“Then you dismiss all suspicion that Oldbeg had anything to do with the murder?”
“If you can dismiss an idea you never entertained. In a certain sense every man in town was under suspicion—Oldbeg no more than another. This job, however, was not the work of a clumsy man like Oldbeg. When we find the murderer, you’ll find a man of quick motions, delicacy of touch, strong purpose, assured position, and considerable refinement. You’ll find a man to whom murder is repugnant and who resorted to it only as a last desperate chance. You’ll find therefore a man who was desperate, whose all was at stake, and who knew that Wing’s continued living meant the loss of that all. Now, if you can tell me where there is such a man, I’ll give you proof of his guilt so conclusive before night that no one will hesitate to approve his arrest.”
As he spoke, McManus grew pale. Something brought a terrible picture before his eyes. As never before, he realised the desperate chase in which they were involved.
“It was, then, in your opinion no mere desire for sordid gain that impelled to the crime?”
“Who has gained by it? Some one that by it has been saved from loss, and tremendous loss. Don’t fool yourself. Don’t look for any common criminal, and above all don’t flatter yourself for one moment that the criminal will stop at any additional crime to prevent detection. If detected, he’s lost everything. He can’t lose any more with twenty murders to his charge.”
McManus glanced over his shoulder, as if he expected to see the murderer rise out of vacancy in his own defence.
“What connection then has Judge Parlin’s statement with the crime?” he asked uneasily.
“It’s a mere incident—an accident, as you might say, that holds its place by its own sensational character and the tensity of nervous interest aroused in the public mind by the crime itself. It had nothing to do with the crime, or the cause that led up to it. I don’t believe the murderer knew of its existence. At the same time it’s one of those accidents that may lead to things to which it’s in no way related. It may be the very thing that’ll ultimately set us on the right track. Don’t lose sight of it for a moment.”
McManus looked as if the caution were wholly uncalled for. There was not much danger of his losing sight of anything that had to do with the murder. One might have suspected from his looks that he wished he could.
After making an appointment for three in the afternoon to examine papers, Trafford left the office and went to a little dingy room, in Gray’s Inn Lane, where he was joined almost immediately by a tall, seedy-looking man, evidently of Canadian stock, whose French was only a trifle worse than his English. He was a man whom few men would have trusted and whom Trafford had always found absolutely trustworthy. The man shook his head, with many a gestured negative. Not a man was missing from Little Canada; every man who was open to suspicion was accounted for, and not one of them showed a broken collar-bone or a shattered arm.