“How true! How trite! And, in this instance, how utterly wrong! Observe. Both Digby-Coates and Deacon are highly intelligent men. Suppose either of them wishing to show by moving back the hands of a clock that the clock stopped at a time earlier than it did in fact: would either make the ridiculous, childish mistake of forgetting the striking? I think not! “Observe again. Two men know that one asked the other the time. Why, then, is the subsequent utilising of that incident to be attributed to only one of them? Clearly it can apply equally to both! “Here again the evidence which has been used against Deacon can be used at least equally well against Digby-Coates. “This clock business, I say, is only further proof of the great ingenuity of Digby-Coates. It was the cleverest stroke of all. Deacon innocently, naturally, asks him the time. At once Digby-Coates, having already made up his mind that to-night was the night, is seized with an idea whose brilliance is surprising even to himself. Deacon, the man he has already chosen as scapegoat, is playing into his hands. “Suppose (I can see his mind working) that he slew Hoode just on the hour, and then made sure, after the clock in the study had struck, that its works, though undamaged, would not go on working, and then moved the hands back till they stood at 10.45. The disorder of the striking when the clock was set going again would reveal to investigators the fact that the hands had been moved and that the clock had stopped not before the hour but after it. Why, these investigators, would ask, had the hands been moved to that particular place—10.45? Soon they would find out—he, clever fellow! helping them without seeming to—that at this moment on the night of the crime Deacon had asked him the time. ‘Ah-ha!’ would say the investigators, ‘Mr. Deacon, to whom so much else points, has been trying to make alibis for himself!’ “But how, he thinks, can he carry out this great, this wonderful scheme? Ah, yes! Let him put himself in Deacon’s place; let him think what Deacon would do if he was killing Hoode. If he stopped the clock, he wouldn’t draw too much attention to it, so—so—ah, yes!—he would try to make it look as if there had been a struggle and would derange the tidy room accordingly! “That, I am convinced, is the way Digby-Coates reasoned. To put it briefly, he had to arrange the study to look, not as if a struggle had really taken place, but as if some one had tried their best to _make it look like that_. That is to say, while giving the air of a genuine attempt to mislead, he must yet make sure that investigators were not, in fact, misled; the first thing, for instance, that he had to do was to ensure that attention was drawn to the clock, but in such a way as to make it seem that endeavours had been made to draw attention _from_ it.