but as she knew that you had been away in the country she ought to have telephoned to learn if you had come up to London.  Instead of telephoning, she went to Riversbrook direct, and when she found you were not there she was admitted to the presence of my old friend, Inspector Chippenfield.  He is an excellent police officer, but I do not think he is a match for a clever woman.  And Mrs. Holymead is such a fine-looking woman that I feel sure Chippenfield was so impressed by her appearance that he forgot he was a police officer and remembered only that he was a man.  She managed to get him out of the room long enough to enable her to open the secret drawer in Sir Horace’s desk and remove the letters.  No doubt Sir Horace had shown her where he kept them, as their neat little hiding place was an indication of the value he placed upon them.  She was under the impression that no one knew about the letters, and her object in removing them was to prevent the police stumbling across them and so getting on the track of her husband.  But as I have already told you, Hill knew about the letters, and on the night of the murder had them in his possession.  On the night after the murder, while Inspector Chippenfield was making investigations at Riversbrook, Hill had managed to obtain the opportunity to put the letters back.  He naturally thought that if the police discovered some of Sir Horace’s private papers in his possession they would conclude that he had had something to do with the murder.

“The next point of any consequence is Holymead’s defence of Birchill and the deliberate way in which he blackened your father’s name while cross-examining Hill.  If we regard Holymead’s conduct solely from the standpoint of a barrister doing his best for his client his defence of Birchill is not so remarkable.  But we have to remember that your father and Holymead had been life-long friends.  His acceptance of the brief for the defence was in itself remarkable.  The fee, as I took the trouble to find out, was not large; indeed, for a man of Holymead’s commanding eminence at the bar it might be called a small one, and he should have returned the brief because the fee was inadequate.  We have, therefore, two things to consider—­his defence of the man charged with the murder of your father, and his readiness to do the work without regard to the monetary side of it.  Much was said at the time in some of the papers about a barrister being a servant of the court and compelled by the etiquette of the bar to place his services at the disposal of anyone who needs them and is prepared to pay for them.  A great deal of nonsense has been said and written on that subject.  A barrister can return a brief because for private reasons he does not wish to have anything to do with the case.  It was Holymead’s duty to do his best to get Birchill off whether he believed his client was guilty or innocent.  Could Holymead have done his best for Birchill if he had believed that Birchill