“Why didn’t you ’oller?” said the policeman.
Jimmy’s knees shook together.
“I couldn’t ’oller,” he maintained doggedly. “They’d stuffed something down me throat.”
“Oh, indeed!” said the policeman. “Maybe it was this ’ankercher, was it?”
He produced a dreadful rag that had been picked up on the road. It fitted neatly with the other rag that had been round Mimi’s neck: awful pièces de conviction!
“I say it’s your ankercher. Don’t go for to deny it. I say it’s your ankercher; I ’appen to know it’s your ankercher. I say you did it all yerself!”
When a six-foot, black-moustached policeman, with boring eye, rolls out such an accusation in tremendous crescendo, what can a little criminal do but collapse? Jimmy collapsed. It was his ankercher. He ’ad done it. There never ’ad been no men. He never ’ad been knocked down. He ’ad rolled in the mud on purpose, in the ditch where it was thickest. He ’ad tried to ’urt Mimi.
“Why?—why?—why?”
Even our local Sherlock Holmes couldn’t extract anything like a plausible reason. Loki’s mistress had to piece one together for herself.