“Yes, I’ve explained it all; I’d have explained it yesterday, if you’d let me.”
“Come now, don’t try and persuade me you didn’t think yourself that Marryatt was guilty?”
“Guilty of murder? Not for a single, solitary moment. I did think there was something wrong with him—so there was, he was hag-ridden with nightmare about Brotherhood. But I never agreed with you about Marryatt being a murderer, and, to do me justice, I never said so.”
“That’s all very well, but you never showed me where I was wrong in my interpretation of the whole thing.”
“I know; it was no good showing you where you were wrong, because you were so confoundedly ingenious at devising fresh explanations. Honestly, I did put one or two difficulties to you, but in a second you’d persuaded yourself to believe that they were no difficulties at all. And of course there were heaps more.”
“Such as?”
“Well, you persisted in regarding the whole thing as a deliberate, carefully planned murder. But if you come to think of it, the circumstances that favoured the murder were just the sort of circumstances that couldn’t have been foreseen. How could a man like Marryatt know that Brotherhood was due to go bankrupt? He knows no more about the City than you do. And the fog—look how the fog played up all through! How was Marryatt to know there was going to be a fog on the very day on which his attempt would be made? Yet, without a fog, the attempt would have been perfectly desperate.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“And it wasn’t merely the general setting, it was the details. How could Marryatt know that the train would be held up by signals just there? How could he tell that Brotherhood would get into the part of the train which hadn’t got a corridor, and that he would get into an empty carriage? What would he have been able to do, if Brotherhood had happened to come back as he always did—did, in fact, come back on Tuesday—in a crowded train like the 3.47? How could he be certain that nobody had seen Brotherhood get into the three o’clock? That nobody had noticed him at Weighford? Alternately, don’t you see, you make your man take the most superhumanly cunning precautions, and then trust to blind chance. But those are all objections of detail. I didn’t mention them because, as I say, you’d have found some sort of answer for each. My real objection was much deeper.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell me about that?”