Bat Wing, Sax Rohmer [top 20 books to read .txt] 📗

Without another word I walked out of the study, took my hat and stick, and opening the front door, quitted the Guest House, from which I had thus a second time been dismissed ignominiously.

Appreciation of this fact, which came to me as I stepped into the porch, awakened my sense of humour—a gift truly divine which has saved many a man from desperation or worse. I felt like a schoolboy who had been turned out of a class-room, and I was glad that I could laugh at myself.

A constable was standing in the porch, and he looked at me suspiciously. No doubt he perceived something very sardonic in my merriment.

I walked out of the gate, before which a car was standing, and as I paused to light a cigarette I heard the door of the Guest House open and close. I glanced back, and there was Paul Harley coming to join me.

“Now, Knox,” he said, briskly, “we have got our hands full.”

“My dear Harley, I am both angry and bewildered. Too angry and too bewildered to think clearly.”

“I can quite understand it. I should become homicidal if I were forced to submit for long to the company of Inspector Aylesbury. Of course, I had anticipated the arrest of Colin Camber, and I fear there is worse to come.”

“What do you mean, Harley?”

“I mean that failing the apprehension of the real murderer, I cannot see, at the moment, upon what the case for the defence is to rest.”

“But surely you demonstrated out there in the garden that he could not possibly have fired the shot?”

“Words, Knox, words. I could pick a dozen loopholes in my own argument. I had only hoped to defer the inevitable. I tell you, there is worse to come. Two things we must do at once.”

“What are they?”

“We must persuade the man on duty to allow us to examine the Tudor garden, and we must see the Chief Constable, whoever he may be, and prevail upon him to requisition the assistance of Scotland Yard. With Wessex in charge of the case I might have a chance. Whilst this disastrous man Aylesbury holds the keys there is none.”

“You heard what he said about Miss Beverley?”

We were now walking rapidly along the high road, and Harley nodded.

“I did,” he said. “I had expected it. He was inspired with this brilliant idea last night, and his ideas are too few to be lightly scrapped. If the Chief Constable is anything like the Inspector, what we are going to do heaven only knows.”

“I take it, Harley, that you are convinced of Colin Camber’s innocence?”

Harley did not answer for a moment, whereupon I glanced at him anxiously, then:

“Colin Camber,” he replied, “is of so peculiar a type that I could not presume to say of what he is capable or is not capable. The most significant point in his favour is this: He is a man of unusual intellect. The planning of this cunning crime to such a man would have been child’s play—child’s play, Knox. But is it possible to believe that his genius would have failed him upon the most essential detail of all, namely, an alibi?”

“It is not.”

“Of course it is not. Which, continuing to regard Camber as an assassin, reduces us to the theory that the crime was committed in a moment of passion. This I maintain to be also impossible. It was no deed of impulse.”

“I agree with you.”

“Now, I believe that the enquiry is going to turn upon a very delicate point. If I am wrong in this, then perhaps I am wrong in my whole conception of the case. But have you considered the mass of evidence against Colin Camber?”

“I have, Harley,” I replied, sadly, “I have.”

“Think of all that we know, and which the Inspector does not know. Every single datum points in the same direction. No prosecution could ask for a more perfect case. Upon this fact I pin my hopes. Where an Aylesbury rushes in I fear to tread. The analogy with an angel was accidental, Knox!” he added, smilingly. “In other words, it is all too obvious. Yet I have failed once, Knox, failed disastrously, and it may be that in my anxiety to justify myself I am seeking for subtlety where no subtlety exists.”