“If they were still in the room when they called, yes. We haven’t found them. But that doesn’t mean that they knew the value of them, and I should be surprised if they did.”

“I wish, Mr. Nightingale, I hadn’t told you. You’re disappointed, I see, to think how narrowly you’ve missed being able to hear that rarity.”

Nightingale smiled. Denial was pointless. To the accompaniment of a great effusion of courtesies from Majendie he made his way out.

After Majendie’s blazing fire and soft carpets, the street seemed colder than before. Nightingale shivered. Majendie was an old fox as well as a hamster. All that blinking bonhomie; that exaggeratedly fragmented, dated, affectedly preserved manner of speaking; all of it a fence to baffle the casual observer from a glimpse of his cunning, even ruthless, pursuit of business. It was like a false limb, in the use of which he had from long practice grown so proficient that it was literally second nature.

It didn’t matter to him, Nightingale thought, unless Majendie was using the fence to hide something rather more than rapacity; and that he was still inclined to doubt. Would Majendie, if he were involved with the robbery, have admitted so much? Possibly; on realising that the police had found a link between himself and Bright’s Row, he might have decided to play safe, admit to having been there, as was inevitable, and hope that the unknown clue would not compromise his explanation. Could that explanation be corroborated? No; except by Majendie’s partners, who would be at best tainted witnesses. If the partners were innocent, was there any reason to suppose that a list of the Princess’s belongings existed? Would Majendie now set to work to concoct one? And in the morning he would have to produce two letters from Princess Olga. That business of the stamps, or lack of them, suggested a fudged story; it was one of those touches by which someone in haste seeks to improve a fiction, but oversteps the bounds of discretion. Had he thought to obviate the post mark difficulty, forgetting that no stamp did not imply no post mark, that in fact there would be an extra Post Office printing to enforce the double charge? In any case, how many offices filed envelopes?

In spite of all this, however, Nightingale tentatively absolved him. He would be wary with Majendie, that was all. If the letters he handed over were forged, they would in time be proved so: and in that time it was unlikely that Majendie, secure in his lucrative business, would try to slink out of the country.