"From you, Mr. Bellamy," said Finucane, "who wouldn't?"
"I'm so sleepy that if I don't give it now, I may forget it. Properly handled, that dirty thing in the chair there will give his show away. Keep him to-night as a drunk and disorderly. Better have a doctor to him. I tasted the stuff. Tomorrow I'll swear a dozen charges against him--burglary, abduction, instigation to murder, attempts to kill; and when he hears 'em read over, he'll be putty in your fingers."
"Next: ring up the police and the station-master at Todsmoor. Tell 'em to keep tight hold of the man who fell out of the train between Harthborough and Todsmoor at five-forty p.m. and of the bloke that was with him, suspected of throwing him out."
Finucane paid his guest the compliment of obeying without question.
"The man's in hospital, all right," he said, "broken collar-bone. I was just in time to prevent them from letting the other go. They're to hold him on a charge of throwing his pal out."
"I did that," said Dick. "At least, I scared the bird off his perch."
"And I'll send this one," he said, "to his nest."
When Melchard had been removed, Dick gave his three listeners a rapid and, as their faces and exclamatory comment testified, a vivid sketch of his adventure from his detection of the perfume which pervaded the alcove in Randal's study and the corroboration of his suspicions given by Melchard's attempted alibi in the letter to Amaryllis, to the time when his train pulled out of Todsmoor station; and, in the course of his narrative, he laid on the table, each at its historic point, his _pièces de conviction_.
Having told how Amaryllis had fainted at the sight of Ockley with the knife-point protruding from the back of his neck, he extracted the Webley from his overcrowded pocket.
"That," he said, "is the man's gun, which Miss Caldegard found for me."
Later, he produced Mut-mut's baag-nouk, laying it, talons upward, beside the Webley.
"That was strapped to his hand. I gave him the first of my two shots before he jumped, the second I put through his head as he lay scrabbling in the car."
At this point there entered the room a stout, bearded man with careworn face and irritable expression. Finucane rose respectfully, but the new-comer made a motion waiving ceremony, sat in the nearest chair, and became one of the audience.