“I don’t know that there’s anything more that I can tell,” he said. “Whatever anybody may think, I told the entire truth about myself and this affair in that statement before the magistrate. Of course, you know they didn’t want me to say a word—my legal advisers, I mean. They were dead against it. But you see, I was resolved on it—I wanted it to get in the papers. I told everything in that. I tried to put it as plainly as I could. No—I’ve told the main facts.”
“But aren’t there any little facts, Barthorpe?” asked Peggie. “Can’t you think of any small thing—was there nothing that would give—I don’t know how to put it.”
“Anything that you can think of that would give a clue?” suggested Selwood. “Was there nothing you noticed—was there anything——”
Barthorpe appeared to be thinking; then to be hesitating—finally, he looked at Selwood a little shamefacedly.
“Well, there were one or two things that I didn’t tell,” he said. “I—the fact is, I didn’t think they were of importance. One of them was about that key to the Safe Deposit. You know you and I couldn’t find it when we searched the office that morning. Well, I had found it. Or rather, I took it off the bunch of keys. I wanted to search the safe at the Safe Deposit myself. But I never did. I don’t know whether the detectives have found it or not—I threw it into a drawer at my office in which there are a lot of other keys. But, you know, there’s nothing in that—nothing at all.”
“You said one or two other things just now,” remarked Selwood. “That’s one—what’s the other?”
Barthorpe hesitated. The three were not the only occupants of that gloomy room, and though the official ears might have been graven out of stone, he felt their presence.
“Don’t keep anything back, Barthorpe,” pleaded Peggie.
“Oh, well!” responded Barthorpe. “I’ll tell you, though I don’t know what good it will do. I didn’t tell this, because—well, of course, it’s not exactly a thing a man likes to tell. When I looked over Uncle Jacob’s desk, just after I found him dead, you know, I found a hundred-pound note lying there. I put it in my pocket. Hundred-pound notes weren’t plentiful, you know,” he went on with a grim smile. “Of course, it was a shabby thing to do, sort of robbing the dead, you know, but——”
“Do you see any way in which that can help?” asked Selwood, whose mind was not disposed to dwell on nice questions of morality or conduct. “Does anything suggest itself?”