Armadale seemed quite unshaken by this blunt assertion.
“I'll be glad to listen to your notions, sir,” he replied, in a tone which he would have used towards a spoiled child whom he wished to conciliate. “It'll be most instructive to hear what a layman thinks of this affair, sir.”
Wendover was slightly nettled—as the inspector meant him to be—by the faint but unmistakable emphasis on the word “layman.”
“Sometimes the looker-on sees most of the game,” he retorted sententiously. “It's true enough in this case. You've missed the crucial bit of the evidence, inspector. Didn't you hear Mrs. Fleetwood tell you that, while she was interviewing him, Staveley had no overcoat on? And yet he was shot through his coat. The hole in the coat corresponded to the position of the wound on the body. Does that convince you?”
“You mean that he must have been shot later on, after he'd put on his coat? No, sir, it doesn't count for a rap, so far as convincing me goes. She and Fleetwood have had plenty of time to concoct their yarn and put in nifty little touches like that. What's that evidence worth? Nothing, when it comes from the criminals and when there's nothing to back it up independently.”
Wendover's smile broadened into something resembling an impish grin.
“You've missed the crucial bit of evidence, inspector. Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux could have given it to you if you'd asked her; but you didn't think of it. I did.”
“And might I ask what this valuable bit of evidence is?” the inspector inquired, with heavy politeness.
Wendover had no objection now.
“It's the time that the rain began to fall on Friday night,” he explained, with the air of setting a dull schoolboy right. “Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux told me that the rain started all of a sudden, after the Fleetwoods' motor had gone away from the shore.”