“I do not know,” he said simply. “To me it is amazing. There must be a secret passage that opens into the vault. I can think of no other way in which the murderer could have got in or out.”
“If there is a secret way,” said the detective grimly, “then it is the best kept secret I have known. It has certainly been kept a secret from the men who built the house and the vault, and the Clerk of the Works who was on the spot all the time it was being erected. No, Yeh Ling, you must get that idea out of your head. Either the man Brown or Walters is guilty. We shall know the method they employed when we get them.”
“Brown was not guilty,” said Yeh Ling quietly, “for I was with him when the murder was committed!”
They heard his pronouncement with astonishment, even the girl seemed surprised.
“Do you know what you are saying?”
“I know what I am saying, and I rather wish I hadn’t said it,” said the Chinaman with a quick smile. “Nevertheless, it is true. If the murder was committed on Saturday afternoon, then I certainly was with the man called Wellington Brown, but whom we called The Drinker or the Unemployed One, at that hour. It embarrasses me to say how or where, but it would embarrass me more if you were to ask me whether I know his whereabouts at the present moment. To that question I should answer: ‘No.’”
“And you would lie,” said Carver quietly.
“I should lie,” was the calm answer. “Yet I tell you, Mr. Carver, that Wellington Brown was with me, under my eye, from half-past one o’clock in the afternoon of the Saturday on which Jesse Trasmere was killed until night.”
Carver eyed him keenly.
“When he came to you,” he asked, “how was he dressed?”