Thirty EMILY EXPLAINS

It was a crowd of people almost too surprised for words that crowdedround Emily Trefusis.
Inspector¹ Narracott had led his prisoner from the room.
Charles Enderby found his voice first.
“For heaven’s sake, cough it up, Emily,” he said. “I want to get to the tele-graph office. Every moment’s vital.”
“It was Major Burnaby who killed Captain Trevelyan.”
“Well, I saw Narracott arrest him. And I suppose Narracott’s sane² —hasn’t gone off his nut suddenly. But how can Burnaby have killed Trev-elyan? I mean how is it humanly possible? If Trevelyan was killed at fiveand twenty past five—”
“He wasn’t. He was killed at about a quarter to six.”
“Well, but even then—”
“I know. You’d never guess unless you just happened to think of it. Skis—that’s the explanation—skis.”
“Skis?” repeated everyone.
Emily nodded.
“Yes. He deliberately³ engineered that table-turning. It wasn’t an acci-dent and done unconsciously as we thought, Charles. It was the second al-ternative that we rejected—done on purpose. He saw it was going to snowbefore very long. That would make it perfectly⁴ safe and wipe out alltracks. He created the impression that Captain Trevelyan was dead—goteveryone all worked up. Then he pretended to be very upset and insistedon starting off for Exhampton.
“He went home, buckled⁵ on his skis (they were kept in a shed in thegarden with a lot of other tackle) and started. He was an expert on skis.
It’s all down hill to Exhampton — a wonderful run. It would only takeabout ten minutes.
“He arrived at the window and rapped. Captain Trevelyan let him in, allunsuspecting. Then, when Captain Trevelyan’s back was turned he seizedhis opportunity, picked up that sandbag thing and—and killed him. Ugh! Itmakes me sick to think of it.”
She shuddered⁶.
“It was all quite easy. He had plenty of time. He must have wiped andcleaned the skis and then put them into the cupboard in the dining room,pushed in among all the other things. Then, I suppose he forced the win-dow and pulled out all the drawers and things—to make it look as thoughsomeone had broken in.

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