“Not one,” said Browne. “Except for the lease, there was only the cheque for the rent, and Mr. Harper took that himself and paid it in.”

“But he returned the keys by post, didn’t he? Wasn’t there a letter with them?”

“I’ll ask Mr. Lewis,” said Browne.

Lewis was summoned from the outer office and the same question put to him.

“There was a letter with the keys,” he answered. “I remember Harper told me so.”

“Then wasn’t it filed in the usual way?” asked Browne.

“It ought to have been, of course,” said Lewis, evidently pleased to be able to score off his fellow employee, “but it wasn’t. I looked for it myself, and when I asked Harper, he said he thought it didn’t matter, and he’d thrown it away.”

Mr. Browne threw up his hands in despair.

“There you are, you see!” he exclaimed. “That’s him all over! What can you do with a man like that? I believe he’s in love, Inspector, engaged or something, but it doesn’t excuse that sort of thing.”

“I quite agree with you,” said Mallett. “Good afternoon, Mr. Browne, and let me know if Mr. Harper comes in later.”

Mallett, on his journey back to Scotland Yard, had food for thought. It was extraordinary how successfully James had succeeded in hiding his traces. Outwardly, nothing would have been more open, ostentatious even, than his actions. To open an account at a bank, to engage a furnished house and a servant, to take a ticket to Paris through an agency—here was a series of actions which should have left behind a trail of clues to his identity—to his handwriting at least, from which his identity could have been established. Instead, there was nothing, or next to nothing, unless Frant’s second visit to the bank should prove more fruitful than his first. It was impossible even to lay hands on anybody who had ever spoken to him, except Crabtree and Harper. He frowned. Why should Harper have been so shockingly careless about the tenancy agreement and the letter? He would not willingly believe that this well-bred, good-looking young man could have had a hand in a callous crime, but if it were only coincidence, it was a very unfortunate one that the one person who had the opportunity of supplying valuable evidence should, knowingly or not, have been the means of destroying it.