“I don’t want it,” he growled. “I tell you plainly that you are my enemy—not my friend.”
“I have never been your enemy. It is true that the police of Europe are searching for you; that your description is in the hands of every official charged with criminal investigation from Christiania to Gibraltar, and that the charge against you is that you murdered a young millionaire. It is true also that it lays in my power to shield or to denounce you. Think, think for a moment the nature of the evidence against you. One night I entered your flat with my key, stumbled across something, and discovered to my horror that it was the body of Sternroyd, who had been shot.”
“You lie!” he cried, turning upon me fiercely, with clenched fists. “You lie! you never saw the body!”
“I tell you I did,” I replied quite calmly, as in the same tone I went on to describe the exact position in which it lay.
My words fell upon him as a thunderbolt. He had entertained no suspicion that the body had been actually discovered before its removal, and never before dreamed that I had entered his flat on that fatal night and witnessed the evidence of the crime. By this knowledge that I held he was visibly crushed and cowed.
“Well, go on,” he said mechanically, in a hoarse tone. “I suppose you want to drive me to take my life to avoid arrest—eh?”
“Think of the nature of my evidence,” I continued. “I entered your flat again on the following night to find you present, the body removed, and you met my request to search one of the rooms by quickly locking the door and pocketing the key. I ask you whether there is not sufficient circumstantial evidence in that to convict you of the crime?”
He remained silent, his chin almost resting upon his breast.
“Again,” I said, “in addition to this, I may as well tell you that the body you sought to hide has been discovered.”
“Discovered!” he gasped. “Have they found it?”