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THE VIADUCT MURDER

"Yes, I've explained it all; I'd have explained it yesterday, if you'd let me."

"Come now, don't try and persuade me you didn't think yourself that Marryatt was guilty?"

"Guilty of murder? Not for a single, solitary moment. I did think there was something wrong with him⁠—so there was, he was hag-ridden with nightmare about Brotherhood. But I never agreed with you about Marryatt being a murderer, and, to do me justice, I never said so."

"That's all very well, but you never showed me where I was wrong in my interpretation of the whole thing."

"I know; it was no good showing you where you were wrong, because you were so confoundedly ingenious at devising fresh explanations. Honestly, I did put one or two difficulties to you, but in a second you'd persuaded yourself to believe that they were no difficulties at all. And of course there were heaps more."

"Such as?"

"Well, you persisted in regarding the whole thing as a deliberate, carefully planned murder. But if you come to think of it, the circumstances that favoured the murder were just the sort of circumstances that couldn't have been foreseen. How could a man like Marryatt know that Brotherhood was due to go bankrupt? He knows no more about the City than you do. And the fog⁠—look how the fog played up all through! How was Marryatt to know there was going to be a fog on the very day on

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