The Man in the Queue

often as not. And the number of cut hands that required investigation would have been incredible to anyone who has not witnessed a manhunt from the inside. Patiently Grant sifted the reports through the long, bright morning, sitting at his desk and sending his lieutenants out here and there as a general arranges his forces on a battlefield. The provincial clues he ignored, with the exception of two, which were too good to be passed over⁠—there was always the odd chance that the man in the Strand had not been the Levantine. Two men were sent to investigate these⁠—one to Cornwall and one to York. All day long the telephone at his elbow buzzed, and all day long messages of failure came over it. Some of the men they had been sent out to observe had not, in the detective’s opinion, the remotest resemblance to the wanted man. This valuable information was obtained often enough at the cost of a long afternoon’s vigil behind the Nottingham lace curtains of a suburban villa waiting for “the man three houses down” to pass within examining distance. One suspect proved to be a nobleman well known to the public as a polo player. The officer who tracked him down saw that he had aroused the earl’s curiosity⁠—the noble lord had been run to earth in a garage where he was collecting his car preparatory to having a little flip of three or four hundred miles as a slight Sunday diversion⁠—and confessed what his business was.

“I thought you were tailing me,” said the peer of the realm, “and as my conscience is particularly good at the moment I wondered what you were up to. I have been accused of many things in my short time, but never of looking like a murderer before. Good luck to you, by all means.”

“Thank you, sir, same to you. I hope your conscience will be as clear when you come back.” And the earl, who had more convictions for exceeding the speed limit than anyone else in England, had grinned appreciatively.

Truly it was the men who went out that found work light that Sunday, and it was Grant, sitting pulling strings with mechanical competence, that found it tedious. Barker came in in the afternoon, but had no suggestion to make which might expedite matters. They could afford to ignore nothing; the least helpful of the clues had to be investigated in the relentless process of elimination. It was spadework, and most unchristian, in the Field sense. Grant looked enviously from his window, through the bright mist that hung over the river, at the Surrey side, lit now by the westering sun. How good it would be to be in Hampshire today! He could see the woods on Danebury in their first green. And a little later in the evening, when the sun went, the Test would be just right for fly.

It was late when Grant got home, but he had not left an avenue of exploration untrodden. With the coming of evening the spate of reported appearances had gradually diminished and died away. But as he ate his supper⁠—to Mrs. Field a meal was a necessary concomitant to a homecoming⁠—he was wearily conscious of the telephone by the fireplace. He went to bed and dreamed that Ray Marcable called him by telephone and said, “You’ll never find him, never, never!” She kept repeating the phrase, unheeding of his pleas for information and help, and he wished that the exchange girl would say “Time up” and release him. But before that relief had come the telephone had turned into a fishing-rod without exciting any surprise on his part, and he was using it, not as a fishing-rod but as a whip to encourage the four-in-hand which he was driving down a street in Nottingham. At the end of the street was a marsh, and in front of the marsh, and exactly in the middle of the street, stood the waitress from the hotel. He tried to call out to her as the horses advanced, but his voice died in his throat. Instead, the waitress grew bigger and bigger, until she filled the whole street. As the horses were about to charge into her she had grown so that she towered over Grant and overwhelmed him, the horses, the street, and everything. He had that sense of inevitability which attends the moment of a catastrophe. It’s come, he thought, and woke to thankful consciousness of a safe pillow and a reasonable world where there was motive before action. Damn that cheese soufflé! he thought, and, turning on his back, surveyed the dark ceiling and let his now wide-awake brain go its own way.

Why had the man hidden his identity? Was it perhaps mere accident? Nothing but the tailor’s name had been obliterated from his clothes, and the makers’ name had been left on the tie⁠—surely a most obvious place if one had been deliberately eliminating identification marks. But if it were a mere accident that eliminated the tailor’s name, how account for the scantiness of the man’s belongings? Small change, a handkerchief, and a revolver. Not even a watch. It spoke loudly of intended suicide. Perhaps the man was broke. He didn’t look it, but that was no criterion. Grant had known many paupers who looked like millionaires, and beggars with large bank balances. Had the man, at the end of his resources, decided to end it rather than sink slowly into the gutter? Had the visit to the theatre with his last few shillings been merely a snapping of fingers in the face of the gods who had defeated him? Was it merely the final irony that the dagger had anticipated his own revolver by an hour or two? But if he were broke, why had he not gone to the friend for money⁠—the friend who was so free with his banknotes? Or had he? and the friend had refused it? Was it conscience, after all, that had prompted