“Good for you! I say, Miss Merrill, if you’re going to carry on like this we shall soon have all we want. What’s the next step now? Inquiries at Watterson & Swayne’s?”
“No,” she said decidedly, “the next step for you is bed. You’re not really well enough yet for this sort of thing. We’ve done enough for tonight. We’ll go home.”
Cheyne protested, but as, apart from his health, it was obvious that inquiries could not at that hour be instituted at the furniture removers, he had to agree.
“I shall go round and see them tomorrow morning,” he remarked as they walked back along Hopefield Avenue. “I suppose you couldn’t manage to come at that time? Or shall I wait until the afternoon?”
She shook her head.
“Neither,” she answered. “I shall be busy all day and you must just carry on.”
Cheyne felt a surprisingly keen disappointment.
“But mayn’t I come and report progress in the afternoon?” he begged.
“Not until after . I shall be painting up till then.”
He wanted to see her home, but this she would not hear of, and soon he was occupying one of these deep chairs in the hotel smoking room whose allure had seemed so strong to him in the draughty porch of the half-built house. As he sat he thought over the turn which this evening’s inquiry had given to the affair in which he was engaged. It was clear enough now that Miss Merrill’s view had been correct and that the Dangles were scared stiff by the absence of information about the finding of his body. As he put himself in their place, he saw that flight was indeed their only course. What he marveled at was that they should have taken time to remove their furniture. From their point of view it must have been a horrible risk, and it undoubtedly left, through the carrying contractor, a certain clue to their whereabouts.
But when Cheyne began his inquiries on the following morning he rapidly became less impressed with the certainty of the clue. A direct request at the firm’s office for Dangle’s address was met by a polite non possumus, and when during the dinner hour Cheyne succeeded in bribing a junior clerk to let him have the information, at a further interview the lad declared he could not find it. It was not until after five hours’ inquiry among the drivers of the various vans which entered and left the yard that he learned anything, and even then he found himself no further on. The furniture, which had been collected from an unoccupied house, had been stored and still remained in Messrs. Watterson & Swayne’s warehouses.
It was a weary and disgruntled Cheyne who at that evening dragged himself up the ten flights to Miss Merrill’s room. But when he was seated in her big armchair with his pipe going and had consumed a whisky and soda which she had poured out for him he began to feel that all was not necessarily lost and that life had compensations for failures in the role of amateur detective.
She listened carefully to his tale of woe, finally dropping a word of sympathy with his disappointment and of praise for his efforts which left him thinking she was certainly the good pal he expected her to be.
“But that’s not the worst,” he went on gloomily. “It’s bad enough that I have failed today, but it’s a great deal worse that I don’t know how I am going to do any better. Those Watterson & Swayne people simply won’t give away any information, and I don’t see how else it’s to be got.”
“There’s not much to go on certainly,” she admitted. “That’s where the police have the pull. They could go into that office and demand the Dangles’ address. You can’t. What about the others, that Sime and that Blessington? Could you trace them in any way?”
Cheyne moved lazily in his chair.
“I don’t see how,” he answered slowly. “We have little enough information about the Dangles, but there is less still about the others. We have practically nothing to go on. I wonder what a real detective would do in such a case. I feel perfectly certain he would find all four in a few hours.”
“Ha! That gives me an idea.” She sat up and looked at him eagerly, and then in answer to his question went on: “What about that detective who was already engaged on the case, the one the manager of the Plymouth hotel recommended? Why not get hold of him and see what he can do? He was a private detective, wasn’t he—not connected with the police?”
“He was, and I have his name and address. By Jove, Miss Merrill, it’s an idea! I’ll go round and see him in the morning. He’s a man I didn’t take to personally, but what does that matter if he’s good at his job?”
Though Cheyne thus enthusiastically received his companion’s suggestion, he was not greatly enamored of the idea. As he said, he had not liked the man personally, and he would have preferred to have kept the affair in his own hands. But he felt bankrupt of ideas for carrying on the inquiry, and if a professional was to be brought in, this man whom he knew and who was vouched for by the manager of the Edgecombe should be as good as another. He decided, however, that he would not employ the fellow on the case as a whole. His job should be to find the quartet, and if and when he did that he could be paid his money and sent about his business. Cheyne felt that at this stage at all events he was not going to share the secret of the linen tracing.
But Cheyne, like many another before him, was to learn the difficulties which beset
