“Yes; but it’s not quite so simple as you make out. What was Levy doing in that surreptitious way at Freke’s on Monday night?”
“Rot, Wimsey. You said yourself it wouldn’t do.”
“Excellent. It won’t do. Therefore Freke was lying. Why should he lie about it, unless he had some object in hiding the truth?”
“Because Levy, contrary to all expectation, had been seen at the corner of the road. That was a nasty accident for Freke. He thought it best to be beforehand with an explanation—of sorts. He reckoned, of course, on nobody’s ever connecting Levy with Battersea Park.”
“Well, then, we come back to the first question: Why did Levy go there?”
“I don’t know, but he was got there somehow. Why did Freke buy all those Peruvian Oil shares?”
“Anyway,” went on Wimsey, “Freke expected him, and made arrangements to let him in himself, so that Cummings shouldn’t see who the caller was.”
“Oh, Charles! I did not expect this of you. This is the purest Suggery! Who saw him go? Somebody said ‘Good-night’ and walked away down the street. And you believe it was Levy because Freke didn’t go out of his way to explain that it wasn’t.”
“D’you mean that Freke walked cheerfully out of the house to Park Lane, and left Levy behind—dead or alive—for Cummings to find?”
“We have Cummings’s word that he did nothing of the sort. A few minutes after the steps walked away from the house, Freke rang the library bell and told Cummings to shut up for the night.”
“Well—there’s a side door to the house, I suppose—in fact, you know there is—Cummings said so—through the hospital.”
“Levy went up into the library and never came down. You’ve been in Freke’s library. Where would you have put him?”
“But suppose the man went in to turn down the bed?”
“Beds are turned down by the housekeeper, earlier than ten o’clock.”
“Yes.... But Cummings heard Freke about the house all night.”
“He heard him go in and out two or three times. He’d expect him to do that, anyway.”
“Do you mean to say Freke got all that job finished before three in the morning?”
“Well, call it quick work. Besides, why three? Cummings never saw him again till he called him for eight o’clock breakfast.”
“I don’t say he didn’t get back from Park Lane before three. But I don’t suppose Cummings went and looked through the bathroom keyhole to see if he was in the bath.”