“That’s true. But murder never entered into my plans at all. Bear in mind that I don’t feel a criminal in this affair. All I’ve done is to take my own money out of the hand of a fellow who had picked my pocket. You’d recover your own purse if you caught a thief red-handed with it; and you wouldn’t call yourself a robber for doing so. Well, no more do I.”
“Go on,” said Sir Clinton, in unconscious plagiarism.
“That being so,” Stenness continued, “murder was the last thing that would have entered my mind. Why should I murder him? I’d squared the account; I’d got my money back again. What would be the point in putting my neck into a noose? None whatever! All I needed was a clean get-away. I planned that carefully enough.”
“That’s no particular business of mine at present,” Sir Clinton reminded him. “But one might ask what you’re doing here, since it’s evidently not according to plan.”
“It’s easy to account for that. I had planned to get away on the evening of the day when the Shandons were murdered. I was in the middle of clearing up preparations for a bolt . . . and suddenly came the affair in the Maze. Could I bolt then? Not likely. I’d have been marked down as the murderer if I’d stirred a step. And look what face would have been on things if I’d cleared out. It would have added the last touch of substance to the very hypothesis you put forward. The whole forgery business would have been raked up to furnish a motive. I couldn’t have faced it—for I hadn’t an alibi. Nobody could swear that I was in my room—I was packing up—at the time the murders were done. It would have been a clear enough case for any jury.”
Sir Clinton’s face showed that he agreed with this reading.
“There’s one point that hasn’t come out, though,” he said. “What’s the meaning of this sudden collapse on your part? If your conscience is clear—and I don’t doubt your account of it—why do you throw up the sponge like this? That’s not very clear.”
Stenness’s face showed that Sir Clinton had touched him on the raw. He had some difficulty with his voice as he replied.
“I may as well put all the cards on the table. You know what Miss Hawkhurst was like? Any man might have fallen in love with her. I did, at any rate.”
“Were you engaged?”