his head wearily away. “I know,” he said. “You don’t need to tell me how bad it is.”
A knock came to the door, and the boy with the protruding ears appeared in the doorway and said that he had been sent to relieve Mr. Grant, if that was what Mr. Grant wanted. Grant said, “I’ll want you in five minutes or so. Come back when I ring.” And the boy melted, grin last, into the dark of the passage like the Cheshire cat. Grant took something out of his pocket and fiddled with it at the washstand. Then he came over to the bedside and said, “Fingerprints, please. It’s quite a painless process, so you needn’t mind.” He took prints of both hands on the prepared sheets of paper, and the man submitted with an indifference tinged with the interest one shows in experiencing something, however mild, for the first time. Grant knew even as he pressed the fingertips on the paper that the man had no Scotland Yard record. The prints would be of value only in relation to the other prints in the case.
As he laid them aside to dry, Lamont said, “Are you the star turn at Scotland Yard?”
“Not yet,” said Grant. “You flatter yourself.”
“Oh, I only thought—seeing your photograph in the paper.”
“That was why you ran last Saturday night in the Strand.”
“Was it only last Saturday? I wish the traffic had done for me then!”
“Well, it very nearly did for me.”
“Yes; I got an awful jolt when I saw you behind me so soon.”
“If it’s any comfort to you, I got a much worse one when I saw you arriving back in the Strand. What did you do then?”
“Took a taxi. There was one passing.”
“Tell me,” the inspector said, his curiosity getting the better of him, “were you planning the boat escape all the time at the manse tea?”
“No; I had no plans at all. I thought of the boat afterwards only because I’m used to boats, and I thought you’d think of them last. I was going to try to escape somehow, but I didn’t think of it until I saw the pepper-pot as I was going out. It was the only way I could think of, you see. Bert had my gun.”
“Your gun? Was that your gun in his pocket?”
“Yes; that’s what I went to the queue for.”
But Grant did not want statements of that sort tonight. “Don’t talk!” he said, and rang for the boy. “I’ll take any statement you want to give me tomorrow. If there’s anything I can do for you tonight, tell the boy and he’ll let me know.”
“There isn’t anything, thank you. You’ve been awfully decent—far more decent than I thought the police ever were to—criminals.”
That was so obviously an English version of Raoul’s gentil that Grant smiled involuntarily, and the shadow of a smile was reflected on Lamont’s swarthy face. “I say,” he said, “I’ve thought a lot about Bert, and it’s my belief that, if it wasn’t a mistake, it was a woman.”
“Thanks for the tip,” said Grant dryly, and left him to the tender mercies of the grinning youth. But as he made his way downstairs he was wondering why he had thought of Mrs. Ratcliffe.
Chapter 14.
THE STATEMENT
It was not at Carninnish, however, that Lamont gave his statement to the inspector, but on the journey south. Dr. Anderson, on hearing what was mooted, pleaded for one more day’s rest for his patient. “You don’t want the man to have inflammation of the brain, do you?”
Grant, who was dying to have a statement down in black and white, explained that the man himself was anxious to give one, and that giving it would surely harm him less than having it simmering in his brain.
“It would be all right at the beginning,” Anderson said, “but by the time he had finished he would need another day in bed. Take my advice and leave it for the meantime.” So Grant had given way and let his captive have still longer time to burnish the tale he was no doubt concocting. No amount of burnish, he thought thankfully, would rub out the evidence. That was there unalterable, and nothing the man might say could upset the facts. It was as much curiosity on his part, he told himself, as fear for his case that made him so eager to hear what Lamont had to say. So he bullied himself into some show of patience. He went seafishing in Master Robert with Drysdale, and every chug of the motor reminded him of the fish he had landed two nights ago. He went to tea at the manse, and with Miss Dinmont’s imperturbable face opposite him and an odd pepper-pot alongside the salt on the table, his thoughts were almost wholly of Lamont. He went to church afterwards, partly to please his host, but mainly to avoid what was evidently going to be a tête-à-tête with Miss Dinmont if he stayed behind, and sat through a sermon in which Mr. Logan proved to his own and his congregation’s satisfaction that the King of kings had no use for the fox-trot; and thought continually of the statement Lamont would give him. When the incredibly dreary noise of Highland “praise” had faded into silence for the last time, and Mr. Logan had pronounced an unctuous benediction, his one thought was that now he could go back and be near Lamont. It was rapidly becoming an obsession with him, and he recognized the fact and resented it. When Mrs. Dinmont—Miss Dinmont had not come to church—reminded him as she was saying good-night that on the morrow the car would stop at the manse gate to allow them to say goodbye to Mr. Lowe, it came as a shock to him that there was more play-acting to be done before he departed from Carninnish. But things proved easier than he had anticipated. Lamont played up as he had played up during the fateful tea, and neither his host nor his hostess suspected that there was anything more serious amiss than the matter of his health. Miss Dinmont was not present. “Dandy said she had already said goodbye to you, and it is unlucky to say goodbye twice,” her mother said. “She said you had been unlucky enough already. Are you a very unlucky person, then?”
“Very,” said Lamont, with an admirable smile, and as the car moved away, Grant took out the handcuffs.
“Sorry,” he said brusquely. “It’s only till we reach the railway.” But Lamont merely repeated the word “Unlucky!” as if, surprisingly, he liked the sound of it. At the station they were joined by a plain-clothes man, and at Inverness had a compartment to themselves. And it was after dinner that night, when the last light was going on the hills, that Lamont, pale and rather ill-looking, offered again to tell them all he knew.
“It isn’t much,” he said. “But I want you to know.”
“You realize that what you say may be used against you?” Grant said. “Your lawyer would probably want you to say nothing. You see, it’s putting your line of defence into our hands.” And even while he was saying it, he was wondering: Why am I so punctilious? I’ve told him already that anything he says may be used against him. But Lamont wanted to talk, and so the constable produced his notebook.
“Where shall I begin?” Lamont asked. “It’s difficult to know where to start.”
“Suppose you tell us how you spent the day Sorrell was murdered—that’s a week last Tuesday—the 13th.”
“Well, in the morning we packed—Bert was leaving for America that night—and I took my things to my new room in Brixton and
