“Perhaps he did. I say perhaps—remember,” exclaimed the young man under arrest. “But I don’t agree with the finding of the Coroner’s jury.”
“People often disagree with a Coroner’s jury,” was the dry reply of the hide-bound official, seated at the table. “But now, let us get along,” he added persuasively. “You admit that you are John James Sainsbury; that you were, until lately, clerk in the employ of the Ochrida Copper Corporation, in Gracechurch Street, from the service of which you were recently discharged. Is that so?”
“Most certainly. I have nothing to deny.”
“Good. Then let us advance a step further. You were, I believe, an intimate friend of Dr Jerome Jerrold, who lived in Wimpole Street, and who, for no apparent reason, committed suicide.”
“Yes.”
“You do not know, I presume, that Dr Jerrold was suspected of a very grave offence under the Defence of the Realm Act, and that, rather than face arrest and prosecution by court-martial as a spy—he took his own life!”
“It’s a lie—an infernal lie!” shouted young Sainsbury. “Who alleges such an outrageous lie as that?”
The fair-haired detective smiled, and in that suave manner he usually adopted towards prisoners, with clasped hands he said:
“I fear I cannot tell you that.”
“But it’s a confounded lie! Jerome Jerrold was no spy. He and I were the firmest friends, and I know how he devoted his time and his money to investigating the doings of the enemy in our midst. Did you not read the words of the Lord Chancellor the other day?”