“One minute, please,” Steadman interposed. “In what street were you now?”
“I don't know. I didn't notice. We didn't seem to have left New Bond Street very long! I really thought for the moment in a half-bewildered way that he must be some one I had known very well in the old days when I was in England, and who had altered—grown as it were. He sat down opposite me. ‘I see you don't know me,’ he said in quite a cultivated voice, ‘and yet it is not so very long since we met.’ ‘Isn't it?’ I said. ‘No, I don't seem to remember you. Where did we meet?’ With that I put out my hand to the speaking tube, for I was beginning to think that all was not right. But he was too quick for me. He caught both my hands in his, then managing somehow to hold them both in one of his he sprang across and sat down beside me. I struggled, of course, and tried to call out, though I wasn't so awfully frightened, not at first, for it seemed unthinkable that I should really be hurt there in my own car in the broad daylight. But when I opened my mouth to cry out he stuck something into my mouth, something that burned and stung. Then in that moment I knew him—knew him for Luke Bechcombe's murderer, I mean. I struggled frantically, but he was putting something round my neck, pulling it tighter and tighter. I couldn't breathe. And then I knew no more till I was coming round again and my husband and the doctor were with me.” She stopped and put up her hands to her neck as if she still felt that cruel strangulating grip.
Cyril B. Carnthwacke's face looked very grim.
“That guy will have something round his own neck soon, I surmise. Something he won't be able to get rid of, either.”
John Steadman and the inspector had both taken out their notebooks. The former spoke first.
“You say you know your assailant to be the murderer of Luke Bechcombe. Will you tell us how you recognized him?”
“Because—because that day when I was talking to the man whom I thought to be Mr. Bechcombe, whom we now believe to have been the murderer, I noticed his hands. He kept moving them over the table in and out of the papers in a nervous sort of way, and I saw——” Mrs. Carnthwacke's voice suddenly failed her. She shrank nervously to the side of the chair. “You are sure no one can hear me, Cyril?”
He sat down on the side of her chair.
“Dead certain, honey. Come now, get it off your chest and you will feel ever so much better.”
“And be ever so much safer,” Inspector Furnival interposed. “As long as you only know this secret, Mrs. Carnthwacke, Mr. Bechcombe's murderer has a solid reason for wanting to destroy the one person who can identify him. But, once this knowledge is shared with others, the reason disappears. If Mrs. Carnthwacke is disposed of and there remain others who share her knowledge, he is none the safer. You see this, don't you, madam?”