The superintendent smiled, and leant back in his chair. “No,” he said, “that is just where you go wrong. We don’t know it. It rests on the evidence about the telephone message. But have you considered all the possibilities about that message? The defence clearly will not admit that Walter Brooklyn sent it. We believe he did; but is it not quite possible for the defence to argue that somebody else sent that message with the deliberate intention of misleading us? And is it not also possible that Brooklyn sent it, but not from Liskeard House?”
“But why should he say he was at Liskeard House if he wasn’t?”
“I don’t say he wasn’t. But he may maintain that the man who took the message down made a mistake. After all, such mishaps are common enough. Or he may have been meaning to go to Liskeard House before the messenger arrived.”
“I think that is ruled out any way. We have proved from inquiries at the telephone exchange that Liskeard House did ring up Brooklyn’s club at about the time stated. There was some trouble about the connection, and the operator remembers making it.”
“Well, take the other possibility. May not the defence argue that some one else must have impersonated Brooklyn at the telephone, with the deliberate object of throwing suspicion upon him? The murderer, supposing him not to be Walter Brooklyn, would obviously want to get some one else suspected if he could. On that theory, all the circumstantial evidence would be false clues left by the real murderer.”
“That doesn’t seem to me at all likely, if I may say so. The evidence that was left on the spot where Prinsep was killed was obviously meant to incriminate George Brooklyn. That seems to show that, when the murder was done, the murderer had no idea that George Brooklyn was dead already, if indeed he was. A criminal would hardly lay two distinct and actually inconsistent sets of clues, leading to quite different suspects.”
“Not unless he was a quite exceptionally clever criminal, I grant you. But tell me this. Why should a man, who otherwise covered his traces so well, give himself away like an utter fool by that telephone conversation?”
“Obviously, I should say, because the ’phone message was sent before the murder, and the murder was not premeditated. Having killed his man, Brooklyn took the only possible course by denying the conversation.”
“Yes, that theory hangs together; but I’m not satisfied with it. There seems to me to be every reason to believe that the murders were most carefully thought out beforehand, and in that case the sending of the telephone message needs a lot of explanation. Then, again, we have still no indication at all of how Walter Brooklyn, or for that matter George Brooklyn, got into or out of the house.”
“On that point I have absolutely failed to get any light. My first idea, of course, was duplicate keys, and the stable yard. But the yard was quite definitely bolted as well as locked by eleven o’clock. The wall could not be scaled without a long ladder, which is out of the question. The front door is quite impossible, unless three or four servants were in the plot. I suppose they must have slipped in through the theatre, although it beats me how they got in without being seen.”