to safety. She had pulled off a glove, to snatch the collar from the basket and thrust the collar under the neck of her jumper; then she had put the glove on again before leaving the room and making her way to the river. Back in her chair she had retrieved the collar.
Gone was the exaltation which had sustained her in her first approach to the police. She stood up, rigid, as she had stood in the hall while listening to the scratching on the panel, refusing to accept an unbearable truth. Once again she had the illusion of being locked up, aware now that there could be no escape from herself.
There remained the collar — evidence irrefutable, but escapable.
“If I keep this as a memento, I shall soon get muddled and accuse myself of murder all over again! What was it that nice inspector said — ‘if the brain can play one trick on you it can play another’.”
She smiled as she put the collar in her handbag, slipped on a coat and walked — by the most direct route, this time — to the Seventeenth-Century bridge. She dropped the collar into the river, knowing that it would sink under the weight of its metal — unlike the bloodstained lumber jacket and the riding gloves which, Miss Paisley suddenly remembered, she had weighted with stones scratched from the soil of the old cemetery...