He made what inquiries he could at the station, exhibiting the lady’s photograph to officials who were on duty when the trains in question were starting. It was, of course, a forlorn hope, and he was not greatly disappointed when it led to nothing.
As another forlorn hope, he wired to the police at Nottingham, Chesterfield, Sheffield, Leeds, Harrogate, Bradford, Morecambe, Heysham, and Belfast, saying that the woman referred to in page four of the previous week’s Bulletin was believed to have gone to their respective towns, and urging that a vigilant lookout be kept for her.
French once more felt baffled. Again in this exasperating case he was left at a loose end. The information he gained always seemed to fail him at the critical moment. In something very like desperation he sat down that evening at his desk and spent a couple of hours going through his notes of the case, wondering if by any chance he could find some further clue which he had hitherto overlooked. After careful thought, he decided that there was still one line of research unexplored—an unpromising line, doubtless, but still a line. That list of dealings on the Stock Exchange: could anything be made of that? Would, for example, the secretaries of the various firms be able to tell him who had carried out the transactions in question? If so, it should lead to Mrs. Vane or to someone who knew her intimately. He was not hopeful of the result, but he decided that if next day he had no other news he would look into it.
XVII
A Deal in Stocks
Full of his new idea, French on arrival at his office on the following morning took from his archives the letter addressed to Mrs. Vane which he had found in the box on that lady’s hall door and spread it out before him on his desk.
As he looked down the list of sales and purchases of stock, he was struck once again not only by the surprising number of the transactions, but also of the diversity of the stocks dealt in. There were British War Loan, Colonial Government and foreign railway stocks, as well as those of banks, insurance companies, stores, and various industrial concerns—some five-and-twenty altogether. He wondered from which of them he would be most likely to obtain the desired information.
Finally he selected James Barker and The Daily Looking Glass, and taking the latter first, he went to the registered offices of the company and asked to see the secretary. His question was a simple one. In his investigations of the affairs of a suspect, he had come across a memorandum of the sale of £895 19s. 8d. worth of Daily Looking Glass ordinary stock. Could the secretary please inform him either of the parties to the transaction or of the stockbroker through whom it was carried out?
The secretary was dubious. He asked French the date of the sale, and when the latter replied that he did not know, dilated on the complexity of the search. This ignorance as to time, together with the constantly varying value of the stock, made the sale very difficult to trace; in fact he was not sure that the information could be obtained. French in his turn dilated on the urgency and importance of the matter, with the result that two clerks were set to work and a report promised for the earliest possible moment.
So far so good, but this was not enough. French went on to James Barker’s, where he set similar inquiries on foot. Then, anxious to leave no stone unturned, he asked the same questions at the registered office of the Picardie Hotel.
The latter was the first to reply. The secretary telephoned to say that he had had a careful search made, and that no transaction covering the exact amount in question had taken place. Nothing within eight pounds of the figure given by Inspector French had been dealt with.
He had scarcely finished the conversation when the secretary of James Barker rang up. He, too, had made a careful search for several years back, and he, too, had found that stock of the amount mentioned by the Inspector had not changed hands during the period. On the 2nd March previously a sale had taken place of slightly over a pound more than the Inspector’s figure, £1 2s. 1d. to be exact, but with the exception of this there was nothing very close to it. An hour later came a similar reply from the Picardie Hotel. No transaction could be traced within ten pounds of the amount mentioned by the Inspector.
Could the discrepancies, French wondered, represent broker’s commission, stamp duties or tax of some kind? To make sure of this would, he thought, be a tedious business, involving research through the books of a considerable number of the companies concerned. He was rather ignorant of the business of stockbroking, and he had no idea of the scale of the brokers’ fees nor how these were paid. He thought, however, that if in the case of, say, six companies, a note were made of the names of those concerned with all transactions of amounts approximating to those mentioned in Mrs. Vane’s letter, and if the same broker, seller, or purchaser occurred in the
