chap didn't do it, it looks to me as though I must be the guilty party.'
'I wouldn't say that, sir,' said the inspector, obviously taken aback by this bit of thought-reading.
'I couldn't blame you if you did,' said Monty. He smiled, remembering his favourite motto for salesmen: 'A cheerful voice and cheerful look put orders in the order-book,' and buzzed merrily away in the wake of the police car along the road from Beachampton to Ditchley.
'We ought to be getting near it now,' remarked Ramage when they had left Helpington behind them. 'We're ten miles from Ditchley and about twenty-five from Pinchbeck's cottage. Let's see--it'll be the left-hand side of the road, going in this direction. Hullo! this looks rather like it,' he added presently. 'They're pulling up.'
The police car had stopped before an ugly corrugated-iron structure, standing rather isolated on the near side of the road, and adorned with a miscellaneous collection of enamelled advertisement-boards and a lot of petrol pumps. Mr Egg brought the Morris alongside.
'Is this the place, Miss Queek?'
'Well, I don't know. It was like this, and it was about here. But I can't be sure. All these dreadful little places are so much alike, but--Well, there! how stupid of me! Of course this isn't it. There's no clock. There ought to be a clock just over the door. So sorry to have made such a silly mistake. We must go on a little farther. It must be quite near here.'
The little procession moved forward again, and five miles farther on came once more to a halt. This time there could surely be no mistake. Another hideous red corrugated garage, more boards, more petrol-pumps, and a clock, whose hands pointed (correctly, as the inspector ascertained by reference to his watch) to 7.15.
'I'm sure this must be it,' said Miss Queek. 'Yes--I recognise the man,' she added, as the garage proprietor came out to see what was wanted.
The proprietor, when questioned, was not able to swear with any certainty to having filled Miss Queek's tank on June 18th. He had filled so many tanks before and since. But in the matter of the clock he was definite. It kept, and always had kept, perfect time, and it had never stopped or been out of order since it was first installed. If his clock had pointed to 10.20, then 10.20 was the time, and he would testify as much in any court in the kingdom. He could not remember having seen the car with the registered number WOE 1313, but there was no reason why he should, since it had not come in for attention. Motorists who wanted to do a spot of inspection often pulled up near his garage, in case they should find some trouble that needed expert assistance, but such incidents were so usual that he would pay no heed to them, especially on a busy morning.
Miss Queek, however, felt quite certain. She recognised the man, the garage and the clock. As a further precaution, the party went on as far as Ditchley, but, though the roadside was peppered the whole way with garages, there was no other exactly corresponding to the description. Either they were the wrong colour, or built of the wrong materials, or they had no clock.
'Well,' said the inspector, rather ruefully, 'unless we can prove collusion (which doesn't seem likely, seeing the kind of woman she is), that washes that out. That garage where she saw Barton is eighteen miles from Pinchbeck's cottage, and since we know the old man was alive at 10.15, Barton can't have killed him--not unless he was averaging 200 miles an hour or so, which can't be done yet awhile. Well, we've got to start all over again.'
'It looks a bit awkward for me,' said Monty pleasantly.
'I don't know about that. There's the voices that baker fellow heard in the kitchen. I know that couldn't have been you, because I've checked up your times.' Mr Ramage grinned. 'Perhaps the rest of the money may turn up somewhere. It's all in the day's work. We'd better be getting back again.'
Monty drove the first eighteen miles in thoughtful silence. They had just passed the garage with the clock (at which the inspector shook a mortified fist in passing), when Mr Egg uttered an exclamation and pulled up.
'Hullo!' said the inspector.
'I've got an idea,' said Monty. He pulled out a pocket-diary and consulted it. 'Yes--I thought so. I've discovered a coincidence. Let's check up on it. Do you mind? 'Don't trust to luck, but be exact and certify the smallest fact.'' He replaced the diary and drove on, overhauling the police car. In process of time they came to the garage which had first attracted their attention--the one which conformed to specification, except in the particular that it displayed no clock. Here he stopped, and the police car, following in their tracks, stopped also.
The proprietor emerged expectantly, and the first thing that struck one about him was his resemblance to the man they had interviewed at the other garage. Monty commented politely on the fact.
'Quite right,' said the man. 'He's my brother.'
'Your garages are alike, too,' said Monty.
'Bought off the same firm,' said the man. 'Supplied in parts, Mass-production. Readily erected overnight by any handy man.'
'That's the stuff,' said Mr Egg approvingly. 'Standardisation means immense saving in labour, time, expense. You haven't got a clock, though.'
'Not yet. I've got one on order.'
'Never had one?'
'Never.'
'Ever seen this lady before?'
The man looked Miss Queek carefully over from head to foot.
'Yes, I fancy I have. Came in one morning for petrol, didn't you, miss? Saturday fortnight or thereabouts. I've a good memory for faces.'
'What time would that be?'
'Ten to eleven, or a few minutes after. I remember I was just boiling up a kettle for my elevenses. I generally take a cup of tea about then.'
'Ten-fifty,' said the inspector eagerly. 'And this is--' he made a rapid calculation--'just on twenty-two miles from the cottage. Say half an hour from the time of the murder. Forty-four miles an hour--he could do that on his head in a fast sports car.'
'Yes, but--' interrupted the solicitor.
'Just a minute,' said Monty. 'Didn't you,' he went on, addressing the proprietor, 'once have one of those clock-faces with movable hands to show lighting-up time?'
'Yes, I did. I've still got it, as a matter of fact. It used to hang over the door, But I took it down last Sunday. People found it rather a nuisance; they were always mistaking it for a real clock.'
'And lighting-up time on June 18th,' said Monty softly, 'was 10.20, according to my diary.'
'Well, there,' said Inspector Ramage, smiting his thigh. 'Now, that's really clever of you, Mr Egg.'
'A brain-wave, a brain-wave,' admitted Monty. ''The salesman who will use his brains will spare himself a world of pains'--or so the Handbook says.'
ONE TOO MANY
A Montague Egg Story
............
When Simon Grant, the Napoleon of Consolidated Nitro-Phosphates and Heaven knows how many affiliated companies, vanished off the face of the earth one rainy November night, it would have been, in any case, only natural that his family and friends should be disturbed, and that there should be a slight flurry on the Stock Exchange. But when, in the course of the next few days, it became painfully evident that Consolidated Nitro- Phosphates had been consolidated in nothing but the name--that they were, in fact, not even ripe for liquidation, but had (so to speak) already passed that point and evaporated into thin air, such assets as they possessed having mysteriously disappeared at the same time as Simon Grant--then the hue-and-cry went out with a noise that shook three continents and, incidentally, jogged Mr Montague Egg for an hour or so out of his blameless routine.
Not that Mr Egg had any money in Nitro-Phosphates, or could claim any sort of acquaintance with the missing financier. His connection with the case was entirely fortuitous, the by-product of an savage budgetary announcement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which threatened to have alarming results for the wine and spirits trade. Mr Egg, travelling representative of Messrs Plummet & Rose of Piccadilly, had reached Birmingham in his wanderings, when he was urgently summoned back to town by his employers for a special conference upon policy, and thus--though he did not know it at the time--he enjoyed the distinction of travelling by the very train from which Simon Grant so suddenly and unaccountably vanished.
The facts in the case of Simon Grant were disconcertingly simple. At this time the L.M.S. Railway were
