“Not if I can help it,” replied Hannasyde. “It's early days yet - though I won't deny that I don't altogether like the look of it.” He scrutinised the long ash on the end of his cigar, debating whether to tip it off or to wait a little longer. “Hemingway - the chap with me today - is feeling aggrieved.” He smiled. “Says there oughtn't to be any mystery about the murder of a man like Vereker. You expect to be baffled when it's a case of some unfortunate girl being taken for a ride and bumped off, but when a prominent City man is stabbed it ought to be fairly plain sailing. You have what Hemingway calls the full decor. His hobby is amateur theatricals - it's the worst thing I know of him. Well, we've got plenty of decor, and we've got dramatis personae, and the net result” - he paused, and at last tipped off the ash of his cigar - “is that we seem most of the time to have got mixed up in a Chekhov play instead of the Edgar Wallace we thought we were engaged for.”
Giles grinned. “My deplorable cousins. I'm really very sorry about it. It would be interesting to know what you make of them.”
“I haven't the least objection to telling you that I don't know what to make of them,” replied Hannasyde calmly. “On the face of it, things point young Vereker's way. The motive is there, the opportunity is there, and unless I'm very much mistaken in my reading of his character, the nerve is there, too.”
“I agree with you,” said Giles.
“Yes,” said Hannasyde, with a kind of grim humour. “I know you do. I'm perfectly well aware that you're as much in the dark over him as I am, and equally well aware that you think things look rather black for him. Well, they do, but I'll be quite frank with you: I wouldn't apply for a warrant for that young man's arrest until I had a cast-iron case against him. His story is the weakest I've ever had to listen to - and I wouldn't let him tell it to a jury for anything you could offer me. Which reminds me, by the way, that Mesurier came up to see me at the Yard this afternoon, with yet another weak story. But I daresay you know about that.”
“I believe I know the story, but I didn't know he'd been to see you.”
“Oh yes!” said Hannasyde. “He went down to that cottage to shoot Vereker, but found him already dead, so returned to town. What I should really welcome would be some suspicious character with a good, strong, probable alibi. I believe it would be easier to disprove. Hemingway fancies Mesurier more than I do. He will have it the man's a dago. I've set him to work on that car alibi, but I don't myself see a way round it. So leaving Mesurier out of it for the time being, we're left with a chauffeur whose alibi I don't altogether trust, as it's supplied by his wife, but whom I don't really think had sufficient motive to murder Vereker; with one unknown man who visited Vereker on Saturday, possibly with the idea of blackmail (and blackmailers don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs); and with Miss Vereker and her brother.” He stopped and drank some of the whisky-and-soda in his glass. “Taking Miss Vereker first,” he continued, “if I were to set the facts down on paper, and show them to any one man, I should think he'd wonder why I haven't had her arrested on suspicion long since. But so far I've nothing to show that she murdered her brother, and that particular kind of candour she treats me to, which looks at first glance to be so damning, is the sort of candour that would get her off with ninety-nine juries out of a hundred. Mesurier's type - trying to conceal facts he thinks might tell against him, contradicting himself, hedging - is easier to deal with. Ask him if he quarrelled with Vereker, and he says he would hardly call it a quarrel - with any number of people ready to swear that they heard him quarrelling. Ask Miss Vereker whether she got on with her half-brother, and she says she hated the sight of him. She doesn't appear to conceal a thing. It's the same with her brother: you don't know whether they're very clever, or completely innocent, or a pair of lunatics.”
“I can set your mind at rest on one point: they're quite sane,” said Giles. “And since you've been so frank with me - admitting what I've known from the start - I'll tell you in return that Miss Vereker, who knows her brother as well as anyone, is willing to bet her whole fortune that if he committed the murder it will never be proved against him.”
The Superintendent's eyes had twinkled appreciatively at one part of this speech, and he replied at once: “That piece of information ought to be very useful — to Miss Vereker, if not to me. But I'm too old a hand to accept it quite as you'd like me to.”
Giles got up to replenish both glasses. “As a matter of fact I didn't mean it like that at all,” he confessed. “Whatever I may or may not think about Kenneth, I am quite convinced in my own mind that his sister had nothing whatsoever to do with it.”