“Now, there is, if you look at it, a complete absence of any backing to the case against Deacon. ‘What about the money?’ you say. ‘What about that hundred pounds belonging to Hoode? There’s motive for you!’ ‘Nonsense!’ say I. Deacon was paid six hundred pounds a year. He had also an allowance from his only living relative. He had been, it is true, a little shorter of money than usual lately; but to suggest that he would commit a murder for a hundred pounds is absurd. A man in his position could have raised the money in a thousand safer and less energetic ways. No, Deacon’s story that the money was a birthday gift from Hoode is, besides being more likely, true. Further, it is easy of proof that Deacon and Hoode were on the best of terms: for corroboration apply to the Ministry of Imperial Finance and the households of Abbotshall and 12 Seymour Square. Further still, look at Deacon’s record and see how rash it is to condemn him murderer with nothing more to go upon than those too-beautiful finger-prints and a few ragged pieces of circumstantial evidence, the two best of which were supplied—oh! so ingenously—by Sir Arthur Digby-Coates. For it was from him that the police first learnt that Hoode had drawn a hundred pounds in notes from his bank. And it was through him that it became known that Deacon had asked him the time at ten forty-five on the night of the murder—the time to which the hands of the clock in the study had been moved by the murderer.
“There being no backing to the case of the Crown against Deacon, I saw that if I could find a stout one for mine against Digby-Coates I should score heavily.
“The first thing to be found was motive. What, I asked myself, could it be? Money? No. Digby-Coates is a wealthier man by far than ever was Hoode. Revenge for some particular ill turn? Hardly that, since Hoode, though a politician, bore all his life the stamp of honesty and straight dealing. A woman? I was not prepared to accept one as the sole cause. She might, of course, be contributory, but I wanted something more likely. Middle-aged men of the social and intellectual standing of these two do not often, in this age of decrees nisi and cold love, go about killing each other over a woman if she is only the first blot upon the fair sea of their friendship.
“I was forced back, in this search for motive, upon the deductions I had made from those little material signs, and remembered that I had determined, before ever I thought of putting a name to the murderer, that John Hoode was killed by a man insane; not mad in the gibbering, straws-in-the-hair sense, but mentally unbalanced by a kind of ingrowing, self-nourishing hatred.
“I took this as my starting point and asked myself how I could find corroboration of and reason for this hatred having existed in the heart of a man ostensibly the closest friend of its object. The answer was: look at their past history; as much of it as is available in books of record. I did so, using Hoode’s own books.
“I found soon enough reason for the hatred. Look as I looked. You will see that always, always, always was Digby-Coates beaten by the man he killed. Were the race one of scholarship, sport, politics, social advancement, honours, the result was the same. Hoode first; Digby-Coates second. Look in the Who’s Who, Hansard, the records of Upchester School and Magdalen, the Honours Lists. Look in the minds of the men’s colleagues and contemporaries. Always will you find the same story. Look at this, the slightest extract from the list:—
| John Hoode. | Arthur Digby-Coates. |
|---|---|
| Captain of Upchester (last three years at school). | Senior Monitor (same three years). |
| Won John Halket scholarship to Magdalen. | Second on list. |
| Rowed 2 in Oxford boat (third year). | Rowed 6 in trials (third year). |
| Gaisford (fourth year). | Newdigate (fourth year). |
| Minor office (Admiralty) after three years in Parliament. | Still merely M.P. after six months longer in Parliament. |
| President of Board of Trade. | Still M.P. (He was, I believe, offered at this time a minor Parliamentary Secretaryship; but refused.) |
| K.C.M.G., C.V.O., etc. | K.B.E. |
| Minister of Imperial Finance (from the date of the forming of the Ministry in 1919.) | Almost at same time accepted Parliamentary Secretaryship to Board of Conciliation. |
“One could go on for pages, for ever telling this story of races won by a stride—Hoode the winner, Digby-Coates his follower-up—and that stride getting longer and longer as time went on.
“But at last came the race for the Woman—the race whose loss snapped the last cord of sanity in the mind of the loser.
“I discovered the existence of the Woman in this way: I searched Hoode’s desk in suspicion of a hidden drawer. I found one and in it a diary (of no use save to corroborate the fact of some of those races), and a bunch of newspaper-cuttings. But I knew—how is no matter—that something was missing from that drawer.