"Mrs. Everett won't get into trouble over it, will she?"
"Probably not — now that we've got you."
"I was a fool to run, in the first place. If I'd come and told the truth in the beginning, it couldn't be any worse than it is now, and I'd have saved all the hell between." He was lying with his eyes on the sea. "Funny to think that, if some one hadn't killed Bert, I'd never have seen this place or — or anything."
The «anything» the inspector took to be the manse. "M'm! And who do you think killed him?"
"I don't know. There wasn't any one I know of who'd do that to Bert. I think perhaps some one did it by mistake."
"Not looking what they were doing with the needle, as it were?"
"No, in mistake for some one else."
"And you're the left-handed man with a scar on his thumb who quarrelled with Sorrell just before his death, and who has all the money Sorrell had in the world, but you're quite innocent."
The man turned his head wearily away. "I know," he said. "You don't need to tell me how bad it is."
A knock came to the door, and the boy with the protruding ears appeared in the doorway and said that he had been sent to relieve Mr. Grant, if that was what Mr. Grant wanted. Grant said, "I'll want you in five minutes or so. Come back when I ring." And the boy melted, grin last, into the dark of the passage like a Cheshire cat. Grant took something out of his pocket and fiddled with it at the washstand. Then he came over to the bedside and said, "Fingerprints, please. It's quite a painless process, so you needn't mind." He took prints of both hands on the prepared sheets of paper, and the man submitted with an indifference tinged with the interest one shows in experiencing something, however mild, for the first time. Grant knew even as he pressed the fingertips on the paper that the man had no Scotland Yard record. The prints would be of value only in relation to the other prints in the case.