“I’m sorry,” replied Macdonald. “I can understand your point of view so well, and in what you have just said you have touched upon certain truth. Valehead is a little world of its own, isolated, as you say, approached by only the one road, and it seems very improbable that anyone traveled that road on Wednesday night. That’s why I have got to know all about those who were in the valley that night. Then you said that I must have missed some small, trivial thing. I think that’s true, too. It’s often the small trivial thing which gives the clue to a problem.”
“Then you do think that it might have been an accident, and that all this horrible suspicion about murder and murderers is just a ghastly mistake?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t think that,” replied Macdonald gently, “but I’ve got to go on a
