“I'm a ruined man in any case. I might as well have thrown up the sponge when you came last time——”
“Perhaps,” murmured Pointer.
“—but here's the true story. You can take it down, and I'll sign it here before we go to the police-station, or you can arrest me first and have it afterwards.”
“Let's have it here.”
“Well, the case was exactly as I told you up to that moment when Beale and I sat here after you had gone, talking over the suicide. I jumped up, for I suddenly remembered after all that Eames—I mean Erskine—had given me a cardboard box to keep in the safe. I had joked him about it, saying it looked like a box of chocolates, and he had said it wasn't much more important, but still he wished me to take care of it for him. Without thinking—for it is one of my strictest rules that I never go to the safe without the booking-clerk or the hall porter with me, and never in the presence of a visitor, I unlocked the combination and opened it. That shows how rattled I was by what had just happened. I pulled out the box——”
“Wrapped in green and white striped paper?”
“That's the one. And I said something about ‘Good God, I forgot to speak of this to the police.’ I moved towards the door when Mr. Beale stopped me. He was tremendously excited, and said that as soon as he had seen Eames' face in the full light he had recognised him as a dangerous crook whose partner, and doubtless murderer, he (Beale) was after. In fact, he stuffed me with the same yarn he filled you up with when you arrested Carter.”
The Chief Inspector gave no sign that he felt the dig.
“He declared that the box would contain plans and signals in cipher for the use of the gang. Would I let him have a look at it? I finally—well, I refused at first”—the bitterness of the manager's voice told the whole story—“but you know what a way Mr. Beale has with him. He claimed to recognise the plan of his own house in the note-book, and then—I'd just been letting myself go a bit about what a blow the suicide would be to the hotel, which was having its work cut out to keep its head above water—he referred to that. Said that he wanted a scoop for his paper. Finally he offered me one thousand pounds down on the table for the box, and I let him take it for another five hundred. Mind you, I'm not trying to clear myself, but I believed his story. And of course when you arrested Carter I thought what a Quixotic fool I should have been to have acted differently.”
He stopped and had another drink.