"Ho-ho!" rumbled H.M. "Not so's you could notice it It was because you said at least one thing that could help to denounce him."
"I did?" Stannard asked in surprise.
"You were in the study when you heard Fleet shout and fall on the flagstones? Right! You then went to the window and stood there looking down? Right!
"But you further said you stood there five minutes before the governess and the boy came round the edge of the house to j the terrace. In Ricky Fleet's story of it which he gave me I almost immediately afterwards when we climbed up to the roof, he said he and Miss Upton were just startin' from the back to the front of the house when they heard the shout.
What sort of frozen-snail-with-lumbago takes five minutes to walk from back to front? "His memory might be bad? Sure! Your memory too? Of course! But there was a certain way of checking it Across the way, at the pub, there were six witnesses on the roof though
only two on the gables. All agreed in their first testimony." H.M picked up the blue folder, and stabbed at it with his dead cigar.
"After Fleet's body struck the terrace, Dr. Pierre Laurier ran out of the house. The local policeman walked up the path to the terrace, picked up the field-glasses from the grass, and went in: presumably to phone the police-station. Dr. Laurier called to Lady (the Dowager Lady) Brayle, who brought a cloth out of the house. Dr. Laurier put the cloth over Fleet's head and shoulders. Cicely Fleet then came out and started to faint but they talked to her 'a while,'—I'm quoting, so note the 'a while,'—and she went in.”
"Then, and only then, did the governess and the boy come round the side of the house. Lord love a duck! For the precedin’ events, you could easily allow five minutes.
"But did the boy and the governess say the things, twenty years ago when it was fresh in mind, as Ricky Fleet said to me as well as to Jenny and Martin Drake? Including, for instance, that fancy touch about hearin' Dr. Laurier say, 'Get the tablecloth out of the hall?' So I asked Masters to check over their statements made to the local police.
"And they had said the same things. Therefore they were both tellin' a pack of lies. Q.E.D."