Free My Name is Michael Sibley by John Bingham Page B

your mind. Everybody can change their mind. It’s a free country, isn’t it? Of course it is. Well, then? Why didn’t you just say, ‘As a matter of fact, I was going down to stay with him, but at the last moment I changed my mind. I put him off.’ That would have been a natural enough thing to say to me, wouldn’t it?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “So you agree it was a funny thing to forget? You now admit that, at last?”
    It might have been Prosset talking, fighting, challenging, across the dining-room table at school. Going on and on about some point or other.
    “Oh, all right,” I said irritably. “I admit it was a funny thing to forget, the way you put it. In fact, I’ve already admitted it. There’s no need to go on and on about it.”
    “There’s no need to get excited, sir.”
    “I wasn’t getting excited.”
    “Weren’t you, sir? I’m sorry. I thought you were. Didn’t you think Mr. Sibley was getting excited, Sergeant?”
    “I thought he sounded a little annoyed, sir. Perhaps it’s natural, if what he says is true.”
    “Perhaps you’re right, Sergeant. Perhaps I was being a little hard. Where were you on the evening and night of May 28th, the night Mr. Prosset was killed, sir?”
    The question came so gently and yet so suddenly that for a full second its implications escaped me. Then they struck with the force of a heavy blow in the stomach.
    “On the night of May 28th?”
    “That’s right, sir. That’s the question I asked.”
    “Well, I was here. I was here part of the time. Then I spent the rest of the evening with my fiancée.”
    “What time did you arrive at Miss Marsden’s place, and what time did you leave?”
    “I got there about 9:15 p.m. and I left at about one o’clock in the morning.”
    “How did you come home?”
    “How did I come home?” I repeated feebly.
    “Yes, sir, how did you come home? I suppose you haven’t forgotten that, have you, sir?”
    “No, of course not. I did not take my car that night. I walked down to Oxford Street looking for a taxi, but I did not find one until I got to Oxford Street itself.”
    “What was the number of the taxi?”
    “The number of the taxi?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I don’t know. I haven’t the faintest idea. Why should I take a note of the number of the taxi? Nobody does.”
    He ignored my question. “So you don’t know the number of the taxi? That’s a pity, but it can’t be helped, can it?”
    There was a question in my mind which I had to put to him, even though I suppose I knew that he would be bound to give the formal reply which he did.
    “What’s on your mind, Inspector? You surely don’t suspect me, do you? You don’t think I killed Prosset? He was my friend.”
    The Inspector raised his eyebrows so that his tawny eyes looked rounder and more pebbly than ever.
    “Suspect you, sir? Why should I suspect you? You ought to know as a newspaperman that we have to check up on everybody’s movements. It’s just a matter of elimination. There’s nothing on my mind, sir. I was just asking a few routine questions.”
    “After all, I was with my fiancée between 9:15 and one o’clock. She can prove that. And Prosset was killed around midnight.”
    I saw the Sergeant raise his head. He said, “How do you know that, sir?”
    “I read it in the papers.”
    “You noted that, did you, sir?” said the Inspector. “Well, as you say, you were with Miss Marsden around midnight, so that looks as though it lets you out all right, sir.”
    I took a deep breath and felt relaxed. I was glad I had made that point. I felt that it settled matters. The Inspector examined his fingernails for a moment, then looked up and stared at me full in the face, and said in quite a conversational tone, “You know, what I can’t understand is why you didn’t tell me a long time ago that, although you cancelled your visit to Mr. Prosset, you did go down there after all. That’s what puzzles me, sir. That’s the sort of obstruction