“If you want to know,” retorted Cotherstone, “it was the very day after old Kitely was killed. I sent it through a friend of mine who still lives in Wilchester. I wanted to be done with it—I didn’t want to have it brought up against me that anybody lost aught through my fault. And so—I paid.”
“But—I’m only suggesting—you could have paid a long time before that, couldn’t you?” said Tallington. “The longer you waited, the more you had to pay. Two thousand pounds, with thirty years’ interest, at four percent—why, that’s four thousand four hundred pounds altogether!”
“That’s what he paid,” said Bent. “Here’s the receipt.”
“Mr. Cotherstone is telling us—privately—everything,” remarked Tallington, glancing at the receipt and passing it on to Brereton. “I wish he’d tell us—privately, as I say—why he paid that money the day after Kitely’s murder. Why, Mr. Cotherstone?”
Cotherstone, ready enough to answer and to speak until then, flushed angrily and shook his head. But he was about to speak when a gentle tap came at Tallington’s door, and before the solicitor could make any response, the door was opened from without, and the police-superintendent walked in, accompanied by two men whom Brereton recognized as detectives from Norcaster.
“Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Tallington,” said the superintendent, “but I heard Mr. Cotherstone was here. Mr. Cotherstone!—I shall have to ask you to step across with me to the office. Will you come over now?—it’ll be best.”
“Not until I know what I’m wanted for,” answered Cotherstone determinedly. “What is it?”
The superintendent sighed and shook his head.
“Very well—it’s not my fault, then,” he answered. “The fact is we want both you and Mr. Mallalieu for this Stoner affair. That’s the plain truth! The warrants were issued an hour ago—and we’ve got Mr. Mallalieu already. Come on, Mr. Cotherstone!—there’s no help for it.”
XXI
The Interrupted Flight
Twenty-four hours after he had seen Stoner fall headlong into Hobwick Quarry, Mallalieu made up his mind for flight. And as soon as he had come to that moment of definite decision, he proceeded to arrange for his disappearance with all the craft and subtlety of which he was a past master. He would go, once and for all, and since he was to go he would go in such a fashion that nobody should be able to trace him.
After munching his sandwich and drinking his ale at the Highmarket Arms, Mallalieu had gone away to Hobwick Quarry and taken a careful look round. Just as he had expected, he found a policeman or two and a few gaping townsfolk there. He made no concealment of his own curiosity; he had come up, he said, to see what there was to be seen at the place where his clerk had come to this sad end. He made one of the policemen take him up to the broken railings at the brink of the quarry; together they made a careful examination of the ground.
“No signs of any footprints hereabouts, the superintendent says,” remarked Mallalieu as they looked around. “You haven’t seen aught of that sort!”
“No, your Worship—we looked for that when we first came up,” answered the policeman. “You see this grass is that short and wiry that it’s too full of spring to show marks. No, there’s naught, anywhere about—we’ve looked a goodish way on both sides.”
Mallalieu went close to the edge of the quarry and looked down. His sharp, ferrety eyes were searching everywhere for his stick. A little to the right of his position the side of the quarry shelved less abruptly than at the place where Stoner had fallen; on the gradual slope there, a great mass of bramble and gorse, broom and bracken, clustered: he gazed hard at it, thinking that the stick might have lodged in its meshes. It would be an easy thing to see that stick in daylight; it was a brightish yellow colour and would be easily distinguished against the prevalent greens and browns around there. But he saw nothing of it, and his brain, working around the event of the night before, began to have confused notions of the ringing of the stick on the limestone slabs at the bottom of the quarry.
“Aye!” he said musingly, with a final look round. “A nasty place to fall over, and a bad job—a bad job! Them rails,” he continued, pointing to the broken fencing, “why, they’re rotten all through! If a man put his weight on them, they’d be sure to give way. The poor young fellow must ha’ sat down to rest himself a bit, on the top one, and of course, smash they went.”
“That’s what I should ha’ said, your Worship,” agreed the policeman, “but some of ’em that were up here seemed to think he’d been forced through ’em, or thrown against ’em, violent, as it might be. They think he was struck down—from the marks of a blow that they found.”
“Aye, just so,” said Mallalieu, “but he could get many blows on him as he fell down them rocks. Look for yourself!—there’s not only rough edges of stone down there, but snags and roots of old trees that he’d strike against in falling. Accident, my lad!—that’s what it’s been—sheer and pure accident.”
The policeman neither agreed with nor contradicted the Mayor, and presently they went down to the bottom of the quarry again, where Mallalieu, under pretence of thoroughly seeing into everything, walked about all over the place. He did not find the stick, and he was quite sure that nobody else had found it. Finally he went away, convinced that it lay in some nook or cranny of the shelving slope on to which he had kicked it in his sudden passion of rage. There, in all probability, it would remain forever, for it would never occur to the police that whoever wielded whatever weapon it was that struck the blow would not carry the weapon away with him. No—on the point of the stick Mallalieu began
