Mr. Tuke clapped his hands softly. “This is pure reasoning. Very impressive. Because when the same idea occurred to me, I had something to go on. The check jacket was obviously bought off the peg for a shorter and broader man. Mr. Thoipsett himself, at a guess. The trousers were short, too. Well, if the sanctimonious Mr. Eady wanted to revisit the neighbourhood of Stocking, he might think it politic to drop his semi-clerical impersonation. So he borrows some duds, and puts on a pair of horn-rims. It was good enough. Only a few people at the station actually saw him as himself. ”
Sir Bruton grunted. “Oh, he’s Eady all right. Eady went to Cambridge—sort of hole he would go to—and this chap comes from there. Now, is Eady the Dresser cousin? And why was he snooping round this Stocking place?” A cunning if pop-eyed glance preceded the next query. “Because when he was there before, he saw something, eh?”
Harvey nodded. “It looks like that. And when he heard of Raymond Shearsby’s death, what he’d seen made him curious. But what did he see? And why wait three weeks? The news was in some Cambridge paper at the time. The Vicar saw to that, because Cousin Mortimer thought it a waste of money.”
“Eady may have only just seen the paper. Or heard in some other way. Don’t make difficulties. We’re getting on. What I want to know is, why all this ballyhoo after the chemist’s wife? You say she couldn’t have done it?”
“Apparently she couldn’t. But on present evidence her husband could.”
“Then why didn’t Eady go to see him?”
“He may have had his reasons. He’d hardly call on the chap at the works, anyway. I don’t believe they’d let him in, and you couldn’t do a bit of blackmail, if that’s what you’re thinking of, out at the gate, with the attendant listening. Eady could have called there, of course, on his way in, and found Shearsby had gone home to lunch. But then where was he in the interval? He turned up in the street after I’d got to the house. Was he having his own lunch, or did he meet Shearsby coming or going?” Mr. Tuke shook his head. “After all, I can’t explain everything.”
“You surprise me,” said Sir Bruton, grinding out the stub of his cigar violently and messily. Mrs. Tuke, with true hospitality, moved the cigar-box towards him. “Thank’y,” he muttered absently, and there was a good deal of puffing and scowling while he lighted a fresh Larranaga. He squinted through the smoke at Mr. Tuke. “Y’know, it’s what I said before about this case. Oh, all right! It is a case. But it won’t be one you and I can look at till they’ve cleared up all this hocus pocus of missing cousins and what not. More than ever now. It’s a worse mess than before.”
“I wouldn’t say that. You have just pointed out that if Dresser is Eady it should simplify matters, and that Vance and Go. ought to lay hands on him soon. But wouldn’t it be nice,” Mr. Tuke added in a reflective tone, “if one could find him first?”
Sir Bruton snorted. “And how do you propose to set about it?”
“We have at least a rather cryptic clue to Dresser.”
“That bit of verse, you mean?” Sir Bruton snorted again. “What was it?”
“‘And while I understand and feel How much to them I owe.’”
“What’s the fellow writing about? His bookies? Sounds like prose to me, anyhow.”
“The higher criticism. And how right you are. That is what suggests Wordsworth.” Harvey glanced at a delicate satinwood bookcase. “Like the Vicar of Stocking, we have the collected works somewhere.”
Sir Bruton no longer seemed to be listening. ’ Fumbling in his pockets, he produced untidy sheafs of papers. He put on his spectacles to sort these out.
“I,looked up that place Stocking on the map. Silly name. There are two of ’em.”
“So there are. Are you going to make a joke?”
“I’m going to give you some real poetry.” The Director proceeded to recite from the back of an envelope:
“The novels of Silas K. Hocking
Don’t mention the village of Stocking.
When he learnt that there were
Not one, but a pair,
He said, ‘This nomenclature’s shocking.’”
Yvette Tuke laughed, though she missed much of the point, none of Mr. Hocking’s hundred novels having come her way. The versifier gobbled and chuckled.
“Wordsworth! Bah!” He unhooked his spectacles and waved them at Mr. Tuke. “Well, if you do dig those lines out, how are they going to help you?”
“I have no idea. Except that what the poet, whoever he may be, was writing about—it would scarcely be his bookies —seems to have a dim bearing on Martin Dresser. As I don’t feel like tackling the whole of Wordsworth, we must try the quotation on some of our literary friends.”
“There’s that nice Mr. Payne,” said Mrs. Tuke.
“A good idea. There’s something else I want to ask him.”
“ I think you will be meeting him again tomorrow evening.” Yvette indicated a card that stood on her bureau. Her husband got up to look at this. Neat typewriting announced that Miss Vivien Ardmore was AT HOME on the following day, Saturday, the 26th, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. ‘Any gay clothes’ said the card. At the top Miss Ardmore had written, in a small hand showing more individuality than is commonly the case with any handwriting nowadays, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Tuke’, and below, ‘Do forgive short notice and come. All the people you met before will be there.’
“Well, well,” said Harvey, his dark brows raised. “How they do pursue one. Shall we go?”
“I felt sure you would want to, so I telephoned to Miss Ardmore and said we should be delighted.”
Harvey handed the card to Sir Bruton. “Miss Ardmore is a young woman of intelligence, sense of humour and spirit,” he remarked. “This,
