It was nearly six o’clock in the evening when Alleyn and Fox returned to Scotland Yard. They went to Alleyn’s room. Fox got to work on his notes, Alleyn tackled the reports that had come in while they were away. They both lit pipes and between them was established that pleasant feeling of unexpressed intimacy that comes to two people working in silence at the same job.

Presently Alleyn put down the reports and looked across at his friend. He thought: “How often we have sat like this, Fox and I, working like a couple of obscure clerks in the offices of the Last Judgment concern, filing and correlating the misdeeds of men. Fox is getting quite grizzled and there are elderly purple veins in his cheeks. I shall go home later on, a solitary fellow, to my own hole.” And into his thoughts came the image of a woman who sat in a tall blue chair by his fire, but that was too domestic a picture. Rather, she would sit on the hearthrug. Her hands would be stained with charcoal and they would sweep beautiful lines across a white surface. When he came in she would look up from her drawing and Troy’s eyes would smile or scowl. He jerked the image away and found that Fox was looking at him with his usual air of bland expectancy.

“Finished?” said Alleyn.

“Yes, sir. I’ve been trying to sort things out. There’s the report on the silver cleaning. Young Carewe took that on and he seems to have made a fair job of it. Got himself up as a Rat and Mice Destruction Officer and went round all the houses and palled up with the servants. All the Carrados silver was cleaned this morning including Sir Herbert’s cigar-case which isn’t the right shape anyway, because he saw it in the butler’s pantry. Sir Daniel’s man does his silver cleaning on Mondays and Fridays, so it was all cleaned up yesterday. François does Dimitri’s stuff every day or says he does. Young Potter and Withers are looked after by the flat service and only their table silver is kept polished. The Halcut-Hacketts’ cases are cleaned once a week — Fridays — and rubbed up every morning. That’s that. How’s the report from Bailey?”

“Bailey hasn’t much. There’s nothing in the taxi. He got Withers’s prints from my cigarette-case but, as we expected, the green sitting-room was simply a mess. He has found Withers’s and young Potter’s prints on the pages of Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence. The pages that refer to asphyxiation.”

“By gum, that’s something.”

“Not such a great deal, Fox. They will tell us that when the newspaper report came out they were interested and turned up Taylor on suffocation; and who is to call them liars? The man who went to Leatherhead had a success. Apparently Withers keeps a married couple there. Our man pitched a yarn that he had been sent by the borough to inspect the electrical wiring in the house, and got in. What’s more he seems to have had a good look round. He found a roulette wheel and had the intelligence to examine it pretty closely. The middle dozen slots had been very slightly opened. I expect the idea is that Master Donald or some other satellite of Withers should back the middle dozen. The wheel seems brand new. There was an older one that showed no signs of irregularity. There were also several packs of cards which had been lightly treated with the favourite pumice-stone. Luckily for us the married couple had a violent row with the gallant Captain and were prepared to talk. I think we’ve got enough to pull him in on a gambling-hell charge. Thompson reports that Withers has stayed in all day. The telephone was disconnected as soon as we left. Donald Potter’s clothes were returned to him by taxi. Nobody has visited Withers. Dimitri comes next. Dimitri went home after he left here, visiting a chemist on the way to get his hand bandaged. He, too, has remained indoors, and has made no telephone calls. Most exemplary behaviour. How the blazes are we going to get any of these victims to charge Dimitri?”

“You’re asking me!” said Fox.

“Yes. Not a hope in a hundred. Well now, Fox, I’ve been over this damnable, dreary, involved, addling business of the green sitting-room. It boils down to this. The people who could have overheard Lord Robert’s telephone conversation were Withers, Sir Herbert Carrados, Miss Harris, Mrs Halcut-Hackett and Donald. They were all on or about the top landing and wouldn’t have to lie particularly freely in avoiding any reference to a brief dart in and out of the telephone-room. But, but, but, and a blasted but it is, it is quite possible that while Lord Robert telephoned, someone came upstairs and walked into the telephone-room. Mrs Halcut-Hackett was in the cloakroom; Withers, Donald and Carrados in the other sitting-room, Miss Harris in the lavatory. Dimitri says he was downstairs but who the devil’s to prove it? If the others are speaking the truth, anybody might have come up and gone down again unseen.”

“The gentleman who burst into the lavatory?”

“Precisely. He may even have hidden in there till the coast was clear, though I can’t see why. There’s nothing particularly fishy in coming out of a sitting-room.”

“Ugh,” said Fox.

“As I see the case now, Fox, it presents one or two highlights. Most of them seem to be concentrated on cigarette-cases. Two cigarette-cases. The murderer’s and Mrs Halcut-Hackett’s.”

“Yes,” said Fox.

“After the cigarette-cases comes the lost letter. The letter written by Paddy O’Brien’s friend in Australia. The letter that somebody seems to have stolen eighteen years ago in Buckinghamshire. It’s odd, isn’t it, that Miss Harris’s uncle was sometime rector of Falconbridge, the village where Paddy O’Brien met with his accident? I wonder if either Miss Harris or Lady Carrados realizes there is this vague connection. I think our next move after the inquest is to go down to Barbicon-Bramley where we may disturb the retirement of Miss Harris’s uncle. Then we’ll have to dive into the past history of the hospital in Falconbridge. But what a cold trail! A chance in a thousand.”

“It’s a bit of a coincidence Miss Harris linking up in this way, isn’t it?” ruminated Fox.

“Are you building up a picture with Miss Harris as the agent of an infamous old parson who had treasured a compromising letter for eighteen years, and now uses it? Well, I suppose it’s not so impossible. But I don’t regard it as a very great coincidence that Miss Harris has drifted into Lady Carrados’s household. Coincidences become increasingly surprising as they gain in importance. One can imagine someone telling Miss Harris about Paddy O’Brien’s accident and Miss Harris saying the parson at Falconbridge was her uncle. Everybody exclaims tiresomely at the smallness of the world and nobody thinks much more of it. Mix a missing letter up in the story and we instantly incline to regard Miss Harris’s remote connection with Falconbridge as a perfectly astonishing coincidence.”

“She’d hardly have mentioned it so freely,” admitted Fox, “if she’d had anything to do with the letter.”

“Exactly. Still, we’ll have to follow it up. And, talking of following things up, Fox, there’s Lady Lorrimer. We’ll have to check Sir Daniel Davidson’s account of himself.”

“That’s right, sir.”

Fox unhooked his spectacles and put them in their case.

“On what we’ve got,” he asked, “have you any particular leaning to anyone?”

“Yes. I’ve left it until we had a moment’s respite to discuss it with you. I wanted to see if you’d arrived independently at the same conclusion yourself.”

“The cigarette-case and the telephone call.”

“Yes. Very well, Fox: ‘in a contemplative fashion and a tranquil frame of mind,’ let us discuss the cigarette-cases. Point one.”

They discussed the cigarette-cases.

At seven o’clock Fox said:

“We’re not within sight of making an arrest. Not on that evidence.”