"H'm," he said.
"Poor devil," he added, after a pause.
"Yes. It's the unnecessary thing. The superfluous murder "
Murchison weighed something in his hand. He nodded towards a door in the left-hand wall, beside the white-marble mantelpiece.
"That goes to the bedroom," he said. "The telephone's in there. But about this ‘unnecessary'- I dunno. Yes, I dare say it was. But there's something I can't quite get through my head. A lot of us have heard of Sir Henry Merrivale; I know I have. And I can't help feeling he's got a whole lot more up his sleeve than the governor," he nodded vaguely back in a direction which represented Stone's presence, "seems to think. You've said it yourself. A lot of ordinary details are explained, like cuff-links and missing books and moved furniture; and they turn out to be the easiest of the lot to explain. It's Hogenauer's other behaviour that's hardest to explain. If he was a harmless old dodderer doing nothing more than a spot of crystal-gazing, why should anybody want to murder him?"
"The Punch and Judy murders," I said. "All the alarms and excursions, all the high hocus-pocus of spy-doings, have turned out to be no more real than a child's Punch and Judy puppet show. There is no `L.' There is no — "
Sharply and stridently in those quiet rooms, a telephone rang.
You could almost imagine that a ghostly tingling and echo came from the glass and bottle on the little round table. Murchison went over quickly and threw back the portiere on the door to the bedroom. He did not even bother to turn on a light. The telephone stood on a little stand just inside, to the left of the door.
"Yes," he said, more as a statement than as a question.
It was so still that I could hear a soft voice murmuring in the receiver, although I could distinguish no words. Murchison stood half in shadow and half in light, one shoulder humped; his big, rather bovine face was turned to the sitting-room, and his eyes were blank.