“Do you go to the police?” asked Ruth apprehensively.
Miles considered. “I don’t see how we can, at the moment. We’ve nothing to show, nothing but theorising, and rather romantic theorising at that. We ought to get some foundation for our case. At present, it’s too weak to stand much investigation.”
Precisely how weak it was he forced himself to realise later, when he was alone. All it boiled down to was a maid-servant’s story, with nothing to support it, and a casual remark from Isobel about a handkerchief. She, he shrewdly suspected, would deny that story if by so doing she could absolve her brother. Though they met seldom, there existed between them a curious, almost a subterranean relationship that was intimate and deep. Probably it was rooted in some early memory forgotten by both, but it involved loyalty to the individual (on Isobel’s part, at least), without regard to that wider loyalty a man owes to the community as a whole, and that is the basis of civilisation. And, with Isobel’s evidence dissipated, what remained? A servant’s tale, a servant, moreover, anxious to prove an alibi for her own advantage. And for the rest—mere supposition, daydreaming, theorising.
“Not good enough,” decided Miles. “Then what?”
Part VII
The Answer
1
It was a theory of Miles’s that, when bewildered and even dismayed by a position, it is wise to thrust the whole matter from the mind for forty-eight hours, concentrating rigidly on something else, so that, after the interval, the intelligence returns to the conflict, refreshed and sharpened by the delay. It chanced that a question regarding a disputed will came into his office within a few hours of his conversation with Ruth, and into this absorbing affair he threw himself heart and soul for some days. Then he returned with a clear and (so far as possible) unprejudiced mind to the King’s Poplars murder.
Being a man whose mind worked more eagerly in a crowd, he went out of his office and walked down to Charing Cross, turning eventually into St. James’s Park. It was a very pleasant day early in February, with a clear blue sky and silver-white clouds, very light and airy above the pointed leafless trees. There were a great many blue pigeons about, their feathers ruffled into boas round their necks because of the wind. A number of people were walking in the Park, and he was struck with a sense of their energy and their pleasure in life. Some children bowled hoops and played games, and fell over their own feet, and down by the ornamental water were the pelicans and ducks. It was all very gay and cheerful, and the general spectre of destitution that spoils a man’s pleasure so often in a London scene was absent. Some idlers there were, of course, but even the poorest had his paper and his pipe and was enjoying the mild weather. The general air of zest and well-being all about him quickened Miles’s thought. He was tranquilly convinced that he would reach the solution, even before he knew where it lay. A sense of competence swept away his hesitations and doubts, as, having walked through the Park, he left it by the Buckingham Palace Gate. He went down to Victoria Station, that was a bustle of energy and excitement. A bevy of young students was setting off for the Continent, and they hummed round the bookstall, buying literature for the journey, bananas and sandwiches, and packets of raisins, settling their sensible berets more firmly on their foreheads, chattering, arguing, debating. It was intensely stimulating; Miles stood on one side watching them. Now he had a familiar sensation that his mind had actually seized on the missing clue, and it only required his concentration to identify it. He liked thinking in a crowd. Those who want their temples of quiet, he was wont to say, are welcome to them, but for himself he sympathised with the novelist who, when he wanted to write, went to an A.B.C. shop. He loved the sound of cars, lorries, buses, carts, and drays going by under his window; the noise of bells and hooters, of shouts, exclamations, warnings, the barking of dogs and neighing of horses, all the bustle and colour and excitement of daily life, delighted and cheered him. Which was why he had chosen the noisiest room in their suite for his own office, and given his children a nursery on the traffic side of the house.
At the bookstall the students bought detective novels with blood-curdling covers—skeletons, hanging bodies, creeping shadows, knives, poison-bottles, and huge impressions of mysterious feet. He wondered if any of the problems within those garish covers was as difficult of solution as his own; no doubt they were all more fantastic. A domestic murder can be made to sound very tame to those not intimately concerned.
A young woman went past in a blue beret, talking to an equally young man in a Fair Isle sweater and a black beret. Both carried cameras. The young man observed with a laugh, “God bless the chap who invented finger-prints. What would these fellows do without them?”
Miles didn’t hear what the young woman
