Sir Clinton refused to be drawn. He resorted to one of his indirect replies.
“ ‘What was the crime?’ ” he repeated. “Now, I’ll put a case to you, Inspector. Suppose that you saw two men in the distance and that you could make out that one of them was struggling and the second man was beating him on the head. What crime would you call that? Assault and battery?”
“I suppose so,” Armadale admitted.
“But suppose, further, that when you reached them, you found the victim dead of his injuries, what would you call the crime then?”
“Murder, I suppose.”
“So your view of the crime would depend upon the stage at which you witnessed it, eh? That’s just my position in this Ravensthorpe affair. You’ve been looking at it from yesterday’s standpoint, and you call it a theft of three replicas. But I wonder what you’ll call it when we know the whole of the facts.”
The Inspector declined to follow his chief to this extent.
“All the evidence we’ve got, so far, points to theft, sir. I’ve no fresh data that would let me put a new name to it.”
“Then you regard it as a completed crime which has partly failed in its object?”
The Inspector gave his acquiescence with a nod.