“No, but she knows I am to try and persuade you to drop the case. She asked me—”
“It is for her sake you want me to leave it alone,” I commented. “It is not for yours.”
“Mine—no—it doesn’t concern me,” he replied, “except as everything that interests her, concerns me.”
“But—doesn’t concern you?” I asked. “Yet you were the last person known to have quarrelled with—”
“If you mean to accuse me of the murder—”
“I don’t,” I interrupted promptly, “but look at the sequence. You quarrel with Sir Philip Clevedon and a few hours later he is dead. Then a celebrated detective—that I am neither a detective nor celebrated is only a detail—is put on the case and you try to buy him off, to bribe him in fact.”
“It is a complete case,” he admitted, with a quick grin.
“Yes,” I agreed, “the sort of completeness that is too good to be true.”
“Not at all,” he added, as the grin widened. “I can already feel the rope round my neck.”
He ran his finger along the inside of his collar with a very expressive gesture.