“Well, I won’t dazzle you with further extracts. Let’s get back to business. Go on with your list.” “Young Torrance,” Wendover continued. “He’s a possible agent. I don’t know about his financial circumstances; he may be hard up, for all I know, and amenable to the cash bait that Hackleton could offer. It would be a pretty big one. Young Torrance was the person who proposed that game in the Maze to Miss Forrest. That would give him a reasonable excuse for being in the Maze at that particular time; and further, it would ensure that he was free from the girl’s supervision at the critical moment. Could you have invented a neater dodge yourself if you’d been set to it?” “No,” Sir Clinton admitted, frankly, “I doubt if I could.” “Take another point,” Wendover pursued his line of reasoning with increased interest. “What evidence have we that there ever was a third individual in the Maze at all? Torrance’s statements: but if Torrance was the murderer himself, of course he’d insist that a third person was present. Miss Forrest’s story of someone running in the Maze: but that may have been Torrance himself. You remember that she found it most difficult to tell the direction from which sounds came when she was in the Maze.” “That’s a theory that might take some upsetting, Squire, if you can explain just one point. What did Torrance do with his air-gun after he’d finished with it? No air-gun was found in the Maze after the business. The murderer got rid of it somehow.” “I see no great difficulty there,” Wendover pointed out at once. “Look at the time Miss Forrest spent in wandering up and down in the Maze, unable to find her way out. If Torrance knew the labyrinth, he could easily make his way through it, get out to the river bank, chuck his gun into the water, and sprint back again into the Maze before she noticed his absence.” He thought for a moment before adding: “In fact, I don’t see why he mayn’t have got rid of the gun in the interval between the last murder and the moment he gave the alarm—the time when he shouted out that he’d found the body.” He paused again. Then a further flash of insight threw a fresh light on the case. “Why, of course, that would account for the running man. He would be rushing to the river bank and back again as quick as he could go, for the essential thing would be to get rid of the gun before anyone met him in the Maze.” Sir Clinton had dropped all his air of superior criticism. “That’s remarkably neat, Squire. I shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t touch the root of the business—at one or two points, at the least.”