Charters was shaky and bewildered.
"It was Serpos — Joseph Serpos, you know. My secretary. I can't believe it, Blake; I never thought he'd do anything like that. As a matter of fact, he must have had it all planned out in advance. He planned to rob my safe here and make a getaway. He knows I'm not a rich man, of course, but still he doesn't seem to know that those things in the safe were exhibits in the Willoughby case. He wasn't here at the time we caught Willoughby. The fool! Anyhow, he packed a black bag and got into my car and drove away over an hour before you left…"
"Yes, but why arrest me?"
"It was Dr. Antrim's fault. Antrim says he met you going down the drive. He was nervous, or muddled, or I don't know what. Just as you left, you remember, Merrivale and I were going to look at the exhibits in the Willoughby case. We discovered the robbery — and a polite, finicky note from Serpos saying he was leaving, and it would be useless to try to track him. Just then Antrim came in. For some reason he seemed to have unholy suspicions of you. He swore you must have robbed the safe, because he'd seen you escaping in my car. Naturally we knew it was Serpos who had robbed it, but we thought Serpos had pinched Merrivale's Lanchester because it was faster…. Whereupon," said Charters bitterly, "Merrivale conceived the brilliant and subtle idea that the whole switch of cars was a plot: that Serpos had deliberately chosen the Lanchester so that we should think you had gone in it: that Serpos, if he were stopped, would pretend to be you. So I sent out an order to arrest a man in a Lanchester numbered AXA 564, who would carry a black bag and might give the name of Blake. Antrim swore flatly, you see, that you'd gone away in a blue Hillman.
"He must be blind. They don't look anything alike. Besides there was somebody else there when I talked to Antrim: an American named Stone."
"Who," said Charters grimly, "said he didn't know one of our cars from another. Don't talk to me about Stone! There was the hell of a row up here between him and Merrivale; but never mind that now. We didn't tumble to the business about the cars until I got the message that the black bag of the sinister criminal they bad caught contained a set of burglar's tools." (In the background I could hear H.M.'s voice squawking fiendishly, apparently with some protest or some message he wanted transmitted.) "But I suppose you don't see you've ruined everything, Blake? I don't know how you escaped. All the same, you won't have a chance now to have a look at Hogenauer's house, or in the big desk, or "
"On the contrary," I said, "on the contrary, I have already done it in spite of your bloodhounds."
I recounted all the facts, as fast and as concisely as I could. In the middle of it the Exchange butted in for some more money, but we got the charges reversed after some wrangling. Also, there appeared to be a little trouble at the other end of the wire while Charters was passing on the information as I gave it. I could hear H.M. in the background, and another voice as well. I concluded by quoting
word for word, as far as I could remember, the words on the blotter.
"Consequently, I shouldn't have got away at all if the coppers hadn't been so flabbergasted at discovering that body that they were off balance. And here's the point: it's all very well to say you've telephoned through to the police station and told them to release me. But the point is that now they want me as the key witness in a murder case. Even though they're convinced I didn't have anything to do with the murder, still it'll be cheerio to any wedding to-morrow if they catch up with me. Will you try to get busy and think of a way out of this?"