Leaving the point for the time being, he turned over the paper and began to examine its other side.
It formed the middle portion of an old hotel bill, the top and bottom having been torn off. The items indicated a stay of one night only being merely for bed and breakfast. The name of the hotel had been torn off with the bill head, and also all but a few letters of the green rubber receipt stamp at the bottom. French felt that if he could only ascertain the identity of the hotel it might afford him a valuable clue, and he settled down to study it in as close detail as possible.
He recalled two statements that Speedwell had made about Dangle. First, the melancholy detective had said that commencing about a fortnight after the acquisition by the gang of Price’s letter and the tracing, Dangle had begun paying frequent visits to the Continent or Ireland, and secondly, that in a tube lift he had overheard Dangle say that he was crossing on a given night, but would be back the next. French thought he might take it for granted that this bill had been incurred on one of these trips. He wondered if Dangle had always visited the same place, as, if so, the bill would refer to an hotel near enough to England to be visited in one day. Of none of this was there any evidence, but French believed that it was sufficiently probable to be taken as a working hypothesis. If it led nowhere, he could try something else.
Assuming then that one could cross to the place in one night and return the next, it was obvious that it must be comparatively close to England, and, the language on the bill being French, it must be in France or Belgium. He took an atlas and a Continental Bradshaw, and began to look out the area over which this condition obtained. Soon he saw that while the whole of Belgium and the northwest of France, bounded by a rough line drawn through Chalons, Nancy, Dijon, Angoulême, Chartres, and Brest, were within the possible limit, giving a reasonable time in which to transact business, it was more than likely the place did not lie east of Brussels and Paris.
He turned back to the torn bill. Could he learn nothing from it?
First, as to the charges. With the franc standing at eighty, twenty four francs seemed plenty for a single room, though it was by no means exorbitant. It and the 4.50 fr. for petit déjeuner suggested a fairly good hotel—probably what might be termed good second-class—not one of the great hotels de luxe like the Savoy in London or the Crillon or Claridge’s in Paris, but one that ordinary people patronized, and which would be well known in its own town.
Of all the information available, the most promising line of research seemed that of the rubber stamp, and to that French now turned his attention. The three lines read:
… uit
… lon,
… S.
French thought he had something that might help here. He rose, crossed the room, and after searching in his letter file, produced three or four papers. These were hotel bills he had incurred in France and Switzerland when he visited those countries in search of the murderer of Charles Gething of the firm of Duke & Peabody, and he had brought them home with him in the hope that some day he might return as a holidaymaker to these same hotels. Now perhaps they would be of use in another way.
He spread them out and examined their receipt stamps. From their analogy the “… uit” on his fragment obviously stood for the words “Pour acquit,” anglice: “paid.” The middle line ending in “… lon” was unquestionably the name of the hotel, and the third, ending in S, that of its town. And here again was a suggestion as to the size of the establishment. A street was not included in the address. It must therefore be well known in its town.
It seemed to him moreover that this fact also conveyed a suggestion as to the size of the town. If the latter were Paris or Brussels—as he had thought not unlikely as both these names ended in s—a street address would almost certainly have been given. The names of the hotel and town alone pointed to a town of the same standing as the hotel itself—a large town to have so important an hotel, but not a capital city. In other words, there was a certain probability the hotel was situated in a large town comparatively near the English Channel, Paris and Brussels being excepted.
As French sat pondering over the affair, he saw suddenly that further information was obtainable from the fact that the lettering on a rubber stamp is always done symmetrically. Once more rising, he found a small piece of tracing paper, and placing this over the mutilated receipt stamp, he began to print in the missing letters of the first line. His printing was not very good, but he did not mind that. All he wanted was to get the spacing of the letters correct, and to this end he took a lot of trouble. He searched through the advertisements in several papers until he found some type of the same kind as that of the “… uit,” and by carefully measuring the other letters he at last satisfied himself as to just where the P of Pour acquit would stand. This, he hoped, would give him the number of letters in the names of both the hotel
