“Now I think I see what you mean, sir. You think that this document that Mr. Justice has sent us is a patchwork—bits cut out of a lot of different letters and stuck together and then photographed?”
“I’m suggesting it as a possibility, Inspector. See how it fits the facts. Here are a set of phrases, each one innocuous in itself, but with a cumulative effect of suggestion when you string them together as in this document. If the thing is a patchwork, then a number of real letters must have been used in order to get fragments which would suit. So Mr. Justice took a fair selection of epistles with him when he raided Miss Deepcar’s house. Further, in snipping out a sentence here and there from these letters, he sometimes had to include a phrase running on from one line to another in the original letter; but when he came to paste his fragments together, the original hiatus at the end of a line got transferred to the middle of a line in the final arrangement made to fit the page of the faked letter. That’s what struck me to begin with. For example, suppose that in the original letter you had the phrase: ‘he will probably see for himself how’; and the original line ended with ‘probably.’ That word might be a bit cramped at the end of the line. But in reconstructing the thing, ‘probably’ got into the middle of the line, and so you get this apparently meaningless cramping of the word when there was space enough for it to be written uncramped under normal conditions. Just the same with the other cases you spotted for yourself. They represent the ends of lines in the original letters, although they all occur in the middle of lines in the fake production.”
“That sounds just as plausible as you like, sir. But you’ve got the knack of making things sound plausible. You’re not pulling my leg, are you?” the Inspector demanded suspiciously. “Besides, what about there being no sign of the paper having been tampered with?”
“Look at what he’s given us,” Sir Clinton suggested. “The only case where he’s given a large-scale reproduction of a whole phrase is at the top of the letter: ‘Things cannot go on any longer in this way.’ That’s been complete in the original, and he gives you a large-scale copy of it showing that the texture of the paper is intact. Of course it is, since he cut the whole bit out of the letter en bloc. When it comes to the microphotographs, of course he only shows you small bits of the words and so there’s no sign of the cutting that was needed at the end of each fragment. And in the photograph of the full text, there’s no attempt to show you fine details. He simply pasted the fragments in their proper order on to a real sheet of notepaper, filled up the joins with Chinese White to hide the solutions of continuity, and used a process plate which wouldn’t show the slight differences in the shades of the whites where the Chinese White overlay the white of the notepaper. If you have a drawing to make for black-and-white reproduction in a book, you can mess about with Chinese White as much as you like, and it won’t show up in the final result at all.”
Flamborough, with a gesture, admitted the plausibility of Sir Clinton’s hypothesis.
“And you think that explains why he didn’t send us the original document, sir?”
“Since I’m sure he hadn’t an original to send, it’s hard to see how he could have sent it, Inspector.”
Flamborough did not contest this reading of the case. Instead, he passed to a fresh aspect of the subject.
“Mr. Justice is evidently ready to go any length to avenge somebody—and that somebody can hardly have been young Hassendean, judging from what we’ve heard about his character.”
Sir Clinton refused the gambit offered by the Inspector.
“Mr. Justice is a very able person,” he observed, “even though he does make a mistake now and again, as in this last move.”
“You said you’d some idea who he was, sir?” Flamborough said with an interrogative note in his voice.
The Chief Constable showed no desire to be drawn. He glanced rather quizzically at his subordinate for a moment before speaking.
“I’ll give you the points which strike me in that connection, Inspector; and then you’ll be just as well placed as I am myself in the matter of Mr. Justice. First of all, if you compare the time of publication of the morning newspapers with the time, at which Mr. Justice’s telegram was collected from the pillar-box, I think it’s fairly evident that he didn’t depend on the journalists for his first information about the affair. Even the Ivy Lodge news wasn’t printed until after he had despatched his message.”
“That’s true, sir,” Flamborough admitted.
His manner showed that he expected a good deal more than this tittle of information.
“Therefore he must have had some direct information about the bungalow business. Either he was on the spot when the affair occurred, or else he was told about it almost immediately by someone who was on the spot.”
“Admitted,” the inspector confirmed.
“Then he obviously—or is it ‘she obviously,’ Inspector?—saw the importance of hyoscine as a clue as soon as any word about it got into the newspapers. Immediately, in comes the code advertisement, giving us—rather unnecessarily I think—the tip to inquire at the Croft-Thornton Institute.”
Flamborough’s face showed that he felt Sir Clinton was merely recapitulating very obvious pieces of evidence.
“Then there was the writing on the advertisements which he sent to the papers—Mrs. Silverdale’s writing rather neatly forged, if you remember.”
“Yes,” said the Inspector, showing by his tone that at this point he was rather at sea.
“Then there was the fact that he managed to choose his time most conveniently for his raid on Miss Deepcar’s house.”
“You mean
