"I hardly think it was Miss Maitland," I said. "She was past sixty, and besides--I don't think she went that way. Still it is worth following up. Is that all?"
He fumbled in his pocket, and after a minute brought up a small black pocket-book and held it out to me. It was the small coin purse out of a leather hand-bag.
"She dropped this in the cab, sir," he said. "I took it home to the missus--not knowing what else to do with it. It had no money in it--only that bit of paper."
I opened the purse and took out a small white card, without engraving. On it was written in a pencil the figures:
When the cabman had gone, I sat down and tried to think things out. As I have said many times in the course of this narrative, I lack imagination: moreover, a long experience of witnesses in court had taught me the unreliability of average observation. The very fact that two men swore to having taken solitary women away from Bellwood that night, made me doubt if either one had really seen the missing woman.
Of the two stories, the taxicab driver's was the more probable, as far as Miss Jane was concerned. Knowing her child-like nature, her timidity, her shrinking and shamefaced fear of the dark, it was almost incredible that she would walk the three miles to Wynton, voluntarily, and from there lose herself in the city. Besides, such an explanation would not fit the blood-stains, or the fact that she had gone, as far as we could find out, in her night-clothes.
Still--she had left the village that night, either by cab or on foot. If the driver had been correct in his time, however, the taxicab was almost eliminated; he said the woman got into the cab at one-thirty. It was between one-thirty and one-forty-five when Margery heard the footsteps in the attic.
I think for the first time it came to me, that day, that there was at least a possibility that Miss Jane had not been attacked, robbed or injured: that she had left home voluntarily, under stress of great excitement. But if she had, why? The mystery was hardly less for being stripped of its gruesome details. Nothing in my knowledge of the missing woman gave me a clue. I had a vague hope that, if she had gone voluntarily, she would see the newspapers and let us know where she was.