“You take a point,” conceded Bony. And Knocker Harris cried triumphantly:

“Therey’are, Inspector. Benkonked out onsomethin ’ not gin. You got to study this killing to find the lay of it.” His small eyes gleamed with sardonic humour. “Millions of people had no time for Ben and his weather-predictin’. And the politicians are in it, too. They were allagin Ben, like. He told us. The politicians would have their mothers murdered if they could hire someone to murder ’emfor nineteen andelevenpence. As for the Jews…”

“You keep off the Jews, Knocker,” roared Mr. Luton. “I’ll have no sectarianism in my house. “You’ll be…”

“Tell me about this last drinking bout,” interposed Bony, and Knocker Harris was unabashed.

“Yes, tell him,” he urged, and Mr. Luton said:

“It’ll be easy. Ben hadn’t been along for about two weeks, when he came down from the big house one afternoon. He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask him, but he was soured by something or other, and when I seen how he was, I suggested a bender as we hadn’t had one going on for six months. First he says no, and then he says yes and to hell with everything, and so we got stuck into the gin.”

“You happened to have a supply of gin on hand?” Bony asked.

“I did, Inspector. Well, after a bit we didn’t want to eat no more. Now and then Knocker would call in and cook us a feed, hut we didn’t want it. Then he tried us out with soup, and after that he gave us up.

“Mind you, this was all on the programme. Nothing unusual. We talked about the old days. We sang all the old songs we knew. Now and then we took the whips down and went outside and flogged the trees, pretending wewas once more on the tracks with the bullock teams. It ended like it always did. One of us got thinking about his mother, and then we cried and called each other drunken sots and swore off the booze for ever. That was two days before he died.