In some dark corner or some empty railway carriage
take it off and roll it up. Then make for the office. Wait there
for Ellenby. True as steel, Ellenby; good business man. Be guided
by Ellenby."
He flung the brief from him with a laugh.
"Why, there's not a missing link!" he cried. "And to think that not
a fool among us ever thought of it!"
"Everything fitting into its place," I suggested, "except young
Hepworth. Can you see him, from your description of him, sitting
down and coolly elaborating plans for escape, the corpse of the
murdered man stretched beside him on the hearthrug?"
"No," he answered. "But I can see her doing it, a woman who for
week after week kept silence while we raged and stormed at her, a
woman who for three hours sat like a statue while old Cutbush
painted her to a crowded court as a modern Jezebel, who rose up from
her seat when that sentence of fifteen years' penal servitude was
pronounced upon her with a look of triumph in her eyes, and walked
out of court as if she had been a girl going to meet her lover.
"I'll wager," he added, "it was she who did the shaving. Hepworth
would have cut him, even with a safety-razor."
"It must have been the other one, Martin," I said, "that she
loathed. That almost exultation at the thought that he was dead," I
reminded him.
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