“But why should he say he was at Liskeard House if he wasn’t?”
“I don’t say he wasn’t. But he may maintain that the man who took the message down made a mistake. After all, such mishaps are common enough. Or he may have been meaning to go to Liskeard House before the messenger arrived.”
“I think that is ruled out anyway. We have proved from inquiries at the telephone exchange that Liskeard House did ring up Brooklyn’s club at about the time stated. There was some trouble about the connection, and the operator remembers making it.”
“Well, take the other possibility. May not the defence argue that someone else must have impersonated Brooklyn at the telephone, with the deliberate object of throwing suspicion upon him? The murderer, supposing him not to be Walter Brooklyn, would obviously want to get someone else suspected if he could. On that theory, all the circumstantial evidence would be false clues left by the real murderer.”
“That doesn’t seem to me at all likely, if I may say so. The evidence that was left on the spot where Prinsep was killed was obviously meant to incriminate George Brooklyn. That seems to show that, when the murder was done, the murderer had no idea that George Brooklyn was dead already, if indeed he was. A criminal would hardly lay two distinct and actually inconsistent sets of clues, leading to quite different suspects.”
“Not unless he was a quite exceptionally clever criminal, I grant you. But tell me this. Why should a man, who otherwise covered his traces so well, give himself away like an utter fool by that telephone conversation?”
“Obviously, I should say, because the phone message was sent before the murder, and the murder was not premeditated. Having killed his man, Brooklyn took the only possible course by denying the conversation.”
“Yes, that theory hangs together; but I’m not satisfied with it. There seems to me to be every reason to believe that the murders were most carefully thought out beforehand, and in that case the sending of the telephone message needs a lot of explanation. Then, again, we have still no indication at all of how Walter Brooklyn, or for that matter George Brooklyn, got into or out of the house.”
“On that point I have absolutely failed to get any light. My first idea, of course, was duplicate keys, and the stable yard. But the yard was quite definitely bolted as well as locked by eleven o’clock. The wall could not be scaled without a long ladder, which is out of the question. The front door is quite impossible, unless three or four servants were in the plot. I suppose they must have slipped in through the theatre, although it beats me how they got in without being seen.”
“May not Walter Brooklyn have come in through the stable yard before it was closed, and been in the house some time before the murders? He may have been going away when your taxi-man saw him at about 11:30.”
“Even so, that doesn’t explain how he let himself out and bolted the place after him from the inside. And, in any case, George Brooklyn was still alive at 11:30, when he was seen leaving the building by the front door. He had to get back, and Prinsep, if he killed him, must have been alive too until well after 11:30.”
“And you can add to that the difficulty that George Brooklyn seems to have got back into the garden after 11:30, and that, where one man could enter unseen, so could two.”
The inspector scratched his chin. “The whole thing is a puzzle,” he said. “But there’s one thing I’m sure of. It’s a much worse puzzle if you don’t assume that Walter Brooklyn was the murderer.”
“Still, there’s nothing so dangerous as to simplify your problem by assuming what you cannot conclusively prove to be true. If I were a juryman, I certainly could not vote for a conviction on the evidence we have at present.”
“But there’s no one else who could have done it.”
“Oh, yes, there is. There’s all the population of London. I grant you we have at present no reason for suspecting anyone else in particular. But that may be because we don’t know enough.”
“Then what do you want me to do?”
“Hunt, for all you’re worth, for further evidence. Don’t shut your eyes to the possibility that Walter Brooklyn may not be the murderer. Hunt for evidence of any kind, as if you were starting the case afresh.”
“And, meanwhile, Walter Brooklyn remains in custody?”
“Most certainly. There is presumptive evidence that he is the guilty party. But it’s nothing like a certainty. Remember that.”
The above conversation serves to show that the police, on their side, were becoming seriously worried. They had hoped that the strong presumptive evidence against Walter Brooklyn would speedily have been reinforced by further discoveries; but so far they had been disappointed. Inspector Blaikie at least was still strongly of opinion that he was guilty; but a strong opinion is not enough to convince a jury, and the inspector did not like to see the acquittal of a man he had arrested, especially as he had no other evidence pointing to some different person as the guilty person. Superintendent Wilson at least, while he could not blame the inspector for his conduct of the investigation, was growing more and more dissatisfied with the progress of the case. He had an uneasy and a growing feeling, which he had at first been unwilling to admit even to himself, that they were on the wrong tack.
XX
Superintendent Wilson Thinks It Out
When the inspector had left him, Superintendent Wilson gave himself up for a
