“He couldn’t get away early enough. Or could he? Got a Bradshaw?” Gordon proceeded to look up the trains with an irritating thoroughness, while Reeves danced with impatience—there is no impatience like that engendered by watching another man look up Bradshaw. “That’s all right,” said Gordon at last. “In order to catch the Scottish train at Crewe he’d have had to take that earlier train, the one Marryatt came up by, and get out at Binver. He took the 3:47, I suppose, because he couldn’t get away sooner. Perhaps, if we’re right in thinking he wanted to skip, he was going to go across country by car tomorrow and confuse his tracks a bit.”
“The thing doesn’t look like skipping quite as much as it did. For Heaven’s sake let’s beware of prejudicing the case. Anyhow, he meant to make for Glasgow on the Wednesday night—that’s tomorrow night, isn’t it? Now let’s have one more look at that silly list that was on the back of the anonymous letter.”
The list had been copied almost in facsimile, for it was very short. It ran
Socks
vest
hem
tins—
at least, that was the general impression it gave, but the writing was so spidery as to make it very doubtful which precise letter each of the strokes represented.
“I suppose it must be a shopping-list of some sort. If one could make that last word ‘ties’ it would read better,” said Gordon.
“But even so you wouldn’t have hems in a shopping-list.”
“It might be ham.”
“But one doesn’t buy ham at the hosier’s.”
“And why did he write at the edge of the paper like that?”
“If it comes to that, who was the he? It’s not Brotherhood’s writing—I’ve verified that from the club book. I fancy this goes pretty deep. Look here, here’s a bit of detection for you. That sheet has been torn off at the left-hand side, hasn’t it? Now, was it torn off before or after the writing was put on it?”
“Before, surely. Otherwise the initial letters wouldn’t be so complete; he’d have been certain to tear across them.”
“I’m not so sure. Who writes so close to the edge of a piece of paper as that? Remember, I copied the thing down exactly, and each word was close up against the tear.”
“I don’t quite see what difference it makes, anyhow,” objected Gordon.
“More than you think, perhaps. I shouldn’t wonder if this bit of paper turned up trumps, when we’ve thought it over a bit more. But there’s one thing that fairly beats me.”
“What’s that?”
“Those two watches. It doesn’t seem to me to make any sense. Well, we’d better get to bed and sleep over it.”
IV
Endless Clues
There is no surer soporific than sleeping over a problem, no more fallacious method of attempting a solution. After murmuring to himself three times, “Let’s see; there was something about watches,” Mordaunt Reeves fell into a sleep which anybody but a psychoanalyst would have called dreamless. He woke in the morning with a strong resolution to do the ninth in four, which melted through lazy stages of half-awareness into the feeling that there was something else to do first. The adventures of yesterday, the duties of today, returned to him. He was already nearly dressed when he remembered that he had decided on the role of a Daily Mail reporter for his morning’s investigation, and grimly set himself to remove again the bulging knickerbockers and the hypocritical garters of his kind. Dressy they might be, but they were not Fleet Street. His memories of the reporter’s wardrobe were, it must be confessed, somewhat disordered, and he was greeted in the breakfast-room with flippant inquiries whether he had gone into mourning for the Unknown Passenger.
He found Gordon already at table with Marryatt—Marryatt in the high clerical collar which was irreverently known to his intimates as “New every morning.”
“Well, how are you feeling?” he asked. “You looked rather chippy yesterday. However, I suppose it brings a job of work your way.”
“Confound it,” said Marryatt, “that’s the trouble. The jury at the inquest are bound to bring in suicide; and then I can’t bury the man in the churchyard, and all the villagers will say I refused out of spite, because the poor old chap used to give these atheist lectures on the village green.”
“Rot!” said Gordon; “if they do find suicide, they’ll certainly say he was of unsound mind.”
“Yes,” echoed Reeves, “if they do bring in suicide.”
“But surely you can’t doubt it,” urged Marryatt energetically. “The man’s just gone bankrupt, and it was an ugly case, from what I hear; several innocent people who’d been fools enough to believe in him left in the cart. At the same time, the smash came very suddenly, and that makes it unlikely that anybody could want to murder the man so soon. Oh, you’ll find it’s suicide right enough.”
“Well,” said Reeves a little stiffly, “we’re going to do our best to find out between us. I’ve the greatest respect for the police as a body, but I don’t think they’re very good at following up clues. When I was in the Military Intelligence one was constantly putting material at the disposal of the police which they were too supine or too stupid to use.”
“Well, good luck to your sleuthing; but mark my words, you’ll find it was suicide. I’m going to play a round now to try and take my mind off the thing, but I don’t believe I shall be able to drive at the third after—after what we saw yesterday.”
Left to themselves, Mordaunt Reeves and Gordon arranged that they would meet again at luncheon and report on the morning’s investigations.
“And look here,” said Reeves, “it’s a belief of mine that one wants to cover the ground oneself if one’s to visualize the setting of a crime properly. So I vote that after lunch we stroll down to the railway and take a look at the top
