"But we know that the two men met and that——"
"And that one of them was killed," he broke in quickly. "But that man was not Gerald Moville."
"He was seen," I argued, "at Falconblane, at Beith, and at Glasgow. The man with the dirty face, the motor coat, and the goggles."
"Exactly," he broke in once more. "The man in the cap with the flap ears, and wearing motor goggles; the man whose face and hair were, in addition, covered with grime. An excellent disguise; as it indeed proved to be."
"But the foreign accent? The man spoke broken English."
"There are few things," he said with a sarcastic smile, "that are easier to assume than broken English, especially when only uneducated ears are there to hear."
"Then you think——"
"I don't think," he replied curtly, "I know. I know that Gerald Moville met the Italian on the moor, that he quarrelled with him over Winnie Gooden, that he knocked him down, and that Vissio was killed in the fall. I can see the whole scene as plainly as if I had been there. Can't you see Moville realising that he had killed the man?—that inevitably suspicion would fall on him? Topcoat had seen him, witnesses had seen his car in the road, he was known to be the Italian's rival in Winnie's affections! Already he could feel the hangman's rope round his neck. But we must look on Gerald Moville as a man of resource, a man, above all, up to many tricks for drawing a red herring across the trail of his own delinquencies. I will spare you the details of what I can see in my own mind as having happened after Moville had realised that Vissio was dead: the stripping of the body, the exchange of clothes down to the vest and shirt, the mutilation of the corpse with the victim's own knife, and the dragging of the body to a distant 'gruff,' where it must inevitably remain hidden for days, until advanced decomposition had set in to efface all identification marks. Fear, no doubt, lent ingenuity and strength to the miscreant; and, as a matter of fact, Gerald Moville is one of the few criminals who committed no appreciable blunder when he set to work to obliterate all traces of his crime; he left the knife with its tell-tale stains on the spot, and that knife was identified as the property of the Italian, and the head, which alone might have betrayed him, even if the body were not found for weeks, he took away with him to bury somewhere far away—goodness only knows where, but somewhere between Yorkshire and Scotland.
"I can see Gerald Moville after he had accomplished his grim task making his way back to his car—the loneliness of this stretch of country would be entirely in his favour, more especially as it had begun to rain; I can see him driving along putting mile upon mile between himself and the scene of his crime. At one place he stopped—a lonely spot it must have been—where he disposed of his gruesome burden; then on and on, past the borders of Yorkshire, of Westmoreland and Cumberland and into Scotland, till he came close to the network of railway round about Paisley and Glasgow. Falconblane, a village tucked away on a lonely bit of country but boasting of a garage, must have seemed an ideal spot wherein to abandon the car altogether and take to the road, and this Moville did, trusting to the long night, and also to luck, to further efface his traces. Again I can see him wandering restlessly through the dark hours of that night, not daring to enter a house and ask for a bed, determined at all costs to obliterate every vestige of his movements since the crime.
"Then in the morning he takes train for Glasgow, the busiest centre wherein a man can disappear in a crowd; in the train he takes the precaution of divesting himself of the motor coat, the goggles and the cap, but not of the grime that covers his face and hair. We know how he provided himself with a more suitable hat and coat; we know how all through his wanderings he kept up his broken English. At Glasgow all traces of him vanish; he has become a very ordinary-looking man, wearing quite ordinary clothes, and in Glasgow people are far too busy to take much notice of passers-by.