“That, my dear Watsons, is what the criminal’s singular choice of nitrobenzene has to tell me.” And Mr. Bradley stroked the growth on his upper lip with an offensive complacency that was not wholly assumed. Mr. Bradley took some pains to impress on the world how pleased he was with himself, but the pose was not without its foundation in fact.
“Most ingenious, certainly,” murmured Mr. Chitterwick, duly impressed.
“So now let’s get on with it,” observed Miss Dammers, not at all impressed. “What’s your theory? That is, if you’ve really got one.”
“Oh, I’ve got one all right.” Mr. Bradley smiled in a superior manner. This was the first time he had succeeded in provoking Miss Dammers to snap at him, and he was rather pleased. “But let’s take things in their proper order. I want to show you how inevitably I was led to my conclusion, and I can only do that by tracing out my own footsteps, so to speak. Having made my deductions from the poison itself, then, I set about examining the other clues to see if they would lead me to a result that I could check by the other. First of all I concentrated on the notepaper of the forged letter, the only really valuable clue apart from the poison.
“Now this piece of notepaper puzzled me. For some reason, which I couldn’t identify, the name of Mason’s seemed to strike a reminiscent note to me. I felt sure that I’d heard of Mason’s in some other connection than just through their excellent chocolates. At last I remembered.
“I’m afraid I must touch here on the personal, and I apologise in advance, Sir Charles, for the lapse of taste. My sister, before she married, was a shorthand-typist.” Mr. Bradley’s extreme languor all of a sudden indicated that he felt this connection needed some defence and was determined not to give it. The next instant he gave it. “That is to say, her education put her on rather a different level from the usual shorthand-typist, and she was, in point of fact, a trained secretary.
“She had joined an establishment run by a lady who supplied secretaries to business firms to take the places temporarily of girls in responsible positions who were ill, or away on holiday, or anything like that. Including my sister there were only two or three girls at the place, and the posts they went to only lasted as a rule for two or three weeks. Each girl would therefore have a good many such posts in the course of a year. However, I did remember distinctly that one of the firms to which my sister went while she was there was Mason’s, as temporary secretary to one of the directors.
“This seemed to me possibly useful. It wouldn’t be likely that she could throw a sidelight on the murder, but at any rate she might be able to give me introductions to one or two members of Mason’s staff if necessary. So I went down to see her about it.
“She remembered quite well. It was between three and four years ago, and she liked being there so much that she had thought quite seriously of putting in for a permanent secretaryship with the firm, should one be available. Naturally she hadn’t got to know any of the staff really well, but quite enough to give me the introductions if I wanted them.
“ ‘By the way,’ I happened to say to her casually, ‘I saw the letter that was sent to Sir Eustace with the chocolates, and not only Mason’s name but the actual paper itself struck me as familiar. I suppose you wrote to me on it while you were there?’
“ ‘I don’t know that I ever did that,’ she said, ‘but of course the paper was familiar to you. You’ve played paper-games here often enough, haven’t you? You know we always use it. It’s such a convenient size.’ Paper-games, I should explain, have always been a favourite thing in our family.
“It’s funny how a connection will stick in the mind, but not the actual circumstances of it. Of course I remembered then at once. There was quite a pile of the paper, in one of the drawers of my sister’s writing-table. I’d often torn it into strips for our paper-games myself.
“ ‘But how did you get hold of it?’ I asked her.
“It seemed to me that she answered rather evasively, just saying that she’d got it from the office when she was working there. I pressed her, and at last she told me that one evening she was just on the point of leaving the office when she remembered that some friends were coming in after dinner at home. We should almost certainly play a paper-game of some kind, and we had run out of suitable paper. She hurried up the stairs again back to the office, dumped her attaché-case on the table and opened it, hastily snatched up some paper from the pile beside her typewriter, and threw it into the case. In her hurry she didn’t realise how much she’d taken, and that supply, which was supposed to tide us over one evening, had actually lasted for nearly four years. She must have taken something like half a ream.
“Well, I went away from my sister’s house rather startled. Before I left I examined the remaining sheets, and so far as I could see they were exactly like the one on which the letter was typed. Even the edges were a little discoloured too. I was more than startled: I was alarmed. Because I ought to tell you that it had already occurred to me that of all the ways of going about the search for the person who had sent that letter to Sir Eustace, the
