first to speak. “Well, you’ve got me,” he said, drawling a little.
“Looks like it,” said Grant. “But you had a good run for your money.”
“Yes,” agreed the man, his eyes going to Miss Dinmont and coming back at once.
“Tell me, what made you dive off the boat? What was the idea?”
“Because swimming and diving is the thing I’m best at. If I hadn’t slipped, I could have got to the rocks under water and lain there, with only my nose and my mouth out, until you got tired looking for me, or the dark came. But you won—by a head.” The pun seemed to please him.
There was a little silence, and Miss Dinmont said in her clear, deliberate voice, “I think, Inspector, he’s well enough to be left now. At least, he won’t need professional services any longer. Perhaps some one in the house would look after him tonight?”
Grant deduced that this was her way of saying that the man was strong enough now to have a more adequate guard, and thankfully agreed. “Do you want to go now?”
“Just as soon as some one can take my place without any one being upset.”
Grant rang, and explained the situation to the maid that came. “I’ll stay if you would like to go now,” he said when the maid had gone, and she agreed.
Grant went to the window and stood looking out at the loch, so that, if she wanted to say anything to Lamont, the way was clear, and she began to collect her things. There was no sound of conversation, and, looking round, he saw that she was apparently quite absorbed in the task of leaving nothing behind her, and the man was watching her unblinkingly, his whole being waiting for the moment of her leave-taking. Grant turned back to the sea, and presently he heard her say, “Shall I see you again before you go?” There was no answer to that, and Grant turned round to find that she was addressing himself.
“Oh, yes, I hope so,” he said. “I’ll call at the manse if I don’t see you otherwise—if I may.”
“All right,” she said, “then I needn’t say goodbye just now.” And she went out of the room with her bundle.
Grant glanced at his captive and looked away at once. It is indecent to pry too far into even a murderer’s soul. When he looked back again, the man’s eyes were closed and his face was a mask of such unspeakable misery that Grant was unexpectedly moved. He had cared for her, then—it had not been merely opportunism.
“Can I do anything for you, Lamont?” he asked presently.
The black eyes opened and considered him unseeingly. “I suppose it is too much to expect any one to believe that I didn’t do it,” he said at length.
“It is, rather,” said Grant dryly.
“But I didn’t, you know.”
“No? Well, we hardly expected you to say you did.”
“That’s what she said.”
“Who?” asked Grant, surprised.
“Miss Dinmont. When I told her I hadn’t done it.”
“Oh? Well, it’s a simple process of elimination, you see. And everything fits in too well for the possibility of a mistake. Even down to this.” And picking up Lamont’s hand from where it lay on the counterpane, he indicated the scar on the inside of his thumb. “Where did you get that?”
“I got it carrying my trunk up the stairs to my new rooms in Brixton—that morning.”
“Well, well,” said Grant indulgently, “we won’t argue the affair now, and you’re not well enough to make a statement. If I took one now, they’d hold it up to me that I had got it from you when you weren’t compos mentis.”
“My statement’ll be the same whenever you take it,” the man said; “only, no one will believe it. If they would have believed it, I wouldn’t have run.”
Grant had heard that tale before. It was a favourite gambit with criminals who had no case. When a man plays injured innocence, the layman immediately considers the possibility of a mistake; but the police officer, who has a long acquaintance with the undoubtedly guilty, is less impressionable—in fact, is not impressed at all. A police officer who was impressed with a hard-luck story, however well told, would be little use in a force designed for the suppression of that most plausible of creatures, the criminal. So Grant merely smiled and went back to the window. The loch was like glass this evening, the hills on either side reflected to their last detail in the still water. Master Robert rode below the boathouse—“a painted ship”—only that no paint could reproduce the translucence of the sea as it was now.
Presently Lamont said, “How did you find where I had come to?”
“Finger-prints,” said Grant succinctly.
“Have you got fingerprints of mine?”
“No, not yours. I’m going to take them in a minute.”
“Whose, then?”
“Mrs. Everett’s.”
“What has Mrs. Everett got to do with it?” the man said, with the first hint of defiance.
“I expect you know more about that than I do. Don’t talk. I want you to be able to travel tomorrow or the next day.”
“But look here, you haven’t done anything to Mrs. Everett, have you?”
Grant grinned. “No; I think it’s what Mrs. Everett’s done to us.”
“What do you mean? You haven’t arrested her, have you?”
There was obviously no hope of the man being quiet until he knew how they had traced him, so Grant told him. “We found a fingerprint of Mrs. Everett’s in your rooms, and as Mrs. Everett had told us she didn’t know where your new rooms were, it was a fair conclusion that she had a finger in the pie. We found that her relations stayed here, and then we found the man you fooled at King’s Cross, and his description of Mrs. Everett made things sure. We only just missed you at the Brixton place.”
“Mrs. Everett won’t get into trouble over it, will she?”
“Probably not—now that we’ve got you.”
“I was a fool to run, in the first place. If I’d come and told the truth in the beginning, it couldn’t be any worse than it is now, and I’d have been saved all the hell between.” He was lying with his eyes on the sea. “Funny to think that, if some one hadn’t killed Bert, I’d never have seen this place or—or anything.”
The “anything” the inspector took to be the manse. “M’m! And who do you think killed him?”
“I don’t know. There wasn’t any one I know of who’d do that to Bert. I think perhaps some one did it by mistake.”
“Not looking what they were doing with the needle, as it were?”
“No; in mistake for some one else.”
“And you’re the left-handed
