Wendover looked keenly at Sir Clinton as he brought out the secretary’s name; but the Chief Constable showed no sign of special interest. “Stenness?” he repeated. “Stenness was undoubtedly at the house at twenty to five, or thereabouts, for Miss Forrest saw him when she came back.” “Then he’d plenty of time to be down at the Maze at the critical period and get home to the house again while Torrance and Miss Forrest were wandering about in the labyrinth?” “He had,” Sir Clinton agreed, gravely. “He’d have been the ideal agent for Hackleton,” Wendover pursued. “And if Ernest’s not got the wind up about nothing—which is always possible, of course—Stenness would be worth watching.” “He is being watched,” Sir Clinton assured him, and then seemed to regret his confidence. Wendover, however, seized on the point at once. “Ah! So after all your criticisms it seems you believe in my original theory!” “I’ve forgotten which that was, by this time,” Sir Clinton admitted. “What was it?” The Squire was rather nettled. “You poured scorn on it at the time. What I said was this: Suppose Hackleton hired a man to put Neville Shandon out of the way. You say that was a local man, according to some evidence which you haven’t divulged to me. Very good. If he was a local man, he might have had access to Roger Shandon’s private papers, his cheque-book, and so forth. When he was hired for the Neville Shandon business, he may have decided to make a bit extra by forgery, and cover it up by the second murder. Two murders are as cheap as one, when it comes to pay for them; and Roger’s murder has confused the trail very considerably. It’s only a question of identifying the man who could have managed all that without going too much out of his way and attracting attention.” Sir Clinton had been listening carefully to Wendover’s exposition. “That’s very neat indeed,” he conceded. “It would certainly hold water, if it fitted all the facts that you know, Squire; but unfortunately it leaves out of account the most interesting fact of all.” “And that is?” Wendover demanded, with some asperity. He was annoyed to find that he had overlooked something. “That is the most interesting fact of all,” Sir Clinton assured him blandly. Then, with a change of tone: “And that’s all I’m able to say just now, Squire. I’ve no fault to find with your reasoning. It hangs together beautifully. But sometimes the human mind, if you follow me, is apt to assume connections where no such things exist in Nature. We’ve got an instinctive craving to trace associations between sets of phenomena—and at times we kid ourselves that there is some relationship when really it’s only a case of simultaneity.” “You’ve been reading one of these shilling manuals lately,” said Wendover suspiciously. “‘How to be a Philosopher in Ten Minutes,’ or something like that. All this gay talk about simultaneity and phenomena and association comes straight from there. You can’t deceive me with a veneer of learning.”