Wendover, however, seized on the point at once.
“Ah! So after all your criticisms it seems you believe in my original theory!”
“I’ve forgotten which that was, by this time,” Sir Clinton admitted. “What was it?”
The Squire was rather nettled.
“You poured scorn on it at the time. What I said was this: Suppose Hackleton hired a man to put Neville Shandon out of the way. You say that was a local man, according to some evidence which you haven’t divulged to me. Very good. If he was a local man, he might have had access to Roger Shandon’s private papers, his chequebook, and so forth. When he was hired for the Neville Shandon business, he may have decided to make a bit extra by forgery, and cover it up by the second murder. Two murders are as cheap as one, when it comes to pay for them; and Roger’s murder has confused the trail very considerably. It’s only a question of identifying the man who could have managed all that without going too much out of his way and attracting attention.”
Sir Clinton had been listening carefully to Wendover’s exposition.
“That’s very neat indeed,” he conceded. “It would certainly hold water, if it fitted all the facts that you know, Squire; but unfortunately it leaves out of account the most interesting fact of all.”
“And that is?” Wendover demanded, with some asperity. He was annoyed to find that he had overlooked something.
“That is the most interesting fact of all,” Sir Clinton assured him blandly. Then, with a change of tone: “And that’s all I’m able to say just now, Squire. I’ve no fault to find with your reasoning. It hangs together beautifully. But sometimes the human mind, if you follow me, is apt to assume connections where no such things exist in Nature. We’ve got an instinctive craving to trace associations between sets of phenomena—and at times we kid ourselves that there is some relationship when really it’s only a case of simultaneity.”
“You’ve been reading one of these shilling manuals lately,” said Wendover suspiciously. “ ‘How to be a Philosopher in Ten Minutes,’ or something like that. All this gay talk about simultaneity and phenomena and association comes straight from there. You can’t deceive me with a veneer of learning.”
“Well, I won’t dazzle you with further extracts. Let’s get back to business. Go on with your list.”
“Young Torrance,” Wendover continued. “He’s a possible agent. I don’t know about his financial circumstances; he may be hard up, for all I know, and amenable to the cash bait that Hackleton could offer. It would be a pretty big one. Young Torrance was the person who proposed that game in the Maze to Miss Forrest. That would give him a reasonable excuse for being in the Maze at that particular time; and further, it would ensure that he was free from the girl’s supervision at the critical moment. Could you have invented a neater dodge yourself if you’d been set to it?”
“No,” Sir Clinton admitted, frankly, “I doubt if I could.”
“Take another point,” Wendover pursued his line of reasoning with increased interest. “What evidence have we that there ever was a third individual in the Maze at all? Torrance’s statements: but if Torrance was the murderer himself, of course he’d insist that a third person was present. Miss Forrest’s story of someone running in the Maze: but that may have been Torrance himself. You remember that she found it most difficult to tell the direction from which sounds came when she was in the Maze.”
“That’s a theory that might take some upsetting, Squire, if you can explain just one point. What did Torrance do with his airgun after he’d finished with it? No airgun was found in the Maze after the business. The murderer got rid of it somehow.”
“I see no great difficulty there,” Wendover pointed out at once. “Look at the time Miss Forrest spent in wandering up and down in the Maze, unable to find her way out. If Torrance knew the labyrinth, he could easily make his way through it, get out to the river bank, chuck his gun into the water, and sprint back again into the Maze before she noticed his absence.”
He thought for a moment before adding:
“In fact, I don’t see why he mayn’t have got rid of the gun in the interval between the last murder and the moment he gave the alarm—the time when he shouted out that he’d found the body.”
He paused again. Then a further flash of insight threw a fresh light on the case.
“Why, of course, that would account for the running man. He would be rushing to the river bank and back again as quick as he could go, for the essential thing would be to get rid of the gun before anyone met him in the Maze.”
Sir Clinton had dropped all his air of superior criticism.
“That’s remarkably neat, Squire. I shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t touch the root of the business—at one or two points, at the least.”
Curiously enough, the Chief Constable’s comment produced a complete change in Wendover’s mental outlook. He had fallen upon the Whistlefield case with all the enthusiasm of the irresponsible amateur. The mystery of it had caught his imagination, and he had thrown himself into the chase for a solution with an eagerness which he had hardly realised himself. He felt no more responsibility than if he had been attempting to follow clues in a detective story. Even the characters involved in the affair failed to give him any particular emotional background. He had never been intimate with the Shandon group; and some of the party he had not so much as seen before the tragedy occurred. Consequently, though he had used the real names of the various people concerned in the affair, they had borne no more significance than if he had said “Mr. X” or “Mr. Y.” The atmosphere in which he had worked had been that of a chess problem rather
