‘Perhaps he is,’ he said, ‘but at the same time he’s a very dangerous one. I may as well tell you fellows,’ he went on, with sudden determination in his grey eyes, ‘there’s something that’s on my conscience. I had those papers – they were papers, as a matter of fact – the first morning we were down here, and I burnt them. I told him what I’d done when I went in to see him yesterday, but he wouldn’t believe me.’
He paused and looked round him. Campion’s pale eyes were goggling behind his enormous spectacles, and Wyatt met Abbershaw’s appealing glance sympathetically. The rest were more surprised than anything else, and, on the whole, approving.
Campion voiced the general thought.
‘Do you know what they were – the papers, I mean?’ he said, and there was something very like wonderment in his tone. Abbershaw nodded.
‘They were all written in code, but I had a pretty shrewd idea,’ he said, and he explained to them the outline of his ideas on the subject.
Campion listened to him in silence, and when he had finished glanced across and spoke softly.
‘You burnt them?’ he said dreamily, and then remarked, as if he had switched on to an entirely new subject, ‘I wonder if the smoke from five hundred thousand pounds in notes looks any different from any other sort of firing.’
Abbershaw glanced at him sharply.
‘Five hundred thousand pounds?’ he said.
‘Why not?’ said Campion lightly. ‘Half a crown here, half a crown there, you know. It soon tells up.’