Sir Clinton knocked the ash from his cigarette.
“Go on,” he said. “Let’s see how you get round that snag. I’ll represent a jury of average intelligence, if I can screw myself up to that pitch.”
“Well, first of all,” Wendover suggested, “there’s this Hackleton case looming in the background. Now that Neville Shandon’s done for, Hackleton stands to win. It was a fight between them. Shandon was depending more on his brains than on his witnesses, I take it; and now that he’s out of it Hackleton will get off scot-free. There’s your motive all right.”
Sir Clinton nodded his assent to this, and Wendover continued with rather more confidence.
“The method used was obviously a sound one, no matter where the murder was done. An air-gun’s fairly silent; and that curare evidently kills quickly. It’s not the sort of thing an ordinary rough would think of. Even if he did think of it he couldn’t get the poison. But Hackleton’s got money enough to buy some unscrupulous fellow with brains; and this gone-under intellectual might have hit on the trick. Or Hackleton himself may have devised it and passed it on to his tool.”
“That’s so. And then?”
“The fact that the murder was done in the Maze may have been mere accident. They may have intended to get at Neville Shandon anywhere they could; and it just happened that he went into the Maze and gave them the best chance there.”
“You assume, of course, that they would have got up the topography of the estate, Maze included, beforehand?”
“I’d have done so myself if I’d been put to that job; so I suppose they’d have had enough sense to do it, too.”
“But why was it a double murder, then?” demanded Sir Clinton. “How did Roger come into the business?”