“What’s your main inference, as things stand?” Sir Clinton inquired.
“Well, sir, it’s a bit early yet. But I’ve been wondering about one thing, certainly.”
“And that is?”
“And that is whether Peeping Tom’s name wasn’t Thomasina,” Flamborough announced gravely.
“There are two sexes, of course,” Sir Clinton admitted with equal gravity. “And inquisitiveness is supposed to be more strongly developed in the female than in the male. The next thing will be to consider whether Mr. Justice shouldn’t be rechristened Justitia. One ought to take all possibilities into account.”
VIII
The Hassendean Journal
When Ronald Hassendean’s journal was found to consist of four bulky volumes of manuscript, Sir Clinton hastily disclaimed any desire to make its acquaintance in extenso and passed over to Inspector Flamborough the task of ploughing through it in detail and selecting those passages which seemed to have direct bearing on the case. The Inspector took the diary home with him and spent a laborious evening, lightened at times by flashes of cynical enjoyment when the writer laid bare certain aspects of his soul. Next day Flamborough presented himself at Sir Clinton’s office with the books under his arm; and the paper slips which he had used as markers made a formidable array as they projected from the edges of the volumes.
“Good Lord!” exclaimed the Chief Constable in consternation. “Do you mean to say I ought to read through about a hundred and fifty passages in inferior handwriting? Life’s too short for that. Take ’em away, Inspector, and get someone to write me a précis.”
Flamborough’s lips opened into a broad smile under his toothbrush moustache.
“It’s not really so bad as it looks, sir,” he explained. “The white slips were put in to mark anything that seemed to bear remotely on the business; but the passages directly relevant to the affair are indicated by red slips. I think you ought to glance through that last lot. There aren’t really very many of them.”
He deposited the volumes on Sir Clinton’s desk so that the marking-tabs projected towards his superior. Sir Clinton eyed them without any enthusiasm.
“Well, I suppose duty calls, Inspector. I’ll go over them with you, just in case you want to give me any special points drawn from your general reading in the Works of Hassendean. If you’ve got a morbid craving for voluminous writers, you’d better start on the Faerie Queene. It, also, leads up to the death of a Blatant Beast.”
“I read a bit of it at school, sir. I’m keeping the rest for a rainy day.”
Sir Clinton again eyed the four stout volumes with unconcealed aversion. Quite obviously he was ready to catch at anything in order to postpone the examination of them, even now that he had decided to submit to the Inspector’s ruling.
“Before I start on this stuff, there are one or two points I want to get cleared up. First of all, did you get any reports in reply to our inquiries about young Hassendean’s car being seen on the roads that night?”
“No, sir. The only motor information we got was about one car that was stolen under cover of the fog. It’s being looked into. Oh, yes, and there was an inquiry for the name and address of the owner of a car. It seems somebody got hit by a motor and managed to take its number. I don’t think any real damage was done. It’s just one of these try-on cases.”
“Something more important now. Did you find out from the man on the beat whether there was a light in Silverdale’s room at the Croft-Thornton on the night of the murders?”
“How did you come to think of that, sir? I didn’t mention it to you.”
“It was just a long shot, Inspector. As soon as Silverdale stated that he had been working all that night at the Croft-Thornton, I was pretty sure he was lying. So were you, I guessed. Then you walked across to the window and looked down. As I was wondering myself whether the window was visible from the street, it didn’t take much mind-reading to see what you were driving at. And from your questions to Markfield later on, I couldn’t help inferring that you had the constable on the beat at the back of your thoughts. Obviously you meant to check Silverdale’s story by asking the constable on duty if he’d noticed a light in Silverdale’s room that night. There was no light, of course?”
“No, sir. There wasn’t a light anywhere in the building, that night. I made the constable look up his notebook.”
“Then you’ve caught Master Silverdale in a very bad lie. By the way, I suppose you noticed that girl who came into his room while we were talking to him: the Miss Deepcar who dined with him down town that night. What did you make of her?”
“Pretty girl, sir, very pretty indeed. The quiet sort, I’d judge. One of the kind that a man might do a good deal to get hold of, if he was keen on her.”
Sir Clinton’s expression showed that he did not disagree with the Inspector’s summing up.
“By the way,” he continued, “did you take any note of what she said to Silverdale at that time?”
“Not particularly, sir. It was all Greek to me—too technical.”
“It interested me, though,” Sir Clinton confessed. “I’ve a chemical friend—the London man who’s going to act as a check on Markfield for us in the search for the poison, as a matter of fact—and he talks to me occasionally about chemistry. You don’t know what a ‘mixed melting-point’ is, I suppose?”
“No, sir. It sounds confused,” said the Inspector mischievously.
The Chief Constable treated this as beneath contempt.
“I’ll explain the point,” he pursued, “and then you’ll know as much as I do. A pure substance melts at a higher temperature than it does when it’s contaminated by even a trace of some foreign material. Suppose that you had been given a stuff which you thought
