Presently Lamont said, “How did you find where I had come to?”
“Finger-prints,” said Grant succinctly.
“Have you got fingerprints of mine?”
“No, not yours. I’m going to take them in a minute.”
“Whose, then?”
“Mrs. Everett’s.”
“What has Mrs. Everett got to do with it?” the man said, with the first hint of defiance.
“I expect you know more about that than I do. Don’t talk. I want you to be able to travel tomorrow or the next day.”
“But look here, you haven’t done anything to Mrs. Everett, have you?”
Grant grinned. “No; I think it’s what Mrs. Everett’s done to us.”
“What do you mean? You haven’t arrested her, have you?”
There was obviously no hope of the man being quiet until he knew how they had traced him, so Grant told him. “We found a fingerprint of Mrs. Everett’s in your rooms, and as Mrs. Everett had told us she didn’t know where your new rooms were, it was a fair conclusion that she had a finger in the pie. We found that her relations stayed here, and then we found the man you fooled at King’s Cross, and his description of Mrs. Everett made things sure. We only just missed you at the Brixton place.”
“Mrs. Everett won’t get into trouble over it, will she?”
“Probably not—now that we’ve got you.”
“I was a fool to run, in the first place. If I’d come and told the truth in the beginning, it couldn’t be any worse than it is now, and I’d have been saved all the hell between.” He was lying with his eyes on the sea. “Funny to think that, if some one hadn’t killed Bert, I’d never have seen this place or—or anything.”
The “anything” the inspector took to be the manse. “M’m! And who do you think killed him?”
“I don’t know. There wasn’t any one I know of who’d do that to Bert. I think perhaps some one did it by mistake.”
“Not looking what they were doing with the needle, as it were?”
“No; in mistake for some one else.”
“And you’re the left-handed man with a scar on his thumb who quarrelled with Sorrell just before his death, and who has all the money Sorrell had in the world, but you’re quite innocent.”
The man turned his head wearily away. “I know,” he said. “You don’t need to tell me how bad it is.”
A knock came to the door, and the boy with the protruding ears appeared in the doorway and said that he had been sent to relieve Mr. Grant, if that was what Mr. Grant wanted. Grant said, “I’ll want you in five minutes or so. Come back when I ring.” And the boy melted, grin last, into the dark of the passage like the Cheshire cat. Grant took something out of his pocket and fiddled with it at the washstand. Then he came over to the bedside and said, “Fingerprints, please. It’s quite a painless process, so you needn’t mind.” He took prints of both hands on the prepared sheets of paper, and the man submitted with an indifference tinged with the interest one shows in experiencing something, however mild, for the first time. Grant knew even as he pressed the fingertips on the paper that the man had no Scotland Yard record. The prints would be of value only in relation to the other prints in the case.
As he laid them aside to dry, Lamont said, “Are you the star turn at Scotland Yard?”
“Not yet,” said Grant. “You flatter yourself.”
“Oh, I only thought—seeing your photograph in the paper.”
“That was why you ran last Saturday night in the Strand.”
“Was it only last Saturday? I wish the traffic had done for me then!”
“Well, it very nearly did for me.”
“Yes; I got an awful jolt when I saw you behind me so soon.”
“If it’s any comfort to you, I got a much worse one when I saw you arriving back in the Strand. What did you do then?”
“Took a taxi. There was one passing.”
“Tell me,” the inspector said, his curiosity getting the better of him, “were you planning the boat escape all the time at the manse tea?”
“No; I had no plans at all. I thought of the boat afterwards only because I’m used to boats, and I thought you’d think of them last. I was going to try to escape somehow, but I didn’t think of it until I saw the pepper-pot as I was going out. It was the only way I could think of, you see. Bert had my gun.”
“Your gun? Was that your gun in his pocket?”
“Yes; that’s what I went to the queue for.”
But Grant did not want statements of that sort tonight. “Don’t talk!” he said, and rang for the boy. “I’ll take any statement you want to give me tomorrow. If there’s anything I can do for you tonight, tell the boy and he’ll let me know.”
“There isn’t anything, thank you. You’ve been awfully decent—far more decent than I thought the police ever were to—criminals.”
That was so obviously an English version of Raoul’s gentil that Grant smiled involuntarily, and the shadow of a smile was reflected on Lamont’s swarthy face. “I say,” he said, “I’ve thought a lot about Bert, and it’s my belief that, if it wasn’t a mistake, it was a woman.”
“Thanks for the tip,” said Grant dryly, and left him to the tender mercies of the grinning youth. But as he made his way downstairs he was wondering why he had thought of Mrs. Ratcliffe.
Chapter 14.
THE STATEMENT
It was not at Carninnish, however, that Lamont gave his statement to the inspector, but on the journey south. Dr. Anderson, on hearing what was mooted, pleaded for one more day’s rest for his patient. “You don’t want the man to have inflammation of the brain, do you?”
Grant, who was dying to have a statement down in black and white, explained that the man himself was anxious to give one, and that giving it would surely harm him less than having it simmering in his brain.
“It would be all right at the beginning,” Anderson said, “but by the time he had finished he would need another day in bed. Take my advice and leave it for the meantime.” So Grant had given way and let his captive have still longer time to burnish the tale he was no doubt concocting. No amount of burnish, he thought thankfully, would rub out the evidence. That was there unalterable, and nothing the man might say could upset the facts. It was as much curiosity on his part, he told himself, as fear for his case that made him so eager to hear what Lamont had to say. So he bullied himself into some show of patience. He went seafishing in Master Robert with Drysdale, and every chug of the motor reminded him of the fish he had landed two nights ago. He went to tea at the manse, and with Miss Dinmont’s imperturbable face opposite him and an odd pepper-pot alongside the salt