Wendover shook his head.
“I don’t recognise it from the title.”
“You must have played it sometime or other when you were a kid,” Sir Clinton continued. “One player chooses a name on a map; the other player’s got to find out which name it is. He can ask any questions he likes, provided that the first player can answer them by a plain ‘Yes’ or a ‘No.’ Now that game is something like detective work, though the problem’s much easier to solve. Curiously enough, the really clever player doesn’t choose a name in tiny type—only the beginner does that. The expert picks out some name like France, or Germany, or Czecho-Slovakia—something that stretches halfway across the map. Then when the opponent asks: ‘Is it on this half of the map?’ the expert answers ‘No,’ quite truthfully; and the beginner at once assumes that it must be in the other half and proceeds accordingly, quite forgetting that it may be on both halves simultaneously. That’s the kind of thing that may turn up in criminal-hunting. The fellow you’re after may be—in fact he generally is—playing two parts simultaneously. He’s not only a criminal; he’s a normal member of society as well—at least in murder cases he usually is. He stretches over both halves of the map, you see? And if you insist on looking at one half only, you miss him completely.”
“That’s a long suit of talk you had in your hand,” Wendover commented. “You seem very flush of information on some points.”
Sir Clinton laughed, admitting the hit.
“You asked for a lecture, and now it seems you don’t care for it when you get it. Well, try your hand yourself. Let’s hear what you’ve made of the case. I’m not afraid of prejudice now.”
Wendover glanced at his friend with some suspicion; but he seemed reassured by what he saw. Sir Clinton appeared to be quite anxious to hear his ideas.
“If you’re not pulling my leg, I don’t mind,” he said. “I’ve taken in most of what you said, and that limits things down a good deal. I’ll take the possibles, one by one, and consider them. The bother is that it’s difficult to find any one person who will fit into your three classes—I mean someone who had an opportunity, the method, and a motive strong enough.”
Sir Clinton knocked the ash from his cigarette.
“Go on,” he said. “Let’s see how you get round that snag. I’ll represent a jury of average intelligence, if I can screw myself up to that pitch.”
“Well, first of all,” Wendover suggested, “there’s this Hackleton case looming in the background. Now that Neville Shandon’s done for, Hackleton stands to win. It was a fight between them. Shandon was depending more on his brains than on his witnesses, I take it; and now that he’s out of it Hackleton will get off scot-free. There’s your motive all right.”
Sir Clinton nodded his assent to this, and Wendover continued with rather more confidence.
“The method used was obviously a sound one, no matter where the murder was done. An airgun’s fairly silent; and that curare evidently kills quickly. It’s not the sort of thing an ordinary rough would think of. Even if he did think of it he couldn’t get the poison. But Hackleton’s got money enough to buy some unscrupulous fellow with brains; and this gone-under intellectual might have hit on the trick. Or Hackleton himself may have devised it and passed it on to his tool.”
“That’s so. And then?”
“The fact that the murder was done in the Maze may have been mere accident. They may have intended to get at Neville Shandon anywhere they could; and it just happened that he went into the Maze and gave them the best chance there.”
“You assume, of course, that they would have got up the topography of the estate, Maze included, beforehand?”
“I’d have done so myself if I’d been put to that job; so I suppose they’d have had enough sense to do it, too.”
“But why was it a double murder, then?” demanded Sir Clinton. “How did Roger come into the business?”
Wendover pondered for a moment; then he seemed to see a solution.
“Perhaps they had two murderers at work and each of them imagined he’d got the right man in front of him. The two Shandons were very much alike, you know.”
Sir Clinton nodded without committing himself.
“Pass along to the next caravan! What’s the next animal on show in your menagerie?”
“I’m a bit doubtful about young Hawkhurst, to tell you the truth. I hardly like to think that he did it; and yet after that attack of sleepy sickness he certainly did turn very queer in his temper. You’d have seen a fine outburst if you’d been with us when we went up for the curare. And there’s no disguising the fact that he and Roger didn’t get on together at all. Given an unbalanced mind and that state of affairs, one has to admit that queer results might turn up.”
“What do you make of the opportunity factor in his case?”
“All we have is his own word that he was up at the spinney shooting rabbits. For all we know, he may have been in the Maze. He knows it thoroughly. All the family do, of course.”
He thought in silence for a moment or two, then added:
“And of course he’s very keen on airguns; and he knew of the store of curare in the house.”
“You’ve made out quite a fair case against both Hackleton and young Hawkhurst as suspects, Squire; but there isn’t a tittle of evidence there that a jury would look at, you know.”
“Oh, I see that well enough,” Wendover admitted.
