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appreciate the weight of the pyramid he is supporting, and he counters H.Q. with a request for assistance. Alas for Shelton! This day he has shed many illusions. He has been pushed around by a bunch of reporters who have found out a good deal more than he has. It was they, not he, who discovered the hotel was locked up by 11.30 p.m., and that the guests, all
forty-four
of them, and the staff, could each show themselves to have been inside it. It was they, not he, who elicited that the American set out, it must be, after 10 p.m., as he did by habit, always alone, usually northward along the cliffs. It was not that Shelton would not have made these discoveries, but that he did not get the chance, there being only one Shelton, assisted by his sergeant, as against fourteen reporters; fourteen reporters, furthermore, who knew what to ask as well as Shelton, and wasted no time in asking it, or in collating the answers. And yet, after all, it is not very much, removed from the context of banner headlines, and promises to lead to no more in the useful future. Rather it is scraping the bottom, of which Shelton is miserably aware; it is likely no one will ever know more, or very much more, than he does at present. It may even be that the lonely American did indeed slay himself. Hence, being found in this frame of mind, Shelton makes a quick decision: he has done his best, in the limits and conditions, and if more is required, let others come after it, and because his point of view, so stated, would find no favour with authority, he translates it into an irresistible form: I’ll need more men. What for? At least, to let him start level with the press! To enable him, within a reasonable time, to cope with three-score-and-ten interrogations. Though, as Shelton craftily insinuates, it will probably be winnowing chaff only, he has no reason to anticipate, as it leaves him, that further interrogations will produce anything. Pause, discussion at H.Q. Has he, H.Q. asks, come to any conclusion? Not a conclusion, Shelton replies hastily, but a feeling, you know how it is, that if anyone did murder the American, which is far from being established, then that someone is outside the scope of the present inquiries. Not a local person, Shelton says daringly, nobody in the hotel or the village. Someone out of the American’s past. If the American, indeed, were murdered. More discussion at H.Q. Have you found the weapon? H.Q. ask. Shelton is obliged to admit he hasn’t, though he has had Stody tramping the cliff-top all day. Any thoughts about that? H.Q. ask. Shelton has many thoughts about that. In the first place, he has dragged out of Halliday the general proposition that suicides often try two or more methods. Thus it is far from unlikely that the twenty-two incisions were self-inflicted, a sort of bungled hara-kiri, which the American had not the courage to consummate; while as for the weapon, Halliday agreed that a piece of broken glass would suffice, and Shelton himself, on an excursion along the cliff-top, had counted eight discarded bottles, two of them broken. Any glass he might have used? Not exactly, but it proved nothing. He may have made the incisions somewhere else, say on the beach, where there were also bottles. Then, if it chanced to have been on the foreshore where the American abandoned his bloodied glass, the next tide would have removed it, buried it, or if neither of these, at least unbloodied it. Shrewd Shelton! What a plausible picture he is building up for H.Q., or rather, letting H.Q. draw from him, goaded by his request for more men. The cleverer, because H.Q. will want to believe it, to cut the case down to coroner-size, to return Shelton to his breaking-and-enterings and to keep the crime record tidy. On the one hand, sensational murder, straining resources and offering no credit; on the other, a routine suicide, with credit to Shelton for pricking the bubble. Can they hesitate? Not for long! Report back in,