‘Do you mean that I should be locked in the cell and kept there and hidden from the world?’

‘You surely heard the instructions of the Inspector?’ [...]

‘Is this all a joke for entertainment purposes?’

‘If you take it that way I will be indefinitely beholden to you,’ said the Sergeant earnestly, ‘and I will remember you with real emotion. It would be a noble gesture and an unutterable piece of supreme excellence on the part of the deceased.’

‘What!’ I cried.

‘You must recollect that to turn everything to your own advantage is one of the regulations of true wisdom as I informed you privately. It is the following of this rule on my part that makes you a murderer this today evening.

The Inspector required a captured prisoner as the least tiniest minimum for his inferior bonhomie and mal d’esprit. It was your personal misfortune to be present adjacently at the time but it was likewise my personal good fortune and good luck. There is no option but to stretch you for the serious offence.’

‘Stretch me?’

‘Hang you by the windpipe before high breakfast time.’

‘That is most unfair,’ I stuttered, ‘it is unjust…rotten…fiendish.’ My voice rose to a thin tremolo of fear.

‘It is the way we work in this part of the country,’ explained the Sergeant.