“Very,” said Lamont, with an admirable smile, and as the car moved away, Grant took out the handcuffs.
“Sorry,” he said brusquely. “It’s only till we reach the railway.” But Lamont merely repeated the word “Unlucky!” as if, surprisingly, he liked the sound of it. At the station they were joined by a plain-clothes man, and at Inverness had a compartment to themselves. And it was after dinner that night, when the last light was going on the hills, that Lamont, pale and rather ill-looking, offered again to tell them all he knew.
“It isn’t much,” he said. “But I want you to know.”
“You realize that what you say may be used against you?” Grant said. “Your lawyer would probably want you to say nothing. You see, it’s putting your line of defence into our hands.” And even while he was saying it, he was wondering: Why am I so punctilious? I’ve told him already that anything he says may be used against him. But Lamont wanted to talk, and so the constable produced his notebook.
“Where shall I begin?” Lamont asked. “It’s difficult to know where to start.”
“Suppose you tell us how you spent the day Sorrell was murdered—that’s a week last Tuesday—the 13th.”
“Well, in the morning we packed—Bert was leaving for America that night—and I took my things to my new room in Brixton and he took his to Waterloo.”
Here the inspector’s heart missed a beat. Fool! He’d forgotten all about the man’s luggage. He had been so hot on the false scent of the Ratcliffes and then on the trail of Lamont that he hadn’t had time to see the thing under his nose. Not that it was of supreme importance, in any case.
“That took us till lunchtime. We had lunch in the Coventry Street Lyons—”
“Whereabouts?”
“In a corner table on the first floor.”
“Yes; go on.”
“All the time we were having lunch we argued as to whether I was going to see him off or not. I wanted to go down to Southampton with him and see him sail, but he wouldn’t let me come even to the boat-train at Waterloo. He said there wasn’t anything in the world he hated like being seen off, especially when he was going a long way. I remember he said, ‘If a chap’s not going far, then there’s no need, and if he’s going to the other side of the world, then there’s no good. What’s a few minutes more or less?’ Then in the afternoon we went to the Woffington to see Didn’t You Know?”
“What!” said Grant. “You went to the show at the Woffington in the afternoon?”
“Yes; that was arranged a long time beforehand. Bert had booked seats. Stalls. It was a sort of final do—celebration. At the interval he told me that he was going to join the pit queue for the evening performance as soon as we got out—he had gone a lot to Didn’t You Know? it was a sort of craze; in fact, we both went a lot—and said that we’d say goodbye then. It seemed a poor way to me to say goodbye to a pal you’d known as well as I knew Bert, but he was always a bit unaccountable, and anyhow, if he didn’t want me, I wasn’t going to insist on being with him. So we said goodbye outside the front of the Woffington, and I went back to Brixton to unpack my things. I was feeling awfully fed up, because Bert and I had been such pals that I hadn’t any others worth mentioning, and it was lonely at Brixton after Mrs. Everett’s.”
“Didn’t you think of going with Sorrell?”
“I wanted to, all right, but I hadn’t the money. I hoped for a while that he’d offer to lend me it. He knew that I’d pay him back all right. But he never did. I was a bit sore about that too. Every way I was pretty fed up. And Bert himself didn’t appear to be happy about it. He hung on to my hand like anything when we were saying goodbye. And he gave me a little packet and said I was to promise not to open it till the day after tomorrow—that was the day after he sailed. I thought it was a sort of farewell present, and didn’t think anything more about it. It was a little white packet done up in paper like jewellers use, and as a matter of fact I thought it was a watch. My watch was always going crazy. He used to say, ‘If you don’t get a new watch, Jerry, you won’t be in time for kingdom come even.’ ”
Lamont choked suddenly and stopped. He carefully wiped away the steam on the window and then resumed:
“Well, when I was unpacking my things in Brixton, I missed my revolver. I never used the thing, of course. It was just a war souvenir. I had a commission, though you mightn’t think it. And I tell you straight I’d rather a thousand times be for it wire-cutting, or anything else like that, than be hunted round London by the police. It isn’t so bad in the open. More like a game, somehow. But in London it’s like being in a trap. Didn’t you feel that it wasn’t so deadly awful out in the country somehow?”
“Yes,” admitted the inspector; “I did. But I didn’t expect you to. I thought you’d be happier in town.”
“Happy! God!” said Lamont, and was silent, evidently living it over again.
“Well,” prompted the inspector, “you missed your revolver?”
“Yes; I missed it. And though I didn’t use it—it used to be kept locked in a drawer at Mrs. Everett’s—I knew exactly where I had put it when I was packing. Whereabouts in the trunk, I mean. And as it was only that morning I had packed, I was just taking things out in the reverse order from the way I’d put them in, and so I missed it at once. And then I grew frightened somehow—though even yet I can’t tell you why. I began to remember how quiet Bert had been lately. He was always quiet, but lately he had been more so. Then I thought he might just have wanted a gun going to a strange country. But then I thought he might have asked for it. He knew I’d have given it to him if he asked for it. Anyway, I was sort of frightened, though I couldn’t tell you just why, and I went straight back to the queue and found him. He had a good place, about a third of the way down, so I think he had had a boy to keep his place for him. He must have meant all the time to go back on his last night. He was sentimental, Bert. I asked him if he had taken my revolver, and he admitted it. I don’t know why I grew so scared then all of a sudden. Looking back, it doesn’t seem to be anything to be scared about—your pal having taken your revolver. But I was, and I lost my head and said, ‘Well, I want it back right now.’ And he said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Because it’s my property and I want it.’ He said, ‘You’re a mean skunk, Jerry. Can’t I borrow anything of yours even when I’m going half round the world and you’re going to stay in little safe old London?’ But I stuck to having it back. Then he said, ‘Well, you’ll have a sweet time unpacking my things for it, but I’ll give you the key and the ticket.’ It was only then that it occurred to me that I had taken it for granted that he had the revolver on him. I began to feel small and to feel I’d made a fool of myself. I always did things first and thought afterwards, and Bert always thought for ages about a thing, and then would do exactly as he had intended to. We were opposites in lots of ways. So I told him to keep his ticket and the revolver too, and went away.”
Now there had been no