For, if he had realized, he could hardly have overlooked the immensely important point he did overlook. It was left to me to draw his attention to this point.

For when one man kills another, it necessarily follows that one man has been, killed by another. And it further follows that, if you decide to shield the killer because he is your friend, you are inevitably forced into an unfriendly attitude towards the victim. What about the victim and his rights in the matter?

You may believe it or not, but until this moment I don't think this aspect of the affair had occurred either to Hubbard or Esdaile. All had been Chummy. More than this: so exclusively had Chummy occupied their thoughts that they had forgotten the ordinary physical fact that a bullet fired into a man's body makes a hole—the same ugly kind of hole whether the person who makes it is your friend or not. Loyalty to friendship in the teeth of the Law is not always the simple thing it sounds. Among the various facts that faced us was one inescapable one, namely, that a man called Maxwell was at that moment lying in a mortuary awaiting a post-mortem examination.

Esdaile was frowning and clawing his jaw. The realization was sinking in now all right.

"What had you thought of doing with the pistol anyway?" I asked.

"To tell you the truth I hadn't thought," he admitted. "I should say the bottom of the river's the best place for it. But as you say, you can't drop that poor devil's bullet-hole into the river. Does nobody know anything about him?"

Nobody did. Maxwell might have been Chummy's best friend or worst enemy, a good fellow, a rotter, any one kind of all the kinds of men there are.

"Chummy was in Gallipoli. Anybody ever hear of a Maxwell with him there?"

Nobody had.

Then Esdaile took another line. For a moment it seemed quite a hopeful one.

"Well, look at it this way." He tried to evade the inevitable. "It's all very well for Monty to talk out of his hat about there not being murders enough, but what earthly right have we to assume that this was a murder at all? None, I say. Far more likely to have been an accident. Accidents do happen. Chummy wasn't the kind of man to deliberately do another fellow in. It must have been an accident."

But at this moment I remembered Philip's own words that morning in the studio: "Anybody would say it was an accident, wouldn't they? It looked like an accident, I mean? It wouldn't occur to anybody who saw it that it wasn't?" Those were rather remarkable words. They had meant, if they had meant anything at all, that even then Philip had had his reasons for supposing it had not been an accident. Now that a thunderclap had revealed that one of the men who had come down on the roof was Chummy, he apparently wanted it to be an accident again.

And by the way, how, at that particular moment, had Philip come to be in possession of an opinion on the matter at all? This was the point I have mentioned as being on Rooke's mind also. So far, in telling his story, Esdaile had taken as his starting-point the moment when he had got possession of the pistol from Monty; but what about the antecedent mystery? How in the first place had he discovered that Monty had the pistol? Why had he walked practically straight to Monty the moment he had ascended from the cellar? The whole series of incidents, from first to last, had passed while he had been still down in the cellar; how then could he know anything whatever about them?

Then I remembered that only a series of diversions had turned Hubbard away from his express purpose in coming to Lennox Street that evening—the purpose of seeing Esdaile's cellar. First had come the shock of learning that one of the men was Chummy Smith; then Joan Merrow's implication in the affair had sidetracked us; and then had come the pistol and Monty. These things were all very well, but they brought us no nearer to the solution of the first puzzle of all. Why had Esdaile behaved as he had behaved when he had rejoined us with a jar of curaÇao in one hand and a lighted candle in the other?

But for all this we had to wait. My speculations were suddenly cut short. There was another ring at the door, and Esdaile rose. But before going to see who it was this time he took the precaution of once more putting Monty's pistol away in the escritoire drawer.

It was well for our Case, as a Case, that he did so. We heard voices in the passage, Esdaile's own tenor and a deeper voice. Then I heard him say, "Well, perhaps you'd better come in."

The next moment he stood holding the door open for a Police Inspector to pass.

[Pg 78]
[Pg 79]