“When you came into the library, Mr. Bannerlee, you were about satiated with your attempts to burn the paper. But even if you couldn’t destroy it, you could get it off your person, and you did that. You told how you ‘reached your hand up into a dark corner,’ and you might have added ‘and changed my quarto with the one on the shelf.’ What happened a few minutes later when you and Lib were looking over your copy? A flake of moss fell to the floor; Lib must have noticed it, for you were scrupulous to mention it in the diary, and you passed it off with some remark about careless dusting. But I read in Armitage about moss, and I read about mossy stones in the diary, and I’ve seen plenty of mossy ones around the oratory, and you can’t tell me that the copy with the parchment in it wasn’t the one you’d left up there last week. So I imagine you knew well enough what Lib had found when she called out to you while you were leaving the library.”
“How absurd!” I cried.
“ ‘Imagine’ is a well-chosen word,” said Lord Ludlow crisply. “I am not much edified by this botanical excursion. You can’t accuse a man of being accessory to murder because of the way he turns a phrase.”
“Thanks, Ludlow,” I nodded. “There’s no need, really—”
“The thing I am driving at,” said the American girl in a quiet little voice that drilled its way into our brains, “is that you, Mr. Bannerlee, wrote the translation yourself. There is no other conclusion, is there?”
“Wilder and wilder!” I exclaimed. “This is too bad, Miss Lebetwood, when you’ve realized all along that I have no knowledge of Welsh.”
Our speech had settled into a duel with unmerciful give-and-take. “Are you sure? Consider this: In the diary your early references to the Welsh language were all natural and ambiguous, which puzzled me mightily when I came to other things later on. Then I saw that you must be taking advantage of those early references to conceal the fact that you are really quite adept in Welsh.”
“Took advantage? That’s rather strong, isn’t it?”
“Well, just think. You made a pun on the name of St. Tarw, which means ‘bull.’ You even went out of your way to use an American expression, that it was a ‘bully name.’ A little later, when the man you call the gorilla-man shouted at you in Irish, you knew quite definitely that he did not shout in Welsh, although Welsh and Irish belong to the same race of languages, and that particular expression must sound about the same in one language as in the other.
“But these were trivial compared with the point they hinted at, and that telegram there clinches the point. You told Lib all about how you read Ellis Griffiths’ history, and now we know the manuscript has never been printed, let alone translated.”