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By Root 840 0

you naturally asked, was he trying to hide traces? Indulge the fancy, and where did that lead? Not his own traces, surely; for he would be conscious of having left them, and would have had the elementary common sense to obliterate them earlier in the day, to obliterate them at some time when the police were unlikely to be about. The same consideration applied, though with slightly less force, if you thought of them as the traces of somebody of whose presence he had been conscious at the time when they were made. And yet he must surely have had some idea whose they were and how they came there, or his meticulous sense of justice would have induced him to point them out to the police. A long shot, but it needed thinking over.

36. Why was the Admiral’s pipe left in the Vicar’s study? Probably because the Admiral forgot it and left it there. He had been in a hurry, it seemed, when he left; and the most punctilious of admirals will have these lapses occasionally. And he was, as Holland had pointed out, a man of many pipes. But Rudge’s brain was by now worked up into the state in which it could see significance in everything; and even this pipe—there was the bare possibility that the Admiral had left it there on purpose, in order to have an excuse for going back to the Vicarage (but apparently never went); or that the Vicar himself had found it in some place where it seemed all too likely to tell a story, and had for safety removed it elsewhere. Rudge, perhaps with a theologian’s unconscious animus, was already thinking of Mr. Mount as the sort of man who would not tell a direct lie, but would be quite willing to let you deceive yourself (“lead you up the garden” was his own less technical phrase).

37. Why were Holland and Elma in such a hurry to get married? That the licence had already been procured before the murder took place, seemed evident. But this in itself need not suggest foreknowledge of the murder; Holland’s own account—that Elma had encouraged him by her letter to expect the Admiral’s consent, and that he had taken out the licence on the strength of that hope—seemed sound enough as it stood. You could understand why there should be haste in their proceedings while the Admiral was still alive, and had given his reluctant consent. Who knew when he might change his mind? But, once he was dead, that motive ceased to operate; you would have thought it common decency to wait a little, and according to Dakers it would have been common prudence too. There must be some reason, but what reason? Rudge admitted that at this point the case defied him.

38. Why did Holland conceal, at first, his alleged midnight interview? His own excuse, that he had concealed the whole story of his midnight journey simply to avoid embarrassing questions when he was in a hurry, seemed strangely inadequate. On the assumption that his first story was true, and his second false, why should he cast doubt on his own veracity by this curious volte-face? On the contrary assumption, why did he not stick to his lie when once he had told it? Having the typewritten consent in his pocket, he could just as easily pretend it had been given to Elma early on the previous evening, before the dinner-party; what motive was there for insisting so strongly that it had only been drafted at midnight? It looked as if some piece of evidence must have cropped up during the day which would make Holland’s statement that he had slept soundly at the Lord Marshall inconsistent with the genuineness of the typewritten consent. What could that evidence be? Rudge tortured his imagination vainly over the problem.

39. Why was the typewritten consent typewritten? There was no typewriter in the Admiral’s room; the documents in the files which were not holograph had plainly been copied out by a professional. Moreover, the amateur, to whom it is a matter of labour to fit his sheet straight into the machine, does not have recourse to his typewriter unless he has a document of some length, say four or five lines, to deal with. Improbable, then … unless the document was a forgery (a signature