“To help on that good work, I arranged to play bridge one night at Whistlefield, so as to let him operate on his own ground. In case of accidents, I had arranged that Ardsley should come over and take charge of the casualty. I’d taken most things into account—I had to—and in case friend Ernest hit anyone else in his flurry, I arranged with Ardsley that the injured person was to ‘die’ nominally; so that friend Ernest might be convinced of the efficacy of the faked darts I’d put into his hands, and might go on to further crimes. “I needn’t go into that affair. I’m not proud of it. I never intended to risk Miss Hawkhurst in that way. Of course, I knew at once she hadn’t been poisoned with curare. But though I’d done my best to sterilise the faked darts, I was afraid of blood-poisoning setting in. I spent a bad time over it, I can tell you. One can never be sure in a case like that. “Well, there we were. He’d managed to nip back into the winter-garden before Wendover got after him. He believed Miss Hawkhurst was dead and only Arthur’s life stood between him and the whole of the Shandon-Hawkhurst money. By this time, like all successful mass-murderers, he’d begun to feel a complete contempt for the risk of detection. See Burke and Hare. “So young Hawkhurst was marked down. And this time, friend Ernest meant to have a perfect alibi. He must have guessed that I suspected his other one; and he’d made up his mind to avert even a shadow of suspicion. He’d stay under my eye at the very time that murder was being done in the Maze; nearly a mile away. That was a master-stroke, I admit. “He used his cigar-case to bait the trap—got Arthur’s back up very skilfully on the point of cowardice. And beforehand he’d set a booby-trap. He’d fixed the air-gun in position to shoot at the right level; and he’d arranged a thread to the trigger. When young Hawkhurst came to the entrance to the Maze he stepped against the thread stretched across the opening; the gun went off; and the dart hit him near the heart. So simple! And then Ernest came down with us; stumbled ‘accidentally’ over the air-gun; tore away the thread from the trigger before handing the gun to us. And then he ‘found’ Ariadne’s clue for us—the thread he’d laid down as a blind, to make us think it was a stranger at work, someone operating from the river.” “He was cleverer than I gave him credit for,” Stenness confessed, rather grudgingly. “I always thought him a dull brute.” “The contents of Roger Shandon’s will took away my last doubts,” Sir Clinton went on. “Besides that, I’d tested the dart he’d used against Miss Hawkhurst and found it was one of the faked lot stolen from the museum that night. So by then the only question was: ‘What should be done with friend Ernest?’” Sir Clinton paused and lit a fresh cigar before going on to the end of his narrative. When he spoke once more his audience was rather surprised by this theme.