Sir Clinton had been listening carefully to Wendover’s exposition.
“That’s very neat indeed,” he conceded. “It would certainly hold water, if it fitted all the facts that you know, Squire; but unfortunately it leaves out of account the most interesting fact of all.”
“And that is?” Wendover demanded, with some asperity. He was annoyed to find that he had overlooked something.
“That is the most interesting fact of all,” Sir Clinton assured him blandly. Then, with a change of tone: “And that’s all I’m able to say just now, Squire. I’ve no fault to find with your reasoning. It hangs together beautifully. But sometimes the human mind, if you follow me, is apt to assume connections where no such things exist in Nature. We’ve got an instinctive craving to trace associations between sets of phenomena—and at times we kid ourselves that there is some relationship when really it’s only a case of simultaneity.”
“You’ve been reading one of these shilling manuals lately,” said Wendover suspiciously. “ ‘How to be a Philosopher in Ten Minutes,’ or something like that. All this gay talk about simultaneity and phenomena and association comes straight from there. You can’t deceive me with a veneer of learning.”
“Well, I won’t dazzle you with further extracts. Let’s get back to business. Go on with your list.”
“Young Torrance,” Wendover continued. “He’s a possible agent. I don’t know about his financial circumstances; he may be hard up, for all I know, and amenable to the cash bait that Hackleton could offer. It would be a pretty big one. Young Torrance was the person who proposed that game in the Maze to Miss Forrest. That would give him a reasonable excuse for being in the Maze at that particular time; and further, it would ensure that he was free from the girl’s supervision at the critical moment. Could you have invented a neater dodge yourself if you’d been set to it?”
“No,” Sir Clinton admitted, frankly, “I doubt if I could.”
“Take another point,” Wendover pursued his line of reasoning with increased interest. “What evidence have we that there ever was a third individual in the Maze at all? Torrance’s statements: but if Torrance was the murderer himself, of course he’d insist that a third person was present. Miss Forrest’s story of someone running in the Maze: but that may have been Torrance himself. You remember that she found it most difficult to tell the direction from which sounds came when she was in the Maze.”
“That’s a theory that might take some upsetting, Squire, if you can explain just one point. What did Torrance do with his air-gun after he’d finished with it? No air-gun was found in the Maze after the business. The murderer got rid of it somehow.”