“What the devil. No, wait. These people are jolly good at meaningful-sounding statements that could apply to anyone. Let me see the rest.” He squinted at Aaron’s notes. “One...yes, that’s about right, very drab woman. Two is one of your ringers. I can’t argue with three. Well.”

“What about the rest?” Aaron made himself say.

Hollis went on through the notes. “Four—not much there, is there? Five. Oh, you’re bloody joking.”

“He was wrong?”

Hollis shook his head, in disbelief rather than disagreement. “He was absolutely right. Number five is up to his neck in debt on the horses. We wasted quite a lot of time assuming he was the guilty party because of it. How the blazes?”

They stared at each other for a moment, then Hollis shook his head and looked back at the notes. “Number six is another ringer. Seven— God almighty!”

“One of yours?” Aaron said hopefully.

“One of yours.” Hollis’s brows went up again as he read. “This is ripe stuff. He’s calling number seven a murderer? Who is it?”

“I picked one sample out of a case file,” Aaron said, his voice horribly wooden in his own ears. “I expect that’s the one.”

“Ha! And is his read accurate?”

“It would be, yes.”

“My God. And then number eight—oh for pity’s sake. It says here he might do charitable work in his spare time. The fellow volunteers at an East End boys’ club. For God’s sake, Fowler, this is absurd. It’s too much. Did we miss something? Could he have found out what case it was?”

“Not through me, since I didn’t know. And I haven’t mentioned this scheme of ours to anyone. Have you?”

“Not a living soul.”

“I suppose he might have guessed I was doing this with you, and perhaps he could get hold of a list of everything you’re working on from someone in your department—”

“I should damned well hope he could not,” Hollis objected.

“But even if he could, he’d still need to pick the right case, get a list of the suspects and the ringers, get hold of samples of their hands to know who was who, discover enough about each of them to give these summaries, and then—”

“Work out that number three was the culprit, days before we did,” Hollis finished for him. “That’s where I stick. Stage magicians and mediums go to extraordinary lengths to get their effects, and I wouldn’t put much past them. But to pull this off, this he’d have had to solve the blasted crime!”

“If he could do all that in the few days between you picking the case and me giving him the handwriting, he wouldn’t be a shabby graphologist off the Pentonville Road,” Aaron said. “He’d be running the Met.”