“That’s your best answer?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s see whether I can’t help you to a better one. Isn’t the reason that you didn’t go home or call up the police or the hospital because you knew perfectly well that any information that anyone in the world could give you would be superfluous?”
Stephen Bellamy focussed his weary eyes intently on the sardonic face only a few inches from his. “I’m sorry—I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Don’t you? I’ll try to make it clearer. Wasn’t the reason that you didn’t go home the perfectly simple one that you knew that your wife was lying three miles away in a deserted cottage, soaked in blood and dead as a doornail?”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” At the low, despairing violence of that cry some in the courtroom winced and turned away their faces from the ugly triumph flushing the prosecutor’s cold face. “I don’t know, I tell you, I don’t know. I was half crazy; I wasn’t thinking of reasons, I wasn’t thinking of anything except that Mimi was gone.”
“Is that your best answer.”
“Yes.”
“At what time the next morning did you hear of the murder of your wife, Mr. Bellamy?”
Slowly, carefully, fighting inch by inch back to the narrow plank of self-control that lay between him and destruction, Stephen Bellamy lifted his tired voice, his tired eyes. “I believe that it was about eleven o’clock.”