“Because I think he did hear one.”
“Well, what of it, sir? According to what you told me, what he heard couldn't have had any bearing on the case. It was an hour too early!”
“Horace, I told you only this morning I'd got a feeling the wrong end of the stick had been pushed into my hand, and that there's something important I haven't spotted. We're now going to have a look for it!”
Chapter Sixteen
“Where are we off to?” enquired the Inspector. “Fox House?”
“Out of the old gentleman's sight, for a start,” Hemingway replied. “I want to think.”
They reached the gorse-clump again, and Hemingway stopped. The Inspector watched him curiously, as he stood there, his quick, bright eyes once more taking in every detail of the scene before him. Presently he gave a grunt, and sat down on the slope above the lane, and pulled his pipe and his aged tobacco-pouch out of his pocket. While his accustomed fingers teased the tobacco, and packed it into the bowl of the pipe, his abstracted gaze continued to dwell first on the spot in the garden where the seat had stood, and then upon the stile, just visible round the bole of the elm-tree. The Inspector, disposing himself on the ground beside him, preserved a patient silence, and tried painstakingly to discover, by the exercise of logic, what particular problem he was attempting to solve. Hemingway lit his pipe, and sat staring fixedly at Fox House, his eyelids a little puckered. Suddenly he said: “The mistake we've been making, Horace, is to have paid a sight too much attention to what you might call the important features of this case, and not enough to the highly irrelevant trimmings. I'm not sure I've not precious near been had for a sucker.”
“I've heard you say as much before, but I never heard that it turned out to be true,” responded the Inspector.
“Well, it isn't going to be true this time—not if I know it! This operator is beginning to annoy me,” said Hemingway briskly.
The Inspector was a little puzzled. “Myself, I hate all murderers,” he said. “But I don't see why this one should annoy you more than any other—for it is not as if the case was a complicated one. It isn't easy, but that's only because we have too many possible suspects, isn't it? Taken just as a murder, I'd say it was one of the simplest I've ever handled.”