“What were you going to do with cocaine?” Miller asked.
“I was going to take a little of it for my health.”
The superintendent smiled faintly as he demanded:
“And the morphine tablets?”
“I had thought of taking one of them occasionally to—er—to steady my nerves.”
Miller nodded, and casting a swift glance at the sergeant, asked:
“And the packet that was in this envelope: what did that contain?”
Wallingford hesitated and was so obviously searching for a plausible lie that Miller interposed, persuasively: “Better tell the truth and not make trouble”; whereupon Wallingford replied in a barely audible mumble that the packet had contained a very small quantity of cocaine.
“What has become of that cocaine?” the superintendent asked.
“I took part of it; the rest got spilt and lost.”