Well, we’d worked that out, too; like I said. There’d always be a risk that they wouldn’t accept a brother’s alibi, that we two was together. The other time, about the accident, they’d had no special reason to suspect me, they’d accepted that all right; but this might at any moment turn into a murder enquiry. And a murder enquiry into us, now they knew about the hit-and-run. But as he said—we had the alternative.
I hadn’t counted on its being Inspector Cockrill. When I realised it was him—come all the way over from Heronsford—I knew they meant business. And to be honest, it struck a bit chill to the heart of me. A little man he is, for a policeman, and near retiring age, he must be—he looks like a grandfather; but his eyes are as bright as a bird’s and they seem to look right into you. He came into the old woman’s best parlour and he had us brought in there, and he looked us up and down. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘the famous Birdswell twins! You certainly are identicals, aren’t you?’ And he gave us a look of a sort of fiendish glee, or so it seemed to me, and said: ‘And devoted, I hear? An almost mystic bond, I hear? David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias and all the rest of it? In fact,’ he said, ‘you might properly be called—blood brothers?’
We stood in front of him, silent. He said at last: ‘Well, which is which?—and no nonsense.’
We told him: and no nonsense.
‘So you’re the one that killed the child?’ he said to me. ‘And drove on, regardless.’
‘I never was near the child,’ I said. ‘I was in the woods, on Monday evening—poaching.’
‘Yours is the name stated in the anonymous letter.’
‘I don’t know who wrote the letter,’ I said. ‘But no one can tell us apart, me and my brother.’
‘Even your fancy girl?’ he said. ‘It appears it was she who wrote the letter.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, ‘by my fancy girl.’
‘Well, everybody else does,’ he said. ‘All the village knows she was playing you off, one against the other. And grinning behind their hands, waiting for her husband’s home-coming.’
‘But all the village can’t tell us two apart,’ I said. ‘I was out poaching.’
‘That’s a damn lie,’ says Fred, playing it the way we’d agreed upon. ‘That was me, poaching.’
‘One of you was poaching?’ says Inspector Cockrill, very smooth. ‘And one of you was with the lady? And even the lady couldn’t have said which was which?’
He said it sort of—suggestive. ‘I dare say she might,’ I said, ‘later on in the proceedings. But there wouldn’t have been any proceedings that night, there wouldn’t have been time: because the accident happened.’
‘Why should she say so positively that it was you, then?’
‘I dare say she thought it was,’ I says. ‘I dare say he told her so. She’d finished with him: it would be the only way he could get her.’
‘I see,’ said Inspector Cockrill. ‘How very ingenious!’ I didn’t know whether he meant how ingenious of Fred to have thought of it then, or of me to think of it now.
‘Don’t you listen to him, sir,’ says Fred. ‘He’s a bloody liar. I wasn’t with the girl that night. I tell you—I was poaching.’
‘All right, you were poaching,’ said Inspector Cockrill. ‘Any witnesses?’
‘Of course not. You don’t go poaching with witnesses. I used to go with him,’ said Fred, bitterly, gesturing with his head towards me, ‘but not since he pinched my girl, the bloody so-and-so.’
‘And last night?’ says the Inspector softly. ‘When the girl was murdered?’
‘Last night too, the same,’ said Fred. ‘I was in the woods poaching.’
‘You call me a liar!’ I said. ‘It was me in the woods. The Vicar saw me going there.’
‘It was me the Vicar saw,’ said Fred. ‘I told him, Good evening, and he laughed and said, “Going poaching?” ’
‘There!’ said Inspector Cockrill to me, like a teacher patiently getting the truth from a difficult child. ‘How could he know that? Because the Vicar will surely confirm it?’
‘He knows it because I told him,’ I said. ‘I told him I’d been poaching and I hoped the Vicar hadn’t really realised where I was going.’
‘Very ingenious,’ said Inspector Cockrill again. ‘Ve-ry ingenious.’ It seemed like he couldn’t get over it all, sitting there shaking his head at the wonder of it. But I knew he was playing for time, I knew that we’d foxed him. And Fred knew too. He suggested, reasonably: ‘Why should you be so sure, sir, that the girl was murdered? Why not just a second hit-and-run?’