He telephoned Hopper what he had found, and Hopper came down at once.

“It has to be somebody around here,” was his opinion. “He got it in cash, and it never came through the mail that way. Anyhow, the McDonalds say he had no letters for years.”

Together they made a list, including everybody in any way connected with the crime. At the end Jim sat back and grunted. “Let’s go back to Morgan’s death,” he said. “That’s the key, Hopper. Suppose that girl he eloped with is back again. Suppose she’s all settled down, married, and so on. Then Don comes back and threatens her. Maybe he wants a spot of cash. She kills him, and Evans sees it.”

Hopper grinned. “Meaning Bessie Wainwright?” he said. “She only married Tony six years ago. That lets her out.”

Jim threw the bankbook on the table in disgust. “All right,” he said. “It’s a lunatic. Or I’m one. I’m headed for Burton right now, if you ask me.”

“If it’s a lunatic he certainly knows his way about,” was Hopper’s dry comment.

Nevertheless, both men were now agreed that two things were probable: that Evans had been receiving blackmail money from someone, and that as a result he was dead.

“It may have nothing to do with Morgan’s murder,” said Hopper laconically.

Jim disagreed. “When we get to the bottom of this,” he said, “we’ll find that Don Morgan, the attack on Bessie Wainwright, Evans’s disappearance, maybe even the cemetery, are all tied up together. This district hasn’t had a crime for as long as I can remember. These are law-abiding people. Then it breaks out with a rash of mysteries. You can have all sorts of symptoms, with only one disease,” he added, and grinned.

Hopper went back to town, to renew the search for Evans or Evans’s body. The next day the police boats were back on the river, and an intensified search of the countryside began once more. But Jim sat in his office, going through the routine of his job, and for long intervals staring at the walls.

In the end he sent for me. It was late in the afternoon, and he gave me a cigarette and lit it before he began. “I want you to help me, Pat,” he said. “I seem to remember you worked in town for a while. You know about offices and so on.”

“I do,” I said with some bitterness. “I’ve been thrown out of some of the best.”

“Still and all,” he argued, “you’d know your way about; where the stenographers and so on eat, what they do, how to get to them.”

“Get to them? How?”

“Get them to talking. Not the young ones. The old girls. The ones who have been in one position for, say, fifteen years. There’s one like that in what used to be Morgan’s firm, only her mouth is sewed up so tight I’ll bet she’s a nose-breather.”

Then it came out. He wanted some information about the Weston girl. “You’ve got to get this,” he said. “When Morgan came back he interfered with Lydia and Bill Sterling. All right, you needn’t look like that. I don’t think either of them killed him. But he was killed. It was no accident. It was thought out, planned. He had to be gotten rid of. Why? Because somebody hated him or else was endangered by him.”