When they were all seated, with P. C. Mackay keeping watch over the door and another constable on the outside of it, Cleek turned to them and let the queer little one-sided smile so indicative of the man travel up his face.
"Well, my friends," said he in his smooth, low-pitched voice, "I promised you something when I saw you again, and I'm here to fulfil that promise. The riddle of Sir Andrew's death is a riddle no longer. If you will have patience for a short time I shall explain a few things to you, and then——"
"You know who killed my husband, then? You know?—you know?" bleated out Lady Paula, starting to her feet with white face and hands clasped close against her breast. "You have found out the secret of his murder, Mr. Deland?"
"Yes—and I know who his murderer was, too, Lady Paula," returned Cleek sharply. "Sit down, Mr. Duggan, I beg of you. The door is guarded, as you can see—both outside and in—and perhaps it might be as well if I added caution to care and turned the key in the door—so." Speaking, he crossed the room in rapid strides, locked the door, and dropped the key into his pocket. "Prevention is better than cure, you know. Yes, Lady Paula, I know who murdered Sir Andrew, and I know how it was done. A dastardly deed at best—an abominable crime upon humanity in return for a family wrong. The old question of a vendetta—though of so recent a date as to be a mere matter of seventeen years back. You have been married that long, have you not? You are surprised, I see. Well, I confess it, so was I. And when you mix up such other unpleasant ingredients as a woman's ill-timed ambition, a blackmailer, and the green-eyed god jealousy, you find a very unpleasant mess of pottage indeed."
He spoke in his own way, unravelling the riddle in that leisurely fashion for which he was famous; but to those over-charged minds and hearts that surrounded him he seemed much like a cat playing with a mouse—and enjoying its fruitless efforts at escape.
"But the murderer—who?—who?" gave out Maud Duggan in a suddenly shrill voice, as a little silence held for a moment in that still room. "Tell us that, Mr. Deland, I implore you——"
"In good time, Miss Duggan. First of all, the ways and means. Look!—see that spinning wheel. There stands your guilty party in that innocent guise. The hand that guided that wheel killed Sir Andrew as surely as I am standing here. And how? An air-pistol. And who owns an air-pistol in this place but Mr. Ross Duggan?"
"It's a lie—a damned lie! And I'll have you to law for it, too!" Ross Duggan started to his feet, face crimson, hands knotted, eyes flashing at this plain implication of himself. "Damn you, whoever you are!—it's a lie! I did not kill my father! I swear it upon the sacred book itself! I did not kill him!"
Cleek held up a detaining hand.
"And who, may I ask, said you did, my fiery young friend?" he returned suavely. "If you will give me a little time to tell my story in my own way, I shall be extremely obliged. You stand self-confessed as the owner of an air-pistol. That we have proof of. The rest will follow in due course. But here is the instrument of death—this simple little spinning wheel, which, wired by electricity as it is, and with the pistol hidden inside that wheel with diabolical ingenuity, caused the death of your father. And who among you, may I ask, has such a perfect knowledge of electricity as to equip the thing like that?"