To say that Mr. Yeudall welcomed the inspector is an inadequate statement. Grant felt that he must have met the man before and have forgotten it. He betrayed none of the curiosity that was usually rampant on a man’s face when the inspector followed his card into a room. Grant was to him merely another charming fellow-being, and almost before he had made his business clear Grant found himself being led away to lunch. It was so much nicer to talk over a meal, and it was long after one o’clock and if the inspector hadn’t eaten since breakfast, he must be famishing. Grant followed his unexpected host meekly enough; he had not yet got his information, and this seemed to be the only way of getting it. Moreover, a detective officer never throws away the chance of making an acquaintance. If Scotland Yard has a motto it is You Never Know.
Over lunch he learned that Mr. Yeudall had never to his knowledge seen the man he was looking for. He knew by sight or personally all the performers at the festival as well as a great number of those merely interested in it. But none tallied exactly with the description Grant furnished.
“If you think he was musical, try Lyons’ orchestra or the picture-houses. Their orchestra performers are mostly Londoners.”
Grant did not bother to explain that the supposition that the man was musical had arisen only through his supposed connection with the festival. It was easier and pleasanter to let Mr. Yeudall talk. In the afternoon, however, after he had taken farewell of his cheerful host, he did sift the various orchestras in the town, with the lack of success that he had foreseen. He then telephoned to the Yard to find out how Williams had fared in his hunt after the history of the banknotes, and spoke to Williams himself, who had just come back after a long morning’s work. The notes were with the bank just now. Nothing had transpired so far, but they were on a scent, and the bank were working it.
Well, thought Grant, as he hung up the receiver, one end of the tangle seemed to be working out slowly but surely. Nothing left so clear an incontrovertible a history behind it as a Bank of England note. And if he had failed at Nottingham to trace the dead man himself, their discovery of the friend’s identity would inevitably lead them to the knowledge of who the dead man was. And from the dead man to the Levantine would be only a step. Still, he was slightly depressed. He had had such a hunch this morning that before night an unexpected piece of information would have set him on the right track that he surveyed his wasted day with something like disgust, and not even the aftereffects of the good lunch Mr. Yeudall had given him, nor the rosy afterglow of that gentleman’s good will to men, was sufficient to comfort him. At the station he found that he had half an hour to wait for his train, and he betook himself to the lounge of the nearest hotel in the vague hope of picking up unconsidered trifles of information in that most gossipy of all public places. He surveyed the two waiters with a jaundiced eye. One was supercilious and like an overfed pug, and the other was absentminded and like a dachshund. Grant felt instinctively that help was not in them. But the person who brought him his coffee was a charming middle-aged waitress. Grant’s weary soul brightened at the sight of her. In a few minutes he was indulging in a friendly, if disjointed, exchange of generalities, and when she went away temporarily to attend to the wants of someone else she always came back and hovered within speaking distance until the conversation was resumed. Realizing that a verbal description of a man who was not a hunchback or blind or otherwise abnormal would convey nothing to this woman, who saw in one day at least half a dozen men who might have fitted a description of the dead man, Grant contented himself with giving leads which might provoke useful information of a relative sort.
“You’re quiet here just now,” he said.
Yes, she admitted; this was their quiet time. They had slack times and busy ones. It just happened like that.
Did it depend on the number of people staying in the hotel?
No, not always. But usually it did. The hotel was the same: they had slack times and busy ones.
Was the hotel ever full up?
Yes; it had been full to bursting when the Cooperative came. The whole two hundred rooms. It was the only time she remembered such a crowd in Nottingham.
“When was that?” asked Grant.
“At the beginning of February,” she said. “They come twice a year, though.”
At the beginning of February!
Where did the Cooperative people come from?
From all over the Midlands.
Not from London?
No, she thought not; but some of them might have.
Grant went to catch his train, revolving the new possibility and not finding it acceptable, though he was
