I have been asked by Cunningham to write the concluding chapter to the manuscript that has just reached me. Needless to say it has traveled by a somewhat circuitous route from the institution wherein he has been detained for so many years. My presence there in the latter part of last year awakened, no doubt, his egotistical interest in the crime, and caused him to put his own account of it to paper. His accompanying note to me contains the remark that after all I am pre?minently the right person to finish the affair. Perhaps I am. At any rate, I’ve decided to do what he requests, if only to stifle certain ill-founded and prejudiced statements that were current for some time after Cunningham’s arrest, trial, sentence and subsequent detention “during His Majesty’s pleasure.” Now for the facts. The great difficulty for us who attempted to investigate the Considine Manor tragedy lay in the separation of the “faked” clues from the true ones. That, of course, to a certain extent, would apply with equal force to a number of other crimes, but in this instance we were arrayed against a criminal—proved afterwards to be a homicidal maniac who had deliberately set out to lead us astray. That was, as I have foreshadowed, our main trouble. Our second difficulty was the apparent absence of motive. But after a time this second matter became less obscure to me. I have read Cunningham’s account of the tragedy very carefully, and I will say this: he has been very fair to his readers. Only three clues have been kept from them, and in two of these three cases he himself is unaware of them to this day. The third omission he can be forgiven, for to have given it in its full significance at the time when it came under my notice would have destroyed some of the interest in the narrative from the pure mystery-story point of view. I will now attempt to show how I arrived at my conclusions. When I was called to the billiard room that morning I was very much at sea—the whole thing seemed untrue, but when I pulled my wits together I eventually found that I had to find satisfactory answers to four questions.
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(a) Why was Prescott wearing brown shoes?

(b) Why had the dagger been used as well as the lace?

(c) Had Prescott dressed himself—because his handkerchief was up his right-hand sleeve—and his one laced shoe had been tied in a most peculiar manner—I only discovered this by actually handling it.

(d) Why was he there—what had brought him?
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The question of the handkerchief was unobserved by Cunningham—yet it was the first slip he had made! The lace business he realized, for he spotted me looking at it closely. I will try to describe its peculiarity. The lace of the shoe had been tied in a bow over a reef-knot. I had never seen a lace tied quite like that before, and it was only by an accident I noticed it, for it wasn’t exactly obvious to a casual observer. Well, these two facts suggested a train of thought in my mind—had Prescott been murdered—then dressed or partially dressed—and brought to the billiard room? Had he been brought there from the garden? For there was mud on his shoes but no mud on the billiard room floor—despite glaringly obvious signs of a struggle and disturbance! With that idea I paid a visit to Prescott’s bedroom. I observed there were nine stairs to be negotiated—not an impossible distance to carry a dead body—for a very powerful man. My idea you see was beginning to take shape. Prescott’s bedroom told me something else. While there, I was able to make a deduction of which I am secretly rather proud! It will be remembered that the dressing space of the room was between the entrance-door and the bed, that is to say on the right of a person lying in the bed on his back. Now when a person gets out of bed he invariably turns the bedclothes away from the side where he gets out. For example, a person leaving this bed, to dress the side of the entrance-door would undoubtedly fling the clothes away to his left—yet these clothes were all lying and trailing on the side by the door. Baddeley took this as evidence that the bed had been slept in—to me it was conclusive evidence in the other direction. I was not concerned for the moment with the missing money. I was reconstructing the crime. The next stage was the garden—the footprints under the billiard room window. For a long time these disconcerted me. There were the four sets and the two kinds. Who had been Prescott’s companion? Did Prescott come from the billiard room into the garden? Had he climbed up into the billiard room from the garden? Had the footprints any relation at all to the billiard room? Then the amazing truth hit me. There was no sign of a descent from the billiard room—the earth below was clear. The shoes didn’t show a trace of scraping—yet why on earth had Prescott put them on, and not his ordinary dress-shoes? They were on Prescott’s feet because the murderer wished us to see them there—the footprints were faked—Prescott had not been outside at all—the murderer had worn them himself. It was at this stage that Lady Considine’s pearls made their appearance or rather their disappearance, and once again the job of unraveling the two skeins presented itself. Just as I had convinced myself they were dissociated from each other, came that startling discovery of the shoe-lace in Webb’s pocket. To my mind this was Cunningham’s second slip—he managed to get it into the pocket during the struggle that preceded Webb’s arrest—but it can be argued that it might very easily have served to hang Webb. I tried hard to persuade myself that Webb must and should be the murderer, but my instinct was always in conflict and I felt that the robbery was just a coincidence. It was hard to place accurately the evidence of the noises in the night—hard, that is, at this stage of the inquiry. I will attempt to explain them later. But so far, I had gone a long way towards sorting out the conditions of the crime, but had found no direct evidence against anybody in particular. But the finding of this shoe-lace opened my eyes a bit, and began to narrow down my field of suspicion. The next point was the discovery of the I.O.U., given to Prescott by Barker. How had that got into the billiard-table pocket? For a long time I was uncertain—then once again the solution came to me. By reason and by memory. It had been put there with deliberation! Nobody had used that room—we knew—till Cunningham and I went there—by “used” I mean—played billiards there. The servants gave it a wide berth for transparent reasons. I cast my mind back to the morning Prescott had been discovered—I visualized the entire scene—what had struck me about the “billiards” part of it? I had it! The three balls were lying in the pocket near the murdered man’s hand—and the red ball was on top. The splash of color it had made against Prescott’s white hand had been vivid to me. Yet when I knocked the balls from the same pocket to commence our game—the spot ball was on top—they had been moved—surely for the secretion of the Barker I.O.U.—since the murder. This caused me to eliminate Barker from my list of “suspects” and I ............