He concentrated his mind on the mysterious letter of recommendation to the bank, which had brought him down to Brighton. In a sense, he had been disappointed, in that the signatory had been able to tell him next to nothing about it. But was it really such a disappointment after all? He had never suspected—no sane person ever would have suspected—that the amiable nobleman he had just interviewed would prove to be concerned in the murder of the man whose innocent tool he had been. Nobody, of course, could be wholly exempt from suspicion in a case such as this, but, so far as he, Mallett, was concerned, he accepted without reservation his account of the board meeting and what went on there. And that account was, after all, of considerable value. It meant that somebody in the London and Imperial Estates Office had successfully endeavoured to get a director to vouch for Colin James. It seemed clear that most of the board took their duties as lightly as Lord Henry, and it was probably the merest chance that it was his signature that happened to appear on the letter. His mind went back to Lord Henry’s description of the procedure—Ballantine with a big wad of papers in front of him, Du Pine with another. From which set of documents had this one come? He toyed for a moment with the theory that one of the other directors might have contrived to shuffle it into Lord Henry’s pile unobserved, but dismissed it as improbable. Remained then, the chairman and the secretary. Whichever it was, one thing was clear. Either was perfectly competent himself to recommend a client to the good offices of a bank. That it should have been done in this roundabout way led to only one conclusion—that the real author of the letter was anxious that his connection with James should not come to light. And this, he remembered, was the first time that his name had appeared at all—the birth, so to speak, of Colin James, who was to walk away into blank space a bare month later along the pavement of the Avenue Magenta, leaving a corpse behind him in Kensington. On the face of it, it did not seem probable that Ballantine had assisted him. Men are not usually privy to their own murder. On the other hand, there must be some connection, as yet unestablished, between the two, or how did Ballantine come to go, apparently of his own free will, to the house where he met his death? There were, he knew, many dark corners in the financier’s life which had yet to be cleared up. Perhaps James was a jackal of his and privy to some of his less reputable activities, who knowing that Ballantine’s time was running short had seized the opportunity to make away with him and with the spoil which he had prepared for his flight?