Now that fright had begun to leave him, Bowers was snappish.
"No, but I've got me ears, haven't I?" be demanded. "They were in the back parlour with the door shut. I've 'eard 'em talking when I came in — latish, it was. At least, I heard the governor. He had a voice you couldn't mistake. And he called the other chap `Antrim' a couple of times. So help me!"
"That's all," grunted H.M.
"Take him out," he added to Sergeant Davis. "Then get hold, at long last, of Mr. Joseph Serpos. Wait about five minutes, and then bring him in here."
Stone, throughout all this, had been sitting back savouring everything with the air of a connoisseur: critical, poised, but benevolent. His face was a little flushed in the smoke-filled room, and there was a gleam on his pince-nez. When he spoke, it was with what he called his Sunday-go-to-meeting manners.
"Allow me, sir," he said to H.M., extending a lighter elaborately, "to light your cigar. For the past few minutes," he went on, in the manner of an after-dinner speaker, "I have been privileged to listen to a sample of British police methods which, I know, will be of great interest to my colleagues back home. I mean to deliver an address on that subject. But there is one question, just one, which I should like to ask you. In the name of the living Judas, who is guilty?"
As he sat back, H.M.'s moon-face was full of a fantastic jollity. He looked like one who knows the answer in a guessing-game which is driving all the other players wild. It was having just that effect on us.
"Quite," agreed Charters. He had taken to pacing about the room, heavy-eyed and heavy-shouldered, as though the dawn had got into him and left him without hope or sense.
"It can't be," he said to himself; "I tell you it can't be! I 1 used to think I was an intelligent man. I don't think so any longer. Look here, Merrivale: now that Bowers has gone the usual way of the incredible, do we play our usual game of l guilty or not guilty? If so-"
"We'll do better than that," said H.M. He was more grave now, and somewhere a decision had been made. "Here!"