“That, I admit, is not much to go upon. But more was to come. This forerunner of Deacon had—before he quarrelled with Hoode and left him—on his own initiative employed a private detective and set him to unearth this enemy of Hoode’s that seemed to command and write for three incendiary newspapers. You see, this secretary was sure that there was an enemy of some importance at work. At first he said nothing to Hoode, but at last told of his suspicions. He was laughed at. He returned to the charge—and they quarrelled. He left Hoode’s employment without having told him of the private detective. Being, with some excuse, not a little angry, he paid the detective, telling him to stop the work and go to hell.
“But, luckily, the private detective had smelt a Big Thing, and consequently Big Money. He went on working. He finished his job. I got into touch with him. He has been paid, and the result of his labours has been forwarded to Scotland Yard.
“His proofs are more than adequate. He has established, mainly through the corruptibility of a disgruntled employee, that Digby-Coates was beyond doubt the hidden owner of those three newspapers and also the composer of all these elaborate paeans of hate which appeared in them from time to time, and were directed against the man who was his friend and whose friendship he so cleverly pretended to return. (One cannot but admire the ingenuity with which Digby-Coates foisted more or less respectable and quite foolish figureheads upon the world—including the rest of the Press—as owners of the papers upon the purchase and upkeep of which he must have spent nearly half his great fortune. He was truly a great Enemy!)
“But it was in himself writing the attacks with which he tried to bring Hoode to a fall that he overstepped himself and made a loophole through which curious persons could wriggle. Had he left the writing to different men and rested content with being the power behind the machine, he would have increased by a thousand his chances of remaining undiscovered. I suppose that his hate was so strong that to leave to others the forging of the weapons was beyond him.
“Before ending the third part of this report, I would draw attention to what has thus far been established—established, I hope, to the satisfaction of even the most rigorous anti-Deaconite.
“It has been shown that there is both reason for and corroboration of Digby-Coates’s hatred of Hoode.
“It has been shown not only that all the evidence against Deacon can be used equally well against Digby-Coates, but also that there is in fact more of this evidence of material signs against Digby-Coates than there is against Deacon.
“Above all, we have in the case against Digby-Coates two things (which might be called one thing) that there have never been against Deacon. The first is motive—although it is nothing more (nor less) than the crazy hatred of a half-madman. The second is reliable evidence that ill-will existed before the murder.
IV
“If I were delivering this report as a lecture, I am sure that there would be a little fat man in a corner bounding up and down with ill-suppressed irritation. At this stage he would be unable to restrain himself any longer and would ask passionately why the hell I was wasting my time and his by faking up a case against a man who had a chilled-steel alibi—the perfect, unassailable defence of a man who is seen by various people at such times and in such a place as to make it impossible for him to have committed the crime.
“I would assure the fat little man—as I assure those who read—that I would in due course deal with and demolish that alibi, pointing out at the same time that it was the very perfection of the thing which had bred some of my first suspicions of its owner. It was too good, too complete, in a household where everyone else had only ordinary ones; it was a Sunday-go-to-meeting alibi; the alibi of a man who at least knew that a crime was going to be committed.
“But more of that later. For the moment I will take two points which, though they might be considered proper to the first part of this document, I have seen fit to reserve until now.
“The first concerns a rope. I have explained that I found it necessary to search the house. During that search, which was not only for the missing letters from the drawer in Hoode’s writing-table, I went into Deacon’s bedroom. This is next to, and on the west side of, the room used by Digby-Coates as a sitting-room, study, and, occasionally, carpenter’s shop. (He has had a bench fitted up there for him, as I mentioned earlier.)
“In the grate in Deacon’s bedroom was a little pile of soot which at once attracted my attention, as being unusual in so scrupulously tended a house as Abbotshall. I investigated. On the ledge which runs round the interior of the chimney at the point where—on a level with the mantelpiece outside—it suddenly narrows, I found a coil of silk cord of roughly the thickness of a man’s little finger. It was double-knotted at intervals of two inches throughout its length, which
