As he noticed this, the inspector made an involuntary gesture of satisfaction, whilst Wendover felt that the net had been drawn yet tighter by this last piece of evidence.
“That's a clincher, sir,” Armadale pointed out with a frank satisfaction which irritated Wendover intensely. “She took a car down and back. This is going to be as easy as falling off a log.”
“I suppose you noticed that that car never stopped at all on the road home,” Sir Clinton remarked casually. “The tracks showed no sign of a stop and a restart once the machine had got going.”
Only after he had run his car into the hotel garage did he speak again.
“We don't want any more chatter than we can help at present, inspector. There's no real case against anyone yet; and it won't do to rush into the limelight. I suggest that Mr. Wendover should ask to see Mrs. Fleetwood. If you inquired for her, every tongue in the place would be at work in five minutes; and by the time they'd compared notes with each other, it'll be quite impossible to dig out anything that one or two of them may really happen to know. Everything will have got mixed up in their minds, and they won't remember whether they saw something themselves or merely heard about it from someone else.”
Wendover saw the force of the argument; but he also realised clearly the position into which he was being pushed.
“I'm not so sure I care about that job, Clinton,” he protested. “It puts me in a false position.”
The chief constable interrupted him brutally.
“Five minutes ago I offered you the chance to get off the bus. You preferred to stay with us. Therefore you do as you're told. That's that.”
Wendover understood that his only chance of keeping in touch with the hunters now depended on his obeying orders. Gloomily he made his submission.