ness! But if the bodies were brought
together somehow and Robert's death looked like suicide?.... Was it
possible?

Madness again. Too difficult. (Only twenty minutes now.) Too difficult
to arrange in twenty minutes. Can't arrange a suicide. Too difficult....
Only nineteen minutes....

And then the sudden inspiration! Robert dead in the office, Mark's body
hidden in the passage--impossible to make Robert seem the murderer, but
how easy to make Mark! Robert dead and Mark missing; why, it jumped to
the eye at once. Mark had killed Robert--accidentally; yes, that would
be more likely--and then had run away. Sudden panic.... (He looks at his
watch again. Fifteen minutes, but plenty of time now. The thing arranges
itself.)

Was that the solution, Antony wondered. It seemed to fit in with the
facts as they knew them; but then, so did that other theory which he had
suggested to Bill in the morning.

"Which one?" said Bill.

They had come back from Jallands through the park and were sitting in
the copse above the pond, from which the Inspector and his fishermen had
now withdrawn. Bill had listened with open mouth to Antony's theory, and
save for an occasional "By Jove!" had listened in silence. "Smart man,
Cayley," had been his only comment at the end.

"Which other theory?"

"That Mark had killed Robert accidentally and had gone to Cayley for
help, and that Cayley, having hidden him in the passage, locked the
office door from the outside and hammered on it."

"Yes, but you were so dashed mysterious about that. I asked you what
the point of it was, and you wouldn't say anything." He thought for a
little, and then went on, "I suppose you meant that Cayley deliberately
betrayed Mark, and tried to make him look like a murderer?"

"I wanted to warn you that we should probably find Mark in the passage,
alive or dead."

"And now you don't think so?"

"Now I think that his dead body is there."

"Meaning that Cayley went down and killed him afterwards after you had
come, after the police had come?"

"Well, that's what I shrink from, Bill. It's so horribly cold-blooded.
Cayley may be capable of it, but I hate to think of it."

"But, dash it all, your other way is cold-blooded enough. According to
you, he goes up to the office and deliberately shoots a man with whom he
has no quarrel, whom he hasn't seen for fifteen years!"

"Yes, but to save his own neck. That makes a difference. My theory is
that he quarrelled viole