As the hansom bowled along we three had what occasionally approached a warm discussion.
‘Marjorie was in that bundle,’ began Lessingham, in the most lugubrious of tones, and with the most woebegone of faces.
‘I doubt it,’ I observed.
‘She was,—I feel it,—I know it. She was either dead and mutilated, or gagged and drugged and helpless. All that remains is vengeance.’
‘I repeat that I doubt it.’
Atherton struck in.
‘I am bound to say, with the best will in the world to think otherwise, that I agree with Lessingham.’
‘You are wrong.’
‘It’s all very well for you to talk in that cocksure way, but it’s easier for you to say I’m wrong than to prove it. If I am wrong, and if Lessingham’s wrong, how do you explain his extraordinary insistence on taking it inside the cab with him, which the bobby describes? If there wasn’t something horrible, awful in that bundle of his, of which he feared the discovery, why was he so reluctant to have it placed upon the roof?’
‘There probably was something in it which he was particularly anxious should not be discovered, but I doubt if it was anything of the kind which you suggest.’