 see that there's at any rate a prima facie case against me. I expect I shall get off with a year or two's imprisonment as accessory after the fact—I think that's what they call it. Anyhow, I shall be in a position to prove that I am not implicated in the murder of this unfortunate nincompoop.' He pointed, with a strange, scornful gesture of his elbow, to the bed. 'And now, shall we go? Everyone is asleep, but there will be a policeman within call of the watchman in the portico. I am at your service. Let us go down together, Mr Racksole. I give you my word to go quietly.'
'Stay a moment,' said Theodore Racksole curtly; 'there is no hurry. It won't do you any harm to forego another hour's sleep, especially as you will have no work to do to-morrow. I have one or two more questions to put to you.'
'Well?' Rocco murmured, with an air of tired resignation, as if to say, 'What must be must be.'
'Where has Dimmock's corpse been during the last three or four days, since he—died?'
'Oh!' answered Rocco, apparently surprised at the simplicity of the question. 'It's been in my room, and one night it was on the roof; once it went out of the hôtel as luggage, but it came back the next day as a case of Demerara sugar. I forget where else it has been, but it's been kept perfectly safe and treated with every consideration.'
'And who contrived all these manoeuvres?' asked Racksole as calmly as he could.
'I did. That is to say, I invented them and I saw that they were carried out. You see, the suspicions of your police obliged me to be particularly spry.'
'And who carried them out?'
'Ah! that would be telling tales. But I don't mind assuring you that my accomplices were innocent accomplices. It is absurdly easy for a man like me to impose on underlings—absurdly easy.'
'What did you intend to do with the corpse ultimately?' Racksole pursued his inquiry with immovable countenance.
'Who knows?' said Rocco, twisting his beautiful moustache. 'That would have depended on several things—on your police, for instance. But probably in the end we should have restored this mortal clay'—again he jerked his elbow—'to the man's sorrowing relatives.
