“It has been shown that there is both reason for and corroboration of Digby-Coates’s hatred of Hoode. “It has been shown not only that all the evidence against Deacon can be used equally well against Digby-Coates, but also that there is in fact more of this evidence of material signs against Digby-Coates than there is against Deacon. “Above all, we have in the case against Digby-Coates two things (which might be called one thing) that there have never been against Deacon. The first is motive—although it is nothing more (nor less) than the crazy hatred of a half-madman. The second is reliable evidence that ill-will existed before the murder. IV “If I were delivering this report as a lecture, I am sure that there would be a little fat man in a corner bounding up and down with ill-suppressed irritation. At this stage he would be unable to restrain himself any longer and would ask passionately why the hell I was wasting my time and his by faking up a case against a man who had a chilled-steel alibi—the perfect, unassailable defence of a man who is seen by various people at such times and in such a place as to make it impossible for him to have committed the crime. “I would assure the fat little man—as I assure those who read—that I would in due course deal with and demolish that alibi, pointing out at the same time that it was the very perfection of the thing which had bred some of my first suspicions of its owner. It was too good, too complete, in a household where every one else had only ordinary ones; it was a Sunday-go-to-meeting alibi; the alibi of a man who at least knew that a crime was going to be committed. “But more of that later. For the moment I will take two points which, though they might be considered proper to the first part of this document, I have seen fit to reserve until now. “The first concerns a rope. I have explained that I found it necessary to search the house. During that search, which was not only for the missing letters from the drawer in Hoode’s writing-table, I went into Deacon’s bedroom. This is next to, and on the west side of, the room used by Digby-Coates as a sitting-room, study, and, occasionally, carpenter’s shop. (He has had a bench fitted up there for him, as I mentioned earlier.) “In the grate in Deacon’s bedroom was a little pile of soot which at once attracted my attention, as being unusual in so scrupulously tended a house as Abbotshall. I investigated. On the ledge which runs round the interior of the chimney at the point where—on a level with the mantelpiece outside—it suddenly narrows, I found a coil of silk cord of roughly the thickness of a man’s little finger. It was double-knotted at intervals of two inches throughout its length, which was sixteen feet. (By the time this report is read the rope will be in the hands of the authorities. They would have had it sooner, only I was not giving away information until my case was complete.)