Death Has Deep Roots Read Online Free PDF Page B

line we’re taking.”
    “I wouldn’t mind knowing that myself,” said McCann frankly. “On the facts you have given me there’s only one person could have done the job—”
    “That’s what they all say,” agreed Nap. “I guarantee, though, that you won’t talk for ten minutes to this girl and go away thinking she’s guilty.”
    “He’s very sensitive to atmosphere,” agreed Mrs. McCann. “He proposed to me the moment he saw my wine list.”
    “I can well believe it,” said Nap. “I’d have done it for your clarets alone. Now this is the idea. If the girl is innocent – and we’re presuming she is – then there are two obvious lines. First we must destroy the motive put forward by the prosecution.”
    “Produce Wells.”
    “Yes. Or someone who heard from him after he was parachuted into France – someone to whom he may have mentioned Vicky.”
    “I don’t think that’s awfully hopeful,” said McCann. “Even the most casual person would hardly write that sort of thing in a letter home, would he? ‘Last week I met a smashing girl called Vicky Lamartine and with any luck she should be having a child by me sometime next June—”
    “There’s no need to be coarse, Angus.”
    “I imagine he’d wrap it up a bit,” agreed Nap. “But I can’t be expected to tell you what we’ll find until we find it.”
    “And your second line?”
    “Well, that’s not quite so simple to explain. What I feel about it is this. You start from one indisputable fact, that Eric Thoseby was murdered. Now, in a general way, Eric was an easygoing sort of chap. People who met him rather liked him. I can’t imagine him making any mortal enemies – except in connection with his Resistance work. So far as that side of him was concerned, it was business first, business last, business all the time. He was amiable but absolutely and completely ruthless. Because he happened to believe in the job he was doing. Therefore, I think it’s a fair bet that if he made any mortal enemies we shall find the beginning of the trail on the Loire.”
    “That’s fair enough,” said McCann.
    “And another thing – we still want to know a great deal more about what actually did happen in September, 1943. All we’ve got to go on at the moment is a certain amount of hearsay and an account – admittedly rather a biased account – given us by Vicky herself. There may be people in the Maine-et-Loire district who know what actually happened – no one’s bothered to ask them yet. I don’t think you can blame the police for that – it just doesn’t happen to be part of their case.”
    Kitty McCann finished the sock she was darning, rolled it into a ball and laid it with a heap of others on top of the cellar book on the big old-fashioned gramophone beside her chair.
    Both men were silent with their own thoughts, and she addressed the remark to them equally.
    “What are you going to do,” she said, “if all the facts you unearth show more and more clearly that Miss Lamartine did do the murder?”
    “Oh, I don’t know.” Nap sounded uncomfortable. “I suppose we’d have to pick out the ones that were least unfavorable and spring them on the other side at the last moment. Unexpected facts are better than no facts at all.”
    “Blind ’em with science,” suggested McCann.
    “I see,” said Mrs. McCann thoughtfully. “Yes – I suppose that’s what you’d have to do.”

 
Chapter Six
     
    On Wednesday morning Major McCann called on Chief Inspector Hazlerigg at Scotland Yard.
    It was the same room, the one he had been in a number of times before, with the waxed linoleum, the green filing cabinets, the neat, unused-looking desk. The only thing which was missing was the camp bed in the corner; the one which Hazlerigg used when times of stress forced him to eat and sleep and live with his work. It had been there during the days of the Fifth Column in 1938. McCann himself remembered it there when the Gilbert-Jacoby crowd was