The sandy-haired man paused, with a reminiscent smile.
“Ever noticed how extraordinarily dense you can be at times, even with a plain fact staring you straight in the face? There was one staring at me for ten minutes that night before my grey matter began to stir.”
“Just hold on a minute,” interrupted the Barrister. “Is this plain fact staring us in the face now?”
“No, it isn’t,” conceded the narrator. “At the moment you are in the position of the other people in that room. Mind you, I’ve left out nothing in order to mystify you; the story, as I have given it to you, is a plain unvarnished account of what took place. But I’m out to disprove your half-brick theory, lawyer-man, and to do so with such little story-telling ability as I happen to possess.
“Now, I won’t weary you with what happened during the next week, beyond saying that an inquest and a burglary took place. And the latter, at any rate, was very successful. The former moved along obvious lines, and resulted in Jack Fairfax being arrested for the wilful murder of his guardian, Roger Marley. The evidence was purely circumstantial, but it was about as damning as it could be. Jack admitted to having had an interview with Marley that night; he admitted that they had had an appalling quarrel. What was even worse was that he admitted to having struck the old man in a furious fit of rage, but beyond that he denied everything. He absolutely swore that the blow he struck Marley could not have killed him; further, that he had never handled the poker. And then, a finger-print expert proved that he had. That was the worst shock of the lot, and his explanation given afterwards that, now he came to think of it, he had picked up the poker to ram the tobacco down in his pipe convinced no one. He indignantly denied that his action in going up to London by the last train was in any sense running away; he had intended all along to go up by that train. And his reason for leaving the house after the interview without attempting to see his _fiancée_ was that he was in such a rage with her father that he couldn’t trust himself to speak to her for fear of what he might say.
“So much for Jack Fairfax’s case—pretty black, as you will agree. In fact, I don’t think I should be exaggerating if I said that there were only two people in England convinced of his innocence. And he was one of them. Even Joan’s faith was shaken, a little.