'Yes,' said Hadley. `You met General Mason.'
`Met him? Met him? Do you think I'd have stopped if I'd seen him? The first thing I knew he'd hopped on the running board, and there he was grinning at me, and saying what a godsend this was, and telling me to get over in the front seat, so that he had room to shove in beside me….
`I stopped the car dead. I felt as though the whole car started to collapse under me. I tried to move, and my foot, jumped so much on the accelerator that I stalled the car. Then I turned my, head away and glared out of the side as though I were looking at a tyre.
`Then the car got started somehow. I could hear the General talking, but I don't remember anything he said. He was in a very good humour, I know, and that seemed, to make it worse.
`I was headed for destruction now I could- see that. We should go straight back to the Tower, and no power this side of hell could change it. Straight back…. Excuse me a second… a drink. Funny this stuff doesn't seem to have any effect… A few drinks, will get, me tight, usually.;
`I had, during that time, about twenty minutes to think and think hard. I'd thought it must be hours since I'd seen Phil lying there. But when I looked at my watch I couldn't understand; it was only eight minutes past two. And all the time my brain was going like a machine shop I was talking to the General — I don't know what we talked about. It began to dawn on me that I had one chance. And that if I worked that chance I might have a real alibi… ’
`You see? If I could get inside the Tower grounds, and dump the body somewhere without detection, no sane person would ever believe I had ridden from town beside General Mason with a corpse in the rear of the car. They would believe, it suddenly dawned on me, that Driscoll had never left the Tower….’
`I had to nerve myself for one last effort. I told the General about the "fake" telephone call that had lured me away; and I wondered what it was all about… ’
`Then we were inside the Tower grounds as two-thirty struck. I had calculated it neatly, and I knew the place. If there were nobody else about as we went along Water Lane I knew what I should do. You were quite right, Doctor, in saying that anybody would think of Traitors' Gate as the place to hide a corpse on a foggy day. And this was the place, because I could stop there without suspicion.
`You see?' Dalrye demanded, leaning forward eagerly. `I had to let the General out opposite the, gate to the Bloody Tower. I waited until he was well up under the archway on his way to the King's House, and then I acted. I opened the rear door, tossed the body over the rail, and was back in the car in a second, driving on….