“When we found that Ingelow had been murdered, your watch agreed with mine while Rodney Tait’s was ten minutes slower. This afternoon in Foyle’s office I found that my watch was ten minutes fast when I compared it with the correct time given by the Naval Observatory on the radio. So Rodney’s watch must have been right two nights ago. Why was mine fast? Because I set it by the Tilbury clock just before the murder, and the Tilbury clock gains several minutes on windy days. Why was yours fast on the same occasion? Because you had just set your watch by the Tilbury clock, too. The Tilbury clock can’t be seen from any point in the theater except the top of this fire escape. So you were the dark figure on the fire escape the night Ingelow was murdered. It was you who dropped Wanda’s script when I passed underneath, and it was you who underscored the line that Hutchins spoke: He cannot escape now, every hand is against him. . . . From the first, Hutchins said he had not underscored it in Wanda’s script, and there was no reason to doubt him as he was not under suspicion. So the line must have been underscored by someone who did not speak it in the play. Why? When does anyone mark a line in a play that he doesn’t speak himself? When it’s a cue for some bit of stage business. The line you underscored in Wanda’s script was not only a clue, but also a cue for a bit of business; and that ‘business’ was murder. You had to have a cue for stabbing Ingelow on the stage in order to fit his murder smoothly into the chronological pattern of the play, so there would be no danger of another actor interrupting you at that moment. That pattern was changed at the last moment when the actor playing Desiré fell ill, and his few lines were cut. You first learned this when I did—at the art gallery a few hours before the opening. When you got to the theater you snatched up Wanda’s script—the only script where the deletions were marked—in order to see if they affected your cue for murder. The cut had to be a line spoken by another actor when you were alone with Vladimir, and the omission of Desiré might have altered one of those conditions. Or it may be that one of Desiré’s lines was your original cue, and you had to find another one at short notice when his lines were cut. Anyway, in your haste you marked your cue for murder automatically as you would any other cue. You went out on the fire escape so you could set your watch by the Tilbury clock and time the cue as exactly as possible. As Milhau told me, you had never lived at Hutchins’ little hotel overlooking the Tilbury clock, so you had never had occasion to notice that the clock was inaccurate. The script fell out of your hands when you were startled by my appearance in the alley. My appearance was startling to you because you mistook me for Ingelow, the man you were planning to murder, just as Wanda did when I knocked on her door a few moments later. We were the same height, and we were dressed alike that evening as I noticed when I first saw him. You dared not recover the script from me in the alley for fear of exciting my suspicion of you when Ingelow was stabbed on cue. There wasn’t time then for you to select another cue.
“The next morning Rodney Tait provided me with a time table of the first act. During rehearsal this morning I found that time table was correct, and I added to it the exact time the cue for murder was spoken by Hutchins. Then I saw you were the only actor on stage near enough Vladimir to stab him at the moment Hutchins spoke that line. Hutchins himself was the first to suspect that his own voice had been the signal for two murders. He wasn’t sure, so he tried to convey the information to me indirectly by a Shakespearean quotation. Even Pauline suspected you tonight when Inspector Foyle turned on the light in the lobby, and she saw that a curtain which looked black in a very faint light was really red. Of all colors, red is the first to lose its characteristic hue when light fails. Just as blood and lipstick look black in a dim light or a photograph, your red dressing gown looked black on the fire escape in the darkness beyond the faint red radiance from the Tilbury clock.”
“That is an ingenious reconstruction,” said Leonard. “But it’s largely surmise. You haven’t proved me guilty.”
“I haven’t, but the fly and the canary have.”
“What about the canary?”
