The Satan Bug by Alistair MacLean Page B

involved, you're too smart not to see that, so your story has to be true. Can they vouch for the entire night—up to eleven-fifteen, say?"
    " No." He frowned. " Stella went to bed about ten-thirty. After that I spent a couple of hours on the roof."
    " Chessingham's observatory? I've heard of it. No one can prove you were up there?"
    " No." He frowned again, thinking. " Does it matter? I haven't even a bicycle and there's no public transport at that time of night. If I was here after ten-thirty I couldn't have made it to Mordon by eleven-fifteen anyway. Four and a half miles, you know."
    " Do you know how the crime was carried out?" I asked. "I mean have you heard? By someone making a diversion to allow someone else to cut through the fences. The red herring got away in a Bedford van stolen from Alfringham."
    "I'd heard something like that. The police weren't very communicative, but rumours get around."
    " Did you know that the van was found abandoned only one hundred and fifty yards from your house?"
    "A hundred and fifty yards!" He seemed genuinely startled, then stared moodily into the fire, "That's bad, isn't it?"
    " Is it?"
    He thought briefly, then grinned. " I'm not as smart as you think. It's not bad, it's good. If I were driving that van I'd have had to go to Alfringham first for it—after leaving here at ten-thirty. Also, if I were the driver, then I obviously couldn't have gone to Mordon—I'd have been making my supposed getaway. Thirdly, I wouldn't have been so damned stupid as to park it at my front door. Fourthly, I can't drive."
    " That's, pretty conclusive," I admitted.
    " I can make it even more conclusive," he said excitedly. "Lord, I'm not thinking at all to-night. Come up to the observatory."
    We went up the stairs. We passed a door on the first floor and I could hear the subdued murmur of voices. Mrs. Chessingham and Mary talking.
    A Slingsby ladder led us up into a square hut affair built in the centre of the flat roof. One end of the hut was blanked off with plywood, an entrance covered by a hanging curtain. At the other end was a surprisingly large reflector telescope set in a perspex cupola.
    " My only hobby," Chessingham said. The strain had left his face to be replaced by the eager excitement of the enthusiast. "I'm a member of the British Astronomical Association, Jupiter Section, and a regular correspondent for a couple of astronomical journals—some of them depend almost exclusively on the work of amateurs like myself— and I can tell you that there's nothing less amateurish than an amateur astronomer who's been well and truly bitten by the bug. I wasn't in bed till almost two o'clock this morning —I was making a series of photographs for The Astronomical Monthly of the Red Spot in Jupiter and the satellite lo occulting its own shadow." He was smiling broadly in his relief now. " Here's the letter commissioning me to do them —
    they've been pleased with some other stuff I've sent in."
    I glanced at the letter. It had to be genuine, of course.
    "Got a set of six photographs. Beauties, too, although I say it myself.
    Here, I’ll let you see them." He disappeared behind the curtain which I took to be the entrance of his darkroom and reappeared with a batch of obviously very new photographs. I took them. They looked terrible to me, just a bunch of greyish dots and streaks against a fuzzily dark background. "Not bad, eh?"
    " Not bad." I paused and said suddenly, " Could anyone tell from those pictures when they were taken?"
    "That's why I brought you up here. Take those to the Greenwich observatory, have them work out the precise latitude and longitude of this house and they could tell you within thirty seconds when each of these photographs were taken. Go on, take them with you."
    " No thanks." I handed back the photographs and smiled at him. "I know when I've already wasted enough tone— and I've wasted far too much.
    Send them to The Astronomical Monthly with my best wishes."
    We found