minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my

hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had

left undone._”

 

All true, you see. But suppose I had put a row of stars after the first

sentence! Would somebody then have wondered what exactly happened in that blank

ten minutes?

 

When I looked round the room from the door, I was quite satisfied.

 

Nothing had been left undone. The dictaphone was on the table by the window,

timed to go off at nine-thirty (the mechanism of that little device was rather

clever—based on the principle of an alarm clock), and the arm-chair was pulled

out so as to hide it from the door.

 

I must admit that it gave me rather a shock to run into Parker just outside the

door. I have faithfully recorded that fact.

 

Then later, when the body was discovered, and I had sent Parker to telephone for

the police, what a judicious use of words: “_I did what little had to be done!_”

It was quite little—just to shove the dictaphone into my bag and push back the

chair against the wall in its proper place. I never dreamed that Parker would

have noticed that chair. Logically, he ought to have been so agog over the body

as to be blind to everything else. But I hadn’t reckoned with the

trained-servant complex.