“I wouldn't proclaim my faith in Thompson's innocence quite so loudly if I were you, Tony. I imagine you have no idea who the world is saying must be guilty if Thompson is innocent.”
“I imagine I have,” Tony returned, his tone growing violent. “I am quite aware that the world”—laying stress on the noun—“is saying that, if Thompson didn't murder Uncle Luke, I did, to gain the money my uncle left. But I am not going to try to hang Thompson to save my own neck. By the way, I come into some more money when Aunt Madeline dies. You will be expecting me to murder her next! You had something left you too. You may have done it to get that!”
Aubrey Todmarsh shook his head.
“My legacy is a mere flea-bite compared with yours. And I trust that my life and aims are sufficiently well known——”
Tony turned his back on him deliberately.
“Bosh! Don't trouble to put it on for me, Aubrey. I have known your life and aims fairly well for a good while. Take care of your own skin, and let everything else go to the wall. That's your aim.”
His cousin's dark eyes held no spark of resentment.
“You do not think that, I know, Tony. But, if the world should misjudge my motives, I cannot help it.”
The cousins were standing in the smaller of the two adjoining waiting-rooms in the late Luke Bechcombe's flat offices. The inquest had been held that morning and the auditors' report on the books that had been in Thompson's charge and the contents of the safe had been taken. Their statement that there had been a system of fraud carried on probably for years had not come as a surprise. The public had from the first decided that Thompson's disappearance could only be accounted for as a flight from the charge of embezzlement that was hanging over him. Ever logical, rumour did not trouble to account for the chloroform and the covered finger-prints or the lady with the white gloves.
The auditors' report had brought both Aubrey Todmarsh and Tony to the office this afternoon, and as usual the cousins could not meet without contradicting one another or quarrelling. Inspector Furnival and Mr. Steadman had also given their account of their visit to Thompson's room and the mystery mongers were more than ever intrigued thereby. There could be no doubt that, whatever might be their opinion of his guilt, Thompson's disappearance was becoming more and more of an enigma to the police. Not the faintest trace of him could be discovered. When he left the clerks' office in Crow's Inn, he apparently disappeared from the face of the earth; no one had met him on the stairs, no one had seen him in the vicinity of the square. After an enormous amount of inquiry the police had at last discovered a small restaurant where he generally lunched, but he had neither been there on the day of the murder nor since, and the railway stations had been watched so far without success. In fact, Inspector Furnival had been heard to state that but that they could not find the body he would have thought that Thompson had been murdered as well as his chief.