"Of course you are. I'd claimed that case for my own. I had cut my initials inside, as I showed Marley when I went to the police-station. And then Marley tells me how I paid Mossa nearly £1,000; how the money must have come into my hands in the nick of time. That was pretty bad when I couldn't for the life of me give a lucid reason for the possession of those notes; but there was worse to come. In the pocket of the injured man was a receipt for a diamond-studded gun-metal cigar-case, purchased the day of the outrage. And Walen, the jeweller, proved beyond a doubt that the case I claimed was purchased at his shop."
Bell nodded gravely.
"Which places you in an exceedingly awkward position," he said.
"A mild way of putting it," David replied. "If that fellow dies the police have enough evidence to hang me. And what is my defence? The story of my visit to No. 219. And who would believe that cock-and-bull story? Fancy a drama like that being played out in the house of such a pillar of respectability as Gilead Gates."
"It isn't his house," said Bell. "He only takes it furnished."
"In anybody else your remark would be puerile," David said, irritably.
"It's a deeper remark than you are aware of at present," Bell replied. "I quite see your position. Nobody would believe you, of course. But why not go to the post-office and ask the number of the telephone that called you up from London?"
The question seemed to amuse David slightly. Then his lips were drawn humorously.
"When my logical formula came back I thought of that," he said. "On inquiring as to who it was rang me up on that fateful occasion I learnt that the number was 0017 Kensington and that—"
"Gates's own number at Prince's Gate," Bell exclaimed. "The plot thickens."