“I’ve told you, Mr. Sheringham,” said the Chief Inspector, with a patient air. “It’s not a bit of good you trying to pump me. I’ve told you all we know here. I’d help you if I could, as you know”—Roger snorted incredulously—“but we’re simply at a dead end.”
“So am I,” Roger grunted. “And I don’t like it.”
“You’ll soon get used to it, Mr. Sheringham,” consoled Moresby, “if you take on this sort of job often.”
“I simply can’t get any further,” Roger lamented. “In fact I don’t think I want to. I’m practically sure I’ve been working on the wrong tack altogether. If the clue really does lie in Sir Eustace’s private life, he’s shielding it like the very devil. But I don’t think it does.”
“Humph!” said Moresby, who did.
“I’ve cross-examined his friends, till they’re tired of the sight of me. I’ve cadged introductions to the friends of his friends, and the friends of his friends of his friends, and cross-examined them too. I’ve haunted his club. And what have I discovered? That Sir Eustace was not only a daisy, as you’d told me already, but a perfectly indiscreet daisy at that; the quite unpleasant type, fortunately very much rarer than women suppose, that talks of his feminine successes, with names—though I think that in Sir Eustace’s case this was simply through lack of imagination and not any natural caddishness. But you see what I mean. I’ve collected the names of scores of women, and they all lead—nowhere! If there is a woman at the bottom of it, I should have been sure to have heard of her by this time. And I haven’t.”
“And what about that American case, which we thought such an extraordinary parallel, Mr. Sheringham?”
“That was cited last night by one of our members,” said Roger gloomily. “And a very pretty little deduction she drew from it.”
“Ah, yes,” nodded the chief inspector. “That would be Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, I suppose. She thinks Sir Charles Wildman is the guilty party, doesn’t she?”
Roger stared at him. “How the devil did you know that? Oh! The unscrupulous old hag. She passed you the wink, did she?”
“Certainly not, sir,” retorted Moresby with a virtuous air, as if half the difficult cases Scotland Yard solves are not edged in the first place along the right path by means of “information received.” “She hasn’t said a word to us, though I’m not saying it wouldn’t have been her duty to do so. But there isn’t much that your members are doing which we don’t know about, and thinking too for that matter.”
“We’re being shadowed,” said Roger, pleased. “Yes, you told me at the beginning that we were to have an eye kept on us. Well, well. So in that case, are you going to arrest Sir Charles?”
“Not yet, I think, Mr. Sheringham,” Moresby returned gravely.
“What do you think of the theory, then? She made out a very striking case for it.”
“I should be very surprised,” said Moresby with care, “to be convinced that Sir Charles Wildman had taken to murdering people himself instead of preventing us from hanging other murderers.”
“Less paying, certainly,” Roger agreed. “Yes, of course there can’t be anything in it really, but it’s a nice idea.”
“And what theory are you going to put forward, Mr. Sheringham?”
“Moresby, I haven’t the faintest idea. And I’ve got to speak tomorrow night, too. I suppose I can fake up something to pass muster, but it’s a disappointment.” Roger reflected for a moment. “I think the real trouble is that my interest in this case is simply academic. In all the others it has been personal, and that not only gives one such a much bigger incentive to get to the bottom of a case but somehow actually helps one to do so. Bigger gleanings in the way of information, I suppose. And more intimate sidelights on the people concerned.”
“Well, Mr. Sheringham,” remarked Moresby, a little maliciously, “perhaps you’ll admit now that we people here, whose interest is never personal (if you mean by that looking at a case from the inside instead of from the outside), have a bit of an excuse when we do come to grief over a case. Which, by the way,” Moresby added with professional pride, “is precious seldom.”
“I certainly do,” Roger agreed feelingly. “Well, Moresby, I’ve got to go through the distressing business of buying a new hat before lunch. Do you feel like shadowing me to Bond Street? I might afterwards walk into a neighbouring hostelry, and it would be nice for you to be able to shadow me in there too.”
“Sorry, Mr. Sheringham,” said Chief Inspector Moresby pointedly, “but I have some work to do.”
Roger removed himself.
He was feeling so depressed that he took a taxi to Bond Street instead of a bus, to cheer himself up. Roger, having been in London occasionally during the war-years and remembering the interesting habits cultivated by taxi-drivers during that period, had never taken one since when a bus would do as well. The public memory is notoriously short, but the public’s prejudices are equally notoriously long.
Roger had reason for his depression. He was, as he had told Moresby, not only at a dead end, but the conviction was beginning to grow in him that he had actually been working completely on the wrong lines; and the possibility that all the labour he had put into the case had simply been time wasted was a sad one. His initial interest in the affair, though great, had been as he had just realised only an academic one, such as he would feel in any cleverly planned murder; and in spite of the contacts established with persons who were acquainted with various of the protagonists he still felt himself awkwardly outside the case. There was no personal connection somehow to enable him really to get to grips with it. He was beginning to suspect that it was the
