"I went back to that little hotel where I'm staying. I changed my clothes, and I went to bed. Now get this! — get it straight. You're not going to pin any rap on me. This talk about my following Nick Depping home is bluff, and you know it." He was fiercely trying to hold Dr. Fell's eyes, as though to drive belief in like a nail. "Bluff. Every word of it. I didn't stir out of that room. You think I wanted more heat? I wasn't going to face Nick Depping. I never handled a rod in my life, and I never will. Why should I?"
His voice was cracking with intensity. "Look up my record and see if I ever handled a rod. I'm as good a man as Nick Depping ever was, but I wasn't going back there; I wasn't mad at him for trying to iron me. Fortunes of war, see? Kill him? Not me. And if I did want him to — ah, advance me a little loan, do you think I'd be crazy enough to try anything like that?" He hammered the arm of his chair. "Do you?"
Throughout all this, Inspector Murch had been trying to take rapid notes; he seemed to be struggling with the idiom, and several times on the point of protest. But now there was a tight smile on his sandy moustache. Hugh Donovan could see what was going on in his mind; he had still against Spinelli that evidence of his having changed clothes and crawled out the window of the Chequers Inn a second time… Then Hugh saw that Dr. Fell was also looking at the inspector. Murch, who had just opened his mouth to speak, stopped. His boiled eye was puzzled.
And Dr. Fell chuckled.
"Bluff?" he said musingly. "I know it."
"You — you know…?"
"Hm, yes. But I had to persuade you to talk, you see," the doctor said. "As a matter of fact, we are fairly well satisfied that you had nothing to do with the murder. I neglected to tell you," he beamed, "that you were seen by the landlord's wife at the Chequers, climbing back into the window of your room, soaking wet, at about ten o'clock"
"And not leave it again—?" Spinelli asked the question after a very brief pause; he seemed almost to have stopped breathing.
"And not leave it again. There, my friend, is your corroboration."
After this thundering lie, Dr. Fell looked as benevolent as Old King Cole. Spinelli's shoulders jerked.