Cecile Boulanger was at work or with friends all the Saturday. On Sunday she took a sandwich lunch and went for a long walk in the Hampton and Kingston district/ returning home about six in time to spend the evening with Mr. Mainward. Vivien Ardmore could also claim some sort of an alibi for Saturday, when both she and Mr. Gartside had the day to themselves and went together to Kew Gardens and Richmond. On the Sunday she took herself off alone, like her cousin Cecile, and tramped over the country about Windsor, returning to Falcon Mews East at nine o’clock.
Of the three secondary characters, Lilian Shearsby went to London on the Saturday morning, shopped there, saw a film, dined (at a Corner House, with several thousand other people), and caught the 8.5 train home. The Sunday she spent mostly with the gnomes and frogs in the garden of ‘ Aylwynstowe’, while her husband roamed the hills. Charles Gartside’s Saturday stood or fell with Miss Ardmore’s, but his Sunday was one long alibi, for he was on duty at the Ministry of Information until a late hour. With Mr. Mainward conversely, the Foreign Office in the morning, a friend in the afternoon, and a Home Guard picquet at the F.O. again from 6 p.m. onwards, carried him happily through the first half of the period; but after his picquet was relieved at 6 a.m. on Sunday his later movements actually brought him within a few miles of Guildford. He had lunch and tea with relatives at Godaiming, returning to London just in time to meet Mile Boulanger in the evening.
All this the Metropolitan police and the constabularies of four counties were endeavouring to check. The Ministry of War Transport and all haulage concerns were asked for news of a convoy routed down Warwick Way on the night of the 10th of April; and in London and Guildford and Bedford, at Cambridge and Stocking, patient inquiries were covering the 28th of July and the Bank Holiday weekend. There was only too little corroboration of the six statements, and of this little much was suspect. With one married couple, one engaged, and a third apparently verging on betrothal, the possibility of collusion was always in Inspector Vance’s mind.
That mind was a tidy one, which liked tangible facts to work on; and so far it was dealing with known people, people who could be interrogated and watched and described. But during the last two days of this routine it had been nagged by the thought of the new and nebulous factor injected into the case. The mystery of Martin Dresser would have to be solved. If alive, he had the same incentive as the younger generation to remove a cousin or two. And there was a suggestive shadow on his past from which theirs was free.
Raymond Shearsby’s statement to Rockley Payne, a casual remark to the Vicar of Stocking, and the evidence of the cancelled story, formed the meagre support for the case of survival. They were enough, however, to compel respect, especially the story, since, good feeling apart, the sacrifice of twenty-five guineas must have been a consideration to an impoverished writer. Raymond had undoubtedly met someone whom he believed to be his cousin Martin. That meeting, vide the Vicar of Stocking, took place in London, and not earlier than the 15th of July, when the proofs of Too Many Cousins were despatched from the office of The Ludgate Magazine. Somewhere, then, among London’s eight millions, there must be sought a man of fifty-seven, of whom no recent description or portrait was extant, who had in all probability changed his name, and whose occupation was unknown. And the first two days’ work on the trail had produced not one further whiff of a scent, even of proof that Martin was alive.
It was scarcely credible that Sydney Dresser had not known of his father’s return to England. But he had kept the secret well, and not only from his cousins. His personal papers, which had been handed to Mile Boulanger, who said she had not yet looked through them, were searched in vain for any allusion to Martin. Those of Raymond, less manuscripts and printed matter, were collected from ‘ Aylwynstowe ’, to prove equally unhelpful, as was the untidy accumulation of documents in the bungalow at Guildford. Letters might have been abstracted, but why? A guilty conscience would have seen the value of this red herring from the past. Another blank was drawn with Captain Dresser’s bank books. There were no untraceable payments, and no large sums had been drawn in cash.
The old story of Martin’s defalcations, his old friends in Chelmsford, literary coteries where Raymond might have talked (but where he was almost unknown), the latter’s literary agent and one or two acquaintances met since his return from France, even Miss Wicksteed, the companion of the second Mrs. Rutland Shearsby, slowly dying in her flat in Chelsea—these were among further avenues explored which proved to be dead ends. Non est inventus Martin Dresser remained.
CHAPTER XI
AND not only Martin Dresser. The police, like archaeologists, never know what they may dig up; and though patient spadework had so far unearthed little of apparent value, it had casually cast upon the scene two new and nameless actors. It was doubtful whether their entry had any bearing upon the case, but as a coincidence it called for explanation. Unfortunately, after brief and mysterious posturings, the pair had vanished again into the unknown from which they had emerged.
Inspector Vance inserted in his report some notes on railways, omnibuses, road-mileages and routes. He remarked on the hopelessness (lacking a stroke of luck) of tracing individuals on the numerous and densely crowded trains running between London and Guildford; nor were those on the
