“Quite right, Inspector,” I agreed; “I hope very shortly to have some further particulars for you bearing upon this point.  I am endeavoring to obtain a work by Saint-Hilaire dealing with teratology.”

“As to her extraordinary activity and agility,” Gatton continued, “we must remember that a privet hedge is not like a stone wall.  I mean she may not have actually cleared the whole six feet, and after all, this is the age of the athletic girl.  There are women athletes who can perform some extraordinary feats of high-jumping.  Of course, there are still a number of witnesses to be discovered and examined, but I know by now exactly what to expect.  It’s an ingenious idea, although not entirely new to me.

“The whole thing has been managed by means of the telephone—­a powerful ally of the modern criminal.  Briefly what happened was this:  The Red House—­selected because of its lonely position, but also because it was fairly accessible—­was leased by our missing assassin without any personal interview taking place.  We have to look then in the first instance for some one possessing considerable financial resources.  It was by the effective substitution of a year’s rent—­in cash—­for the more usual references, that our man—­or woman—­whom I will call ‘A’ secured possession of the keys and right of entry to the premises.  A limited amount of furniture was obtained in the same manner.  We haven’t found the firm who supplied it, but I don’t doubt that the business was done over the telephone, cash being paid as before.  Duplicate keys must have been made for some of the doors, I think—­a simple matter.  We shall find that the furnishing people as well as the caterer who later on supplied the supper were admitted to the Red House by a district messenger or else had the keys posted to them for the purpose.

“The whole business was built up around a central idea, simple in itself:  that of inveigling Sir Marcus into the prepared supper-room.  His attendance at the New Avenue Theater last night was doubtless assured—­although we may never prove it—­by another of these mysterious telephone messages, probably purporting to come from Miss Merlin.  The cold-blooded thoroughness with which ‘A’ arranged for a crate to be delivered at the garage and for the body of the murdered man to be taken to the docks and shipped to the West Indies, illuminates the character of the person we have to seek.

“Discovery sooner or later was inevitable, of course.  It came sooner because of the accident at the docks.  Had it come later I don’t doubt that ‘A’ would have dismantled the Red House again so that the investigation would have been severely handicapped.  As it is, the only dismantling done was the most important of all.”

“You mean?” I said with keen interest.

“The death-machine,” answered Gatton.  “The cunning device around which all these trappings were erected.  We don’t have to wait for the coroner’s inquest nor the pathologists’ report to know that Sir Marcus was asphyxiated.”