He drummed on the table.
“Well,” he burst out at last, “I’ll admit that. I’ll admit—for the sake of argument—that Lathom might have murdered your father, though I don’t believe it for a moment. But it was physically impossible. How could he? He was here in London all the time.”
“That’s where you can help me. Why was it impossible? How do you know it was impossible? Can you prove that it was impossible?”
“I’m sure I can.”
“Will you let me have all the facts you know about the whole thing from the beginning?”
“Of course I will. Damn it all, if Lathom did do it, he deserves everything that’s coming to him. He’d have to be an absolute swine. Mind you, Lathom and I didn’t always get on together, but—its absurd. He can’t have done it. But we’ve got to kill the possibility.”
He began to walk up and down, visibly perturbed. I waited. We were interrupted by a servant announcing dinner.
“You’ll stay?” said Munting. “You must meet my wife. She has a very clear head for this kind of thing.”
I accepted, not wishing to lose a day in getting to the bottom of the matter. We did not, of course, talk about the subject while the maid was in the room, but after dinner we all went into the library, and there outlined the story to Mrs. Munting. I mention her, not because she was able to contribute anything of great value to the discussion (though, being a woman, she was more willing than her husband to allow that a young man might murder an older one for a woman’s sake), but because she fetched out the letters which Munting had written to her during his period of residence at Whittington Terrace, in order to verify facts and