“Not if it’ll set your mind at rest, Inspector. I’ll do anything to oblige.”
The inspector put his hand into his pocket and brought it out full of coins, as if to make sure of his loose change before setting out. A sixpenny piece slid through his fingers and rolled swiftly across the smooth surface of the table towards Miller, and Miller’s hand shot out in an abrupt preventive movement as it was about to drop off the table’s edge to the floor. He fumbled for a moment with his gloved hand and then laid the coin down on the table.
“Trifling things, these,” he remarked in his flat amiable voice. But it was his right hand that he had used to stop it.
As they were driving down to the mortuary in a car he turned to the inspector with the almost noiseless expulsion of breath that in him did duty for a laugh. “Say,” he said, “if any of my pals see me now, they’ll all be boarding a dangler for Southampton inside five minutes and not waiting to pack.”
“Well, we’d do the packing—back,” said Grant.
“Got us all taped like that, have you? Would you bet on it? I’ll lay you five to one in dollars—no, pounds—five to one in pounds that you don’t have one of us settled inside two years. You won’t take it? Well, I think you’re wise.”
When Miller was brought face to face with the body of the murdered man, Grant’s eager eyes could trace no shadow of expression on that poker face. Danny’s cool grey glance wandered over the dead man’s features in a half-interested indifference. And Grant knew certainly that, even had Miller known the man, his hope of a betraying gesture or expression had been a vain one.
“No,” Danny was saying, “I never saw the man in my—” He stopped. There was a long pause. “Say, but I did!” he said. “Oh, gosh, let me think! Where was it? Where was it? Wait a minute, and it’ll come.” He beat a hectic tattoo on his forehead with his gloved palm. Was this acting, thought Grant? Good acting, if so. But then Miller would never make the mistake of acting badly. “Oh, gosh, I can’t get it! I talked to him, too. Don’t think I ever knew his name, but I’m sure I talked to him.”
In the end Grant gave it up—he had the inquest in front of him—but it was more than Danny Miller did. The fact that his brain had gone back on him was an outrage in his eyes and quite insupportable. “I never forget a man,” he kept saying, “any more than a ‘bull’ does.”
“Well, you can think it over and telephone to me,” said Grant. “Meanwhile, will you do one thing more for me? . . . Will you take your gloves off?”
Danny’s eyes shut suddenly to bright slits. “What’s the big idea?” he said.
“Well, there isn’t any reason that you shouldn’t take them off, is there?”
“How do I know that?” snapped Danny.
“Look here,” said Grant good-naturedly, “a minute ago you wanted a gamble. Well, here’s one. If you take your gloves off, I’ll tell you whether you’ve won or not.”
“And if I lose?”
“Well, I have no warrant, you know.” And Grant smiled easily into the gimlet eyes boring into his own.
Danny’s eyelids lifted. His old nonchalance came back. He drew his right glove off and held out his hand. Grant glanced at it and nodded. Then he slipped off his left glove and extended his hand, and as he did so the right hand went back into his coat pocket.
The left hand that lay open to Grant’s gaze was clean and unscarred.
“You win, Miller,” said Grant. “You’re a sportsman.” And the slight bulge in Danny’s right-hand coat pocket disappeared.
“You’ll let me know the minute you have a brainwave, won’t you?” Grant said as they parted, and Miller promised.
“Don’t you worry,” he said. “I don’t let my brain go back on me and get away with it.”
And Grant made his way to lunch and the inquest.
The jury, having swallowed at one nauseating gulp the business of viewing the body, had settled into their places with that air of conscious importance and simulated modesty which belongs to those initiated into a mystery. Their verdict was already certain, therefore they had no need to worry themselves over the rights or wrongs of the case. They could give themselves up wholly to the delightful occupation of hearing all about the most popular murder of the day from lips of eyewitnesses. Grant surveyed them sardonically, and thanked the gods that neither his case nor his life depended on their intelligences. Then he forgot them and gave himself up to the rich comedy of the witnesses. It was strange to compare the grim things that fell from their lips with the pretty comedy they themselves presented. He knew them so well by now, and they all ran so amusingly true to form. There was the constable who had been on duty at the Woffington pit queue, brushed and shining, his dampish forehead shining most of all; precise in his report and tremendously gratified by his own preciseness. There was James Ratcliffe, the complete householder, hating his unexpected publicity, rebelling against his connexion with such an unsavoury affair, but determined to do his duty as a citizen. He was the type that is the law’s most useful ally, and the inspector recognized the fact and mentally saluted him in spite of the fact that he had been unhelpful. Waiting in queues bored him, he said, and as long as the light was good enough he had read, until the doors opened and the pressure became too great to do anything but stand.
There was his wife, whom the inspector had last seen sobbing in her bedroom. She still clutched a handerchief, and obviously expected to be encouraged and soothed after every second question. And she was subjected to a longer examination than any one else. She was the one who had stood directly behind the dead man.
“Are we to understand, madam,” said the coroner, “that you stood for nearly two hours in close proximity to this man and yet have no recollection of him or of his companions, if any?”
“But I wasn’t next to him all that time! I tell you I didn’t see him until he fell over at my feet.”
“Then who was next in front of you most of the time?”
“I don’t remember. I think it was a boy—a young man.”
“And what became of the young man?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you see him leave the queue?”
“No.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Yes; he was dark and foreign-looking, rather.”
“Was he alone?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, somehow. I think he was talking to some one.”
“How is it that you do not remember more distinctly what occurred when it is only three nights ago?”
The shock had put everything out of her head, she said. “Besides,” she added, her gelatinous backbone ossified suddenly by the coroner’s ill-hidden scorn, “in a queue one doesn’t notice the people next one. Both I and my husband were reading most of the time.” And she dissolved into hysterical weeping.
Then there was the fat woman, shiny with satin and soap-and-water, recovered now from the shock and reluctance she had displayed at the crowded moment of the murder, and more than willing to tell her tale. Her plump red face and boot-button brown eyes radiated a grim satisfaction with her rôle. She seemed disappointed when the coroner thanked her and dismissed her in the middle of a sentence.
There was a meek little man, as precise in manner as the constable had been, but evidently convinced that the coroner was a man of little intelligence. When that long-suffering official said, “Yes, I was aware that queues usually go two by two,” the jury allowed themselves to snigger and the meek little man looked pained. As neither he nor the other three witnesses from the queue could recall the murdered man, or throw any light on any departure from the queue, they were