hing at
the moment. They only awakened in me a suspicion of something lurking in
the shadows, something that lent more mystery to the already mysterious
question how and why and through whom Manderson met his end.

With this much of preamble I come at once to the discovery which, in the
first few hours of my investigation, set me upon the path which so much
ingenuity had been directed to concealing.

I have already described Manderson's bedroom, the rigorous simplicity of
its furnishings, contrasted so strangely with the multitude of clothes
and shoes, and the manner of its communication with Mrs. Manderson's
room. On the upper of the two long shelves on which the shoes were
ranged I found, where I had been told I should find them, the pair of
patent leather shoes which Manderson had worn on the evening before his
death. I had glanced over the row, not with any idea of their giving me
a clue, but merely because it happens that I am a judge of shoes, and
all these shoes were of the very best workmanship.

But my attention was at once caught by a little peculiarity in this
particular pair. They were the lightest kind of lace-up dress shoes,
very thin in the sole, without toe-caps, and beautifully made, like all
the rest. These shoes were old and well-worn; but being carefully
polished and fitted, as all the shoes were, upon their trees, they
looked neat enough. What caught my eye was a slight splitting of the
leather in that part of the upper known as the vamp, a splitting at the
point where the two laced parts of the shoe rise from the upper. It is
at this point that the strain comes when a tight shoe of this sort is
forced upon the foot, and it is usually guarded with a strong stitching
across the bottom of the opening. In both the shoes I was examining this
stitching had parted, and the leather below had given way. The splitting
was a tiny affair in each case, not an eighth of an inch long, and the
torn edges having come together again on the removal of the strain,
there was nothing that a person who was not something of a connoisseur
of shoe-leather would have noticed. Even less noticeable, and indeed not
to be seen at all unless one were looking for it, was a slight straining
of the stitches uniting the upper to the sole. At the toe and on the
outer side of each shoe this stitching had been dragged until it was
visible on a close inspection of the joining.

These indications, of course, could mean only one thing.