Curiously enough, the part of the whole horrible business of the Chiltern murder that returns to plague me, is the part I myself played in its final unravelling. I don’t mean that I discovered the murderer, but I was in at the death, so to speak. And the fact is that during the whole course of the inquiry I was never entirely aware of what was actually happening. Clues turned up and were discussed in my presence without my ever having subtlety enough to see where they led. And now when I face myself in the shaving mirror, my chin covered with lather, I regard myself with amazement, and wonder how I could have been so completely fooled.
And certainly I’d never have been absurd enough to get involved in a business so fantastically foreign to my usual well-ordered and sober existence, if I h
