"Could it? Without being noticed?" asked Wake.
"Yes, easy, it could," said Cook. "There's a flower-bed running along the wall of the house, and creepers on the house, too. You'd never see the wire. He could have laid it along the bed till he got to the corner of the house, and then taken it across the bit of path lying between the house and the top-end of the shrubbery. He might have sprinkled a bit of gravel over it just there, though I shouldn't think it would have been necessary myself. Then, all he had to do, once he'd got rid of the vice, and the electro-magnet, was to run back to the house, coiling up the wire as he went."
Hemingway, who had not been paying much attention to this speech, suddenly said: "Didn't you tell me White had got something to do with a coal-mine?"
"That's right," said Cook. "He's manager of the Copley group."
"I thought so. What's that thing called that they use in mines when they want to blast? Electrical thing they touch off the dynamite with?"
"A shot-firer, do you mean?" asked Wake. "But they don't blast in coal-mines, do they?"
"By gum, you've got it!" said Cook. "They do do quite a bit of blasting here, because we're remarkably free from gas, as it happens! He could have got hold of one, too, without a bit of trouble, in his position."
"Don't they check up on those kinds of stores?" asked Wake.
"Yes, but, don't you see? The murder was committed on a Sunday. White could have brought the shot-firer away with him on Saturday, and returned it to store on the Monday morning, and no one the wiser!"
"Would it work?" Hemingway demanded.