A directory was on the mantelpiece. It was the next afternoon. I had called upon him in his chambers. It was just an idea that came to me. I crossed over and opened it, and there was his name, "Ellenby and Co., Ships' Furnishers," in a court off the Minories. Was he helping her for the sake of his dead master--trying to get her away from the man. But why? The woman had stood by and watched the lad murdered. How could he bear even to look on her again? Unless there had been that something that had not come out--something he had learnt later--that excused even that monstrous callousness of hers. Yet what could there be? It had all been so planned, so cold-blooded. That shaving in the dining-room! It was that seemed most to stick in his throat. She must have brought him down a looking-glass; there was not one in the room. Why couldn't he have gone upstairs into the bathroom, where Hepworth always shaved himself, where he would have found everything to his hand? He had been moving about the room, talking disjointedly as he paced, and suddenly he stopped and looked at me. "Why in the dining-room?" he demanded of me. He was jingling some keys in his pocket. It was a habit of his when cross-examining, and I felt as if somehow I knew; and, without thinking--so it seemed to me--I answered him. "Perhaps," I said, "it was easier to bring a razor down than to carry a dead man up." He leant with his arms across the table, his eyes glittering with excitement. "Can't you see it?" he said. "That little back parlour with its fussy ornaments. The three of them standing round the table, Hepworth's hands nervously clutching a chair. The reproaches, the taunts, the threats. Young Hepworth--he struck everyone as a weak man, a man physically afraid--white, stammering, not knowing which way to look. The woman's eyes turning from one to the other. That flash of contempt again--she could not help it--followed, worse still, by pity. If only he could have answered back, held his own! If only he had not been afraid! And then that fatal turning away with a sneering laugh one imagines, the bold, dominating eyes no longer there to cower him. "That must have been the moment. The bullet, if you remember, entered through the back of the man's neck. Hepworth must always have been picturing to himself this meeting--tenants of garden suburbs do not carry loaded revolvers as a habit--dwelling upon it till he had worked himself up into a frenzy of hate and fear. Weak men always fly to extremes. If there was no other way, he would kill him. "Can't you hear the silence? After the reverberations had died away! And then they are both down on their knees, patting him, feeling for his heart. The man must have gone down like a felled ox; there were no traces of blood on the carpet. The house is far from any neighbour; the shot in all probability has not been heard. If only they can get rid of the body! The pond--not a hundred yards away!"