“Your evidence may be wanted by us. Where can you be found?”

“Not here, I can’t—not after the end of this week, I can tell you that!” she spat out angrily.

Still impassive, Mallett took down the address she gave him and found his way out into the wet and windy street.

“If Mrs. Eales had sold a few more things to pay her servant’s wages,” he murmured to himself as he strode along the streaming pavement, “she would have saved herself and her husband a lot of trouble.”

19
RESULTS OF A LITTLE QUIET THINKING

Monday, November 23rd

“That’s the machine, all right,” said Frant.

Mallett and he stood at a table looking down at two typewritten letters on the office paper of the London and Imperial Estates Ltd. The inspector took a magnifying glass and pored for some time over the documents.

“Yes,” he said at last, straightening himself. “This letter”, he pointed to the one signed by Lord Henry Gaveston, “was typed by the machine I handled this morning. Do you notice that ‘c’ a little out of alignment? And if you look through the glass you will see a tiny fault in the crossbar of the capital ‘J’. We’ll get an expert to check it, but that’s good enough for our purposes.”

Frant was beaming. He rubbed his hands and twittered with excitement.

“By Jove, we’ve got him!” he exclaimed. Then he looked up into his superior’s face. What he saw there prompted him to add more doubtfully: “Haven’t we, sir?”

Mallett’s forehead was furrowed with thought. He pulled his moustache until it seemed that the hairs must come out by the roots. For some time he stood in silence as though he had not heard the sergeant’s exclamation. At last he turned slowly and said in a restrained voice:

“Have we? Let’s sit down and think this over quietly.”

He seated himself at his desk and drew a piece of paper from a drawer. Frant sat down opposite him, his effervescence suddenly subsiding to an uncomfortable flatness.

“In the first place,” said Mallett, unscrewing the cap of his fountain-pen, “who is ‘he’?”

“Well, Eales, I suppose,” said the sergeant.

“Eales,” repeated the inspector gravely. He wrote the name down at the head of the sheet. “Motive?” he went on.

“Money,” said Frant promptly. “Money and jealousy—and perhaps the fear of exposure as a bigamist.”

Mallett wrote down: “Money, jealousy, exposure” under the heading “Motive”.

“Evidence?” was his next question.

“The letter to the bank,” was the ready answer.

“You mean that he could have written it,” Mallett pointed out.

“Yes—of course, it doesn’t go further than that.”

“Access to typewriter,” wrote Mallett.

“He could have put it among Ballantine’s papers and got it taken to the office that way,” Frant went on.

“M’m. Could he? Ballantine kept his attaché case well locked, remember——”