‘I know,’ he said simply. ‘I think I am a little mad. It seemed to me so wicked. I loved her.’
There was silence after he had spoken, and the two men sat for some time, Abbershaw staring into the fire, Wyatt leaning back, his eyes half-closed. The thought that possessed Abbershaw’s mind was the pity of it – such a good brain, such a valuable idealistic soul. And it struck him in a sudden impersonal way that it was odd that evil should beget evil. It was as if it went on spreading in ever-widening circles, like ripples round the first splash of a stone thrown into a pond.
Wyatt recalled him from his reverie.
‘It was a perfect murder,’ he said, almost wonderingly. ‘How did you find me out?’
Abbershaw hesitated. Then he sighed. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ he said. ‘It was too perfect. It left nothing to chance. Do you know where I have spent the last week or so? In the British Museum.’
He looked at the other steadily.
‘I now know more about your family history than, I should think, any other man alive. That Ritual story would have been wonderful for your purpose, Wyatt, if it just hadn’t been for one thing. It was not true.’
Wyatt rose from his chair abruptly, and walked up and down the room. This flaw in his scheme seemed to upset him more than anything else had done.
‘But it might have been true,’ he argued. ‘Who could prove it? A family legend.’
‘But it wasn’t true,’ Abbershaw persisted. ‘It wasn’t true because from the year 1100 until the year 1603 – long past the latest date to which such a story as yours could have been feasible, Black Dudley was a monastery and not in the possession of your family at all. Your family estate was higher up the coast, in Norfolk, and I shouldn’t think the dagger came into your possession until 1650 at least, when an ancestor of yours is referred to as having returned from the Papal States laden with merchandise.’