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Updated: May 3, 2025
Because he knew that his master's murdered body was lying in the house, and he wanted to be in the position to produce evidence against Birchill as the murderer if he found himself in a tight corner as the result of the subsequent investigations of the police.
"When one of the main features of Hill's story is proved to be false, how can you believe any of the rest? In the light in which we now see him, with his cunning exposed, what significance is to be attached to his statement that Birchill in his presence threatened to shoot Sir Horace Fewbanks if the master of Riversbrook interfered with him?
It would cause a shock to his many friends, and especially to those who knew what a close friendship had existed between the arrested man and the dead judge. The papers expatiated on the fact that Holymead had appeared for the defence when Frederick Birchill had been tried for the murder.
It had been arranged that Birchill was to wait for me to come over to the flat on the 18th of August, the night fixed for the burglary. But about 7 o'clock, while I was at Riversbrook, I heard the noise of wheels outside, and looking out, I saw to my dismay Sir Horace getting out of a taxi-cab with a suit-case in his hand.
Without knowing it, he had been so influenced by Crewe's analysis of the case that he had practically given up the idea that Birchill had anything to do with the murder. His real reason for going to Hill's shop that morning was to try and extract something from Hill which might put him on the track of the actual murderer. He believed Hill knew more than he had divulged.
I've just brought you a message from an old friend Fred Birchill he wants to see you to-night at this address. And with that she put a bit of paper into my hand. I was so upset and excited that I said I'd be there, and she went away. "This Fred Birchill was a man I'd met in prison, and he was in the cell next to me.
Do you deny that he went up to Riversbrook that night?" "The letter sent to Scotland Yard shows that some one was there besides the murderer. If Birchill was there and helped to write the letter and so much is part of your case he wasn't the murderer. In short, I believe Birchill went up there to commit a burglary and found the murdered body of Sir Horace."
Birchill, who had been living on the girl, was furious with anger when he learnt that Sir Horace had cut off the monetary allowance he had been making her, and, on discovering by some means that his former prison associate Hill was now the butler at Sir Horace Fewbanks's house, he planned his revenge.
It was for the jury to determine for themselves whether he had been terrorised into drawing the plan for Birchill or whether he was the instigator of the burglary. The defence had contended that Hill had drawn the plan at his leisure at a time when he had access to a special quality of paper supplied to his master.
The way in which Crewe had pulled the police case to pieces had shown Rolfe that the conviction of Birchill was by no means a foregone conclusion, and had left him a prey to doubts and anxiety which Inspector Chippenfield's subsequent depreciation of the detective's views had not altogether removed. The little shop kept by the Hills was empty when Rolfe entered it, but Mrs.
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