'Has it indeed, sir? I'm sure it's the one as I put here at the end of this row. Somebody must have been and changed it.'
'But--' said the inspector. He stopped in mid-speech, as though struck by a sudden thought. 'I think you'd better let me have those cellar keys of yours, Craven, and we'll get this cellar properly examined, That'll do for the moment. If you'll just step upstairs with me, Mr Egg, I'd like a word with you.'
'Always happy to oblige,' said Monty agreeably. They returned to the upper air.
'I don't know if you realise, Mr Egg,' observed the inspector, 'the bearing, or, as I might say, the inference of what you said just now. Supposing you're right about this bottle not being the right one, somebody's changed it on purpose, and the right one's missing. And, what's more, the person that changed the bottle left no fingerprints behind him--or her.'
'I see what you mean,' said Mr Egg, who had indeed, drawn this inference some time ago, 'and what's more, it looks as if the poison had been in the bottle after all, doesn't it? And that--you're going to say--is a serious look-out for Plummet & Rose, seeing there's no doubt our seal was on the bottle when it was brought into Lord Borrodale's room. I don't deny it, inspector. It's useless to bluster and say 'No, no', when it's perfectly clear that the facts are so. That's a very useful motto for a man that wants to get on in our line of business.'
'Well, Mr Egg,' said the inspector, laughing, 'what will you say to the next inference? Since nobody but you had any interest in changing that bottle over, it looks as though I ought to clap the handcuffs on you.'
'Now, that's a disagreeable sort of an inference,' protested Mr Egg, 'and I hope you won't follow it up. I shouldn't like anything of that sort to happen, and my employers wouldn't fancy it either. Don't you think that, before we do anything we might have cause to regret, it would be a good idea to have a look in the furnace- room?'
'Why the furnace-room?'
'Because,' said Mr Egg, 'it's the place that Craven particularly didn't mention when we were asking him where anybody might have put a thing he wanted to get rid of.'
The inspector appeared to be struck by this line of reasoning. He enlisted the aid of a couple of constables, and very soon the ashes of the furnace that supplied the central heating were being assiduously raked over. The first find was a thick mass of semi-molten glass, which looked as though it might once have been part of a wine bottle.
'Looks as though you might be right,' said the inspector, 'but I don't see how we're to prove anything. We're not likely to get any nicotine out of this.'
'I suppose not,' agreed Mr Egg sadly. 'But'--his face brightened--'how about this?'
From the sieve in which the constable was sifting the ashes he picked out a thin piece of warped and twisted metal, to which a lump of charred bone still clung.
'What on earth's that?'
'It doesn't look like much, but I think it might once have been a corkscrew,' suggested Mr Egg mildly. 'There's something homely and familiar about it. And, if you'll look here, I think you'll see that the metal part of it is hollow. And I shouldn't be surprised if the thick bone handle was hollow, too. It's very badly charred, of course, but if you were to split it open, and if you were to find a hollow inside it, and possibly a little melted rubber--well, that might explain a lot.'
The inspector smacked his thigh.
'By Jove, Mr Egg!' he exclaimed, 'I believe I see what you're getting at. You mean that if this corkscrew had been made hollow, and contained a rubber reservoir, inside, like a fountain-pen, filled with poison, the poison might be made to flow down the hollow shaft by pressure on some sort of plunger arrangement.'
'That's it,' said Mr Egg. 'It would have to be screwed into the cork very carefully, of course, so as not to damage the tube, and it would have to be made long enough to project beyond the bottom of the cork, but still, it might be done. What's more, it has been done, or why should there be this little hole in the metal, about a quarter of an inch from the tip? Ordinary corkscrews never have holes in them--not in my experience, and I've been, as you might say, brought up on corkscrews.'
'But who, in that case--?'
'Well, the man who drew the cork, don't you think? The man whose fingerprints were on the bottle.'
'Craven? But where's his motive?'
'I don't know,' said Mr Egg, 'but Lord Borrodale was a judge, and a hard judge too. If you were to have Craven's fingerprints sent up to Scotland Yard, they might recognise them. I don't know. It's possible, isn't it? Or maybe Miss Waynfleet might know something about him. Or he might just possibly be mentioned in Lord Borrodale's memoirs that he was writing.'
The inspector lost no time in following up this suggestion. Neither Scotland Yard nor Miss Waynfleet had anything to say against the butler, who had been two years in his situation and had always been quite satisfactory, but a reference to the records of Lord Borrodale's judicial career showed that, a good many years before, he had inflicted a savage sentence of penal servitude on a young man named Craven, who was by trade a skilled metal- worker and had apparently been involved in a fraud upon his employer. A little further investigation showed that this young man had been released from prison six months previously.
'Craven's son, of course,' said the inspector. 'And he had the manual skill to make the corkscrew in exact imitation of the one ordinarily used in the household. Wonder where they got the nicotine from? Well, we shall soon be able to check that up. I believe it's not difficult to obtain it for use in the garden. I'm very much obliged to you for your expert assistance, Mr Egg. It would have taken us a long time to get to the rights and wrongs of those bottles. I suppose, when you found that Craven had given you the wrong one, you began to suspect him?'
'Oh, no,' said Mr Egg, with modest pride, 'I knew it was Craven the minute he came into the room.'
'No, did you? You're a regular Sherlock, aren't you? But why?'
'He called me 'sir',' explained Mr Egg, coughing delicately. 'Last time I called he addressed me as 'young fellow' and told me that tradesmen must go round to the back door. A bad error of policy. 'Whether you're wrong or whether you're right, it's always better to be polite,' as it says in the Salesman's Handbook.'
SLEUTHS ON THE SCENT
A Montague Egg Story
............
The commercial room at the Pig and Pewter presented to Mr Montague Egg the aspect of a dim cavern in which some primeval inhabitant had been cooking his mammoth-meat over a fire of damp seaweed. In other words, it was ill lit, cold, smoky and permeated with an odour of stale food.
'Oh dear, oh dear!' muttered Mr Egg. He poked at the sullen coals, releasing a volume of pea-coloured smoke which made him cough.
Mr Egg rang the bell.
'Oh, if you please, sir,' said the maid who answered the summons, 'I'm sure I'm very sorry, but it's always this way when the wind's in the east, sir, and we've tried ever so many sorts of cowls and chimney-pots, you'd be surprised. The man was here today a-working in it, which is why the fire wasn't lit till just now, sir, but they don't seem able to do nothink with it. But there's a beautiful fire in the bar-parlour, sir, if you cared to step along. There's a very pleasant party in there, sir. I'm sure you would be comfortable. There's another commercial gentleman like yourself, sir, and old Mr Faggott and Sergeant Jukes over from Drabblesford. Oh, and there's two parties of motorists, but they're all quite nice and quiet, sir.'
'That'll suit me all right,' said Mr Egg amiably. But he made a mental note, nevertheless, that he would warn his fellow-commercials against the Pig and Pewter at Mugbury, for an inn is judged by its commercial room. Moreover, the dinner had been bad, with a badness not to be explained by his own rather late arrival.
In the bar-parlour, however, things were better. At one side of the cheerful hearth sat old Mr Faggott, an aged countryman, beneath whose scanty white beard dangled a long, scarlet comforter. In his hand was a tankard of ale. Opposite to him, also with a tankard, was a large man, obviously a policeman in mufti. At a table in front of the fireplace sat an alert-looking, darkish, youngish man whom Mr Egg instantly identified as the commercial gentleman by the stout leather bag at his side. He was drinking sherry. A young man and a girl in motor-cycling kit were whispering together at another table, over a whisky-and-polly and a glass of port. Another man, with his hat and burberry on, was ordering Guinness at the little serving-hatch which communicated with the bar, while, in a far corner, an indeterminate male figure sat silent and half concealed by a slouch hat and a newspaper. Mr Egg saluted
