“Fancy that!” marvelled Hemingway. “Send him in to me!”
The youth who was presently ushered into the small office was a shock-headed boy with a slightly pimpled countenance, and the rather clumsy limbs of the rapidly growing adolescent. He entered the room with every evidence of reluctance, and remained just inside it, staring at the Chief Inspector out of a pair of round, serious eyes, and tightly gripping a trilby hat before him.
Hemingway looked him over. “So you're Reg Ditchling, are you?” he said.
“Yessir,” acknowledged Reg, with a gulp.
“All right. Come and sit down in that chair, and tell me what you mean by not giving his gun back to Mr. Cliburn!”
This command was uttered in quite a friendly tone, but it was apparent that Reg saw the prison gates yawning wide before him. He shrinkingly approached the chair in front of the desk, and sat down on the extreme edge of it, but the power of speech seemed to have deserted him.
“Come on!” said Hemingway kindly. “I'm not going to eat you. Where was the rifle? Did you have it in that shed I saw?”
“Ted put it here, “cos of Alfie, sir.”
“Well, that was a sensible thing to do, at all events. Was the shed locked every day?”
“Yessir.”