The wretched Sellon sat twisting his hands together, finding no answer but a miserable mumble: ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Now, look here,’ said Kirk, with a dangerous note in his voice. ‘What were you doing there, that you didn’t want anybody to know about?… Speak up!… Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.’ (He’s seen it, thought Peter, and turned round.) ‘You’re left-handed, ain’t you?’

‘Oh, my God, sir, my God! I never done it! I swear I never done it! ‘Eaven knows I ‘ad cause enough, but I never done it-I never laid a’and on ’im-’

‘Cause? What cause?… Come on, now. Out with it!

What were you doing with Mr Noakes?’

Sellon looked round wildly. At his shoulder stood Peter Wimsey with an inscrutable face.

‘I never touched ‘im. I never done nothing to ‘im. If I was to die the next minute, sir, I’m innocent!’

Kirk shook his massive head, like a bull teased by gadflies. ‘What were you doing up here at nine o’clock?’

‘Nothin’,’ said Sellon, stubbornly. The excitement died out of him. ‘Only to pass the time of day.’

‘Time o’ day!’ echoed Kirk, with so much contempt and irritation that Peter nerved himself to interfere.

‘Look here, Sellon,’ he said, in a voice that had induced many a troubled private to disclose his pitiful secrets. ‘You’d much better make a clean breast of it to Mr Kirk. Whatever it is.’

‘This,’ growled Kirk, ‘is a nice thing, this is. A police officer-’

‘Go easy with him. Superintendent.’ said Peter. ‘He’s only a youngster.’ He hesitated. Perhaps it would be easier for Sellon without an outside witness. ‘I’ll push along into the garden,’ he said, reassuringly.

Sellon turned in a flash. ‘No, no! I’ll come clean. Oh, my God, sir!-Don’t go, my lord. Don’t you go!… I’ve made a damn’ bloody fool of myself.’

‘We all do that at times,’ said Peter, softly.

‘You’ll believe me, my lord… Oh, God, this’ll break me.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Kirk, grimly.

Peter glanced at the Superintendent, saw that he, too, recognised the appeal to an authority older than his own, and sat down on the edge of the table. ‘Pull yourself together, Sellon. Mr Kirk’s not the man to be hard or unjust to anybody. Now, what was it all about?’

‘Well… that there note-case of Mr Noakes’s-what he lost-’

‘Two years ago-well, yes. What happened to it?’

‘I found it… I-I-he’d dropped it in the road-ten pound it had in it. I-my wife was desperate bad after the baby-doctor said she ought to have special treatment-I hadn’t saved nothing-and the pay’s not much, nor the allowance-I been a damned fool-I meant to put it back right away. I thought he could spare it, being well off. I know we’re supposed to be honest, but it’s a dreadful temptation in a man’s way.’

Yes,’ said Peter. ‘A generous country expects a lot of honesty for two or three pounds a week.’ Kirk seemed incapable of speech, so he went on: ‘And what happened about it?’

‘He found out, my lord. I dunno how, but he did. Threatened to report me. Well, of course, that’d have been the end of me. Out of a job, and who’d a-given me work after that? So I ‘ad to pay him what he said, to stop his tongue.’

‘Pay him?’

‘That’s blackmail,’ said Kirk, coming out of his stupefaction with a pounce. He spoke the words as though they were, somehow, a solution of this incredible situation. ‘It’s an indictable offence. Blackmail. And compounding a felony.’

‘Call it what you like, sir-it was life and death to me. Five bob a week he been bleeding me for these last two years.’

‘Good God!’ said Peter, disgusted.

‘And I tell you, my lord, when I came in this room this morning and ‘eard as he was dead, it was like a breath of ‘Eaven to me… But I didn’t kill him-I swear I didn’t. You do believe me? My lord, you believe me. I didn’t do it.’

‘I don’t know that I could blame you if you had.’

‘But I didn’t,’ said Sellon, eagerly. Peter’s face was noncommittal and he turned to Kirk again. ‘It’s all right, sir. I know I been a fool-and worse-and I’ll take my medicine; but as sure as I stand here, I didn’t kill Mr Noakes.’

‘Well, Joe,’ said the Superintendent, heavily, ‘it’s bad enough without that. You’ve been a fool and no mistake. We’ll have to see about that later. You’d better tell us now what did happen.’

‘I came up to see him, to tell him I hadn’t got the money that week. He laughed in my face, the old devil.’

‘What time was this?’

‘I came up here by the path and I looked in at that there window. The curtains wasn’t drawn, and it was all dark. Only then I see him coming in from the kitchen with a candle in his hand. He holds the candle up to the clock there, and I see it was five minutes past nine.’

Peter shifted his position and spoke quickly: ‘You saw the clock from the window. You’re sure?’

The witness failed to catch the note of warning, and said briefly, ‘Yes, my lord.’ He licked his lips nervously and went on: ‘Then I taps on the window and he comes over and opens it. I tells him I ain’t got the money and he laughs at me, nasty-like. “All right,” he says, “I’ll report you in the morning.” So then I plucks up ‘eart and says to him, “You can’t. It’s blackmail. All this money you’ve been takin’ off of me is blackmail, and I’ll see you in the dock for it.” And he says, “Money? You can’t prove you ever paid me money. Where’s your receipts? You got nothing on paper.” So I swears at him.’

‘No wonder,’ said Peter.

‘“Get out,” he says, and slams the window shut. I tried the doors, but they was locked. So I gets out, and that’s the last I seen of him.’

Kirk drew a long breath. ‘You didn’t go into the house?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Are you telling all the truth?’

‘Honest to God, I am, sir.’

‘Sellon, are you sure?’ This time, the warning was unmistakable.

‘It’s God’s truth, my lord.’

Peter’s face changed. He got up and walked slowly over to the fireplace.

‘H’m, well,’ said Kirk. ‘I don’t rightly know what to say. See here, Joe; you better go over straight away to Pagford and check up that alibi for Crutchley. See this man Williams at the garage and get a statement from him.’

‘Very good, sir,’ said Sellon in a subdued tone.

‘I’ll talk to you when you come back.’

Sellon said again, ‘Very good, sir.’ He looked at Peter, who was gazing down at the burning logs and made no movement. ‘I hope you won’t be too hard on me, sir.’

‘That’s as may be,’ said Kirk, not unkindly. The constable went out, his big shoulders drooping.

‘Well,’ said the Superintendent, ‘and what do you think of that?’

‘It sounded straight enough-so far as the note-case was concerned. So there’s a motive for you-a nice new motive, all a-growing and a-blowing. Widens the field a bit, doesn’t it? Blackmailers don’t as a rule stop at a single victim.’

Kirk scarcely noticed this ingenious attempt to divert him from his natural suspicions. It was the breach of duty by one of his own officers that hurt him. Theft and the concealment of evidence-He hammered on at this wretched worry, the angrier because it was the kind of thing that need not ever have occurred. ‘Why couldn’t the young fool have come to his sergeant, if he was short-or to me? This is the devil and all. Beats me altogether. I wouldn’t have believed it.’

‘There are more things in heaven and earth,’ said Peter, with a kind of melancholy amusement.

‘That’s so, my lord. There’s a lot of truth in Hamlet.’’

‘Hamlet?’ Peter’s bark of harsh laughter astonished the Superintendent. ‘By God, you’re right. Village or hamlet of this merry land. Stir up the mud of the village pond and the stink will surprise you.’ He paced the room restlessly. The light thrown on Mr Noakes’s activities had only confirmed his own suspicions, and if there was one sort of criminal whom he would have been ready to strangle with his bare hands, it was the blackmailer. Five shillings a week for two years. He could not doubt that part of the story; no man would so pile up the evidence against himself unless he were telling the truth. All the same-He stopped abruptly at Kirk’s side.