"Do you think he was the sort of witness that was wanted? I’m not so sure of his suitability myself."
"It wasn’t exactly a nice job, sir," the Inspector pointed out. "Silverdale would hardly care to take one of his close friends to inspect an affair of that sort. And of course a woman——"
He broke off suddenly, as though struck by a fresh idea. Sir Clinton ignored the last phrase of the Inspector.
"Assume that Whalley was the witness, then, what next?"
"Assume that Silverdale posted Whalley at the second window and went round to the first one—at the front. Then, to make the thing complete, he breaks in through the window and jumps into the room. Young Hassendean has his pistol and mistakes the state of affairs—thinks that Silverdale means to thrash him or worse. He pulls out his pistol and there’s a struggle for the possession of it. The pistol goes off accidentally, and the bullet hits Mrs. Silverdale in the head by pure chance. Then the struggle goes on, and in the course of it, young Hassendean gets shot twice over in the lung."
The Chief Constable looked at his subordinate with quite unaffected respect.
"It looks as if you’d come very near the truth there," he admitted. "Go on."
"The rest’s fairly obvious, if you grant what’s gone before. Whalley’s seen the whole affair from his post at the window. He sneaks off into the dark and gets out of Silverdale’s reach. If he hadn’t, then Silverdale would probably have shot him at sight to destroy the chance of evidence against him. But when Whalley has time to think things over, he sees he’s got a gold-mine in the business. If he can blackmail Silverdale, he’s got a steady income for life. But I expect he weakened and tried to play for safety. He blackmailed Silverdale; then he came to us, so that he could say he’d been to the police, meaning to give information. Then he went back to Silverdale, and in some way he let out that he’d given us a call. That would be enough for Silverdale. Whalley would have to go the way the maid went. And so he did."
Sir Clinton had listened intently to the Inspector’s reconstruction of the episode.
"That’s very neat indeed, Inspector," he adjudged at the close. "It’s quite sound, so far as it goes, and so far as one can see. But, of course, it leaves one or two points untouched. Where does the murder of the maid come into the business?"
Flamborough reflected for a moment or two before answering.
"I’m not prepared to fill that gap just at this moment, sir. But I’ll suggest something. Renard told us that Mrs. Silverdale was going to draw up a note of the terms of her new will. It’s on the cards that Silverdale knew about that—she may have mentioned it to him. He’d want to get that note and destroy it at any cost, before there was any search of his house or any hunting through Mrs. Silverdale’s possessions."
"He might have thought it worth while, I admit. But I’d hardly think it important enough to lead to an unnecessary murder. Besides, it wasn’t necessary for Silverdale to murder the maid at all. It was his own house. He could search where he chose in it and nobody could object. The maid wouldn’t see anything strange in that."
"It was pretty clear that the maid knew her murderer, anyhow," the Inspector pointed out. "Everything points to that. I admit I’m only making a guess, sir. I can’t bring any evidence against Silverdale on that count yet. For all one can tell, she may have seen something—blood on his coat from the shots, or something of that sort. Then he’d have to silence her."
Sir Clinton made no comment on the Inspector’s suggestion. Instead, he turned to a fresh aspect of the case.
"And where does Mr. Justice come into your theory of the affair? He wasn’t your friend Whalley. That’s evident."
The Inspector rubbed his nose thoughtfully, as though trying to gain inspiration from the friction.
"It’s a fact, sir, that I can’t fit Mr. Justice into my theory at present. He wasn’t Whalley, and that’s a fact. But hold on a moment! Suppose that Whalley wasn’t Silverdale’s witness at all. Come to think of it, Whalley was hardly the sort that one would pick out for the job, if one had been in Silverdale’s shoes."
"I’m quite convinced of that, at any rate, Inspector. You needn’t waste breath in persuading me."
"Yes, but there’s another possibility that’s been overlooked, sir," Flamborough interrupted eagerly. "I’ve been assuming all along that Silverdale was the only person at the opened window. But suppose he’d brought someone along with him. Both of them might have been looking through the front window, whilst Whalley was at the side window, quite unknown to them at the time."
"Now you’re getting positively brilliant, Inspector," Sir Clinton commended. "I think you’ve got at least half the truth there, beyond a doubt."
"Who could Silverdale’s witness have been?" the Inspector pursued, as if impatient of the interruption. "What about the Deepcar girl?"
