“Then I went on to consider the evidence. One thing struck me at once. Fanshawe went to France by the night boat on Friday the 13th. So, we found, did Eales. A coincidence, no doubt, but a perfectly possible one. But so also did Colin James. That struck me as a perfectly impossible coincidence—that three individuals, connected with this crime, should all have chosen independently to travel by that boat. Now we know, had known from the start, that James was someone else in disguise. It stuck out a mile. To reduce my three travellers to two, my impossible coincidence to a possible one, James must be one of the others in disguise, either Eales or Fanshawe. I struck out Eales, for reasons which you know. Therefore James was Fanshawe. At the same time, we knew on irrefutable evidence that James had been a tenant in Daylesford Gardens while Fanshawe was a tenant of a cell in Maidstone. Therefore James was not Fanshawe. Two perfectly logical propositions arriving at opposite results. I left them there and went back to consider what we have always regarded as the crux of the problem, the identity of James.

“Who had I got to look for? Either somebody who had disappeared altogether, about the time that James came to life, or somebody whose manner of living enabled him to lead a double life, putting in sufficient appearances in his old haunts and under his normal guise to avoid suspicion, while spending the rest of his time building up the new identity of Colin James. I went through the records of disappearances, and found none that would suit. I was not surprised. James had been only intermittently at Daylesford Gardens, and I suspected all along that he had been spending the rest of his time elsewhere in another identity. So I had to find someone whose conduct had recently been irregular and abnormal, whose sleeping places one couldn’t trace, and who had a motive for building up another personality at the time in question. I found him—Lionel Ballantine.