Hadley removed his bowler, gestured Rampole to a chair, and sat down himself.
`Mr Bitton,' he said, harshly, `I suggest that you be frank. I am not concerned with your wife's morals, or with yours, except in so far as they concern a particularly brutal murder. You have admitted you had her followed. Why do you trouble to deny that there was an affair between your wife and Philip Driscoll?'
`That's a damned lie. If you insinuate.’
`I don't insinuate. I tell you. You can hardly be very excited by an insinuation which you made, yourself when you put a private detective on her movements can you? Let's not waste time. You have the "Mary" notes, Mr Bitton.'
'Mary? Who the devil is Mary?'
`You should know. You were about to smash her on the hearth when we walked into this room'
Hadley bent forward; he spoke sharply and coldly: 'I warn you again, I can't afford to waste time. You are not in the habit of walking into people's houses and, smashing ornaments off their mantelshelves because you don't approve of the decoration. If you have any idea that we don't know the meaning of those two figures, get rid of it. We do. You had broken the man, and you were about to break the woman. No sane person who saw your face at that moment could, have any doubt of your state of mind.'
Bitton shaded his eyes with a big hand. 'Is it any of your business.' he said at length, 'whether..'
`Have you heard the facts of Driscoll's murder?'
`A few. I spoke to my brother when he returned from the Tower. Laura had come home and locked, herself in her room. When I — when I came back from the City, I knocked at her door and she wouldn't let me in. I thought everybody, had gone mad: Especially as I knew nothing of this murder. And Sheila said that Laura had run into the house as white as death and rushed upstairs without a word. Then Will