Grant opened the evening paper that was lying on the car cushions and laid the photograph carefully between its folds. Then he drove down to the river and along the Embankment.

The old place looked very much as usual, he thought, as the hideous pile loomed up in the dusk. And so, too, did the finger-print department once he got there. Cartwright was stubbing out a cigarette in the saucer of a half-drunk cup of cold tea and admiring his latest handiwork: a complete set of left-hand prints.

‘Lovely, ’m?’ he said, looking up as Grant’s shadow fell across him. ‘These are going to hang Pinky Mason.’

‘Hadn’t Pinky the price of a pair of gloves?’

‘Huh! Pinky could have bought up Dents. He just couldn’t believe, clever little man Pinky, that the police would ever get round to thinking it anything but a suicide. Gloves are for small-time trash: burglars and such; not for master-minds like Pinky. You been away?’

‘Yes. I’ve been fishing in the Highlands. If you’re not too busy could you do something off the cuff for me?’

‘Now?’

‘Oh, no. Tomorrow would do.’

Cartwright looked at the clock. ‘I’ve nothing to do till I meet my wife at the theatre. We’re going to Marta Hallard’s new play. So I can do it now, if you like. Is it a difficult job?’

‘No. Dead easy. Just here, in the lower right-hand corner of this photograph, there is a beautiful thumb-print. And at the back I think you’ll find a nice set of finger-tips. I want to check them with the files.’

‘All right. Will you wait?’

‘I’m going to the library. I’ll come back.’

In the library he took down Who’s Who, and looked up Kinsey-Hewitt. The paragraph on Kinsey-Hewitt was a very modest little affair compared with the half-column on Heron Lloyd. He was a much younger man, it seemed; married, with two children; and his address was a London one. The ‘Scottish connection’ that Lloyd had mentioned seemed to consist in the fact that he was the younger son of some Kinsey-Hewitt who had a place in Fife.

Well, there was always the chance that he was now, or had been lately, in Scotland. Grant went to a telephone and called the London address. A woman with a pleasant voice answered, and said that her husband was not at home. No, he would not be at home for some time; he was in Arabia. He had been in Arabia since November and was not expected back until May at the earliest. Grant thanked her and hung up. It had not been to Kinsey-Hewitt that Bill Kenrick had gone. Tomorrow, he would have to go through the various authorities on Arabia, one by one, and ask them the question.

He went back, after some coffee-housing with such friends as he happened to run into at that hour, to Cartwright.

‘Got the photograph or am I too early?’

‘I’ve not only got it but looked it up for you. The answer is no.’

‘No, I didn’t really think there would be anything. I was just clearing decks. But thank you, all the same. I’ll take the print with me. I thought the new Hallard show got awful notices.’

‘Did it? I never read ’em. Neither does Beryl. She just likes Marta Hallard. So do I, if it comes to that. Nice long legs. Good night.’

‘Good night, and thanks again.’

12

‘You don’t seem awfully sweet on this guy,’ Tad Cullen said, when Grant had finished this story over the telephone.

‘Don’t I? Oh, well, perhaps it’s just that he doesn’t happen to be what we call my cup of tea. Look, Tad, you’re quite sure that you have no idea, even in the back of your mind, where Bill could have been staying?’

‘I haven’t got a back to my mind. I have just a small, narrow space in front where I keep all that’s useful to me. A few telephone numbers, and a prayer or two.’

‘Well, tomorrow I’d like you to do the round of the more obvious places, if you would.’

‘Yes, sure. I’ll do anything. Anything you say.’

‘All right. Have you got a pen? Here’s the list.’

Grant gave him the names of twenty of the more likely places, going on the assumption that a young man from the wide open spaces and the small towns would look for a caravanserai that was both large and gay and not too expensive. And just for good measure he added a couple of the best-known expensive ones; young men with several months’ back-pay were liable to be extravagant.

‘I don’t think I’d bother with any more than that,’ he said.

‘Are there any more?’

‘If he didn’t stay in one of these, then we’re sunk, because if he didn’t stay in any of them we’d have to hunt every hotel in London to find him, to say nothing of the boarding-houses.’

‘Okay. I’ll start first thing in the morning. Mr Grant, I’d like to tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me. Giving up your time to something that no one else could do; I mean, something the police wouldn’t touch. If it wasn’t for you—’

‘Listen, Tad. I’m not being benevolent. I’m being self-indulgent and typically nosey and I’m enjoying myself to the top of my bent. If I wasn’t, believe me I wouldn’t be in London. I’d be going to sleep tonight in Clune. So good night and sleep well. We’ll crack this thing between us.’

He hung up and went to see what Mrs Tinker had left on the stove. It seemed to be a sort of shepherd’s pie. He carried it into the living-room and ate it absent-mindedly, his thoughts still on Lloyd.

What was familiar about Lloyd?

He went back in his mind over the few moments before his first feeling of recognition. What had Lloyd been doing? Pulling open the panel of the book cupboard. Pulling it open with a gesture self-consciously graceful; faintly exhibitionist. What was there in that to provoke a sense of familiarity?

And there was something even more curious.

Why had Lloyd said ‘On what?’ when he had mentioned Kenrick’s scribbling?

That, surely, was a most unnatural reaction.

What exactly had he said to Lloyd? He had said that he became interested in Kenrick because of some verses he had been scribbling. The normal come-back to that was surely: ‘Verses?’ The operative word in the sentence was verses. That he was scribbling was entirely by the way.

And that anyone’s reaction to the information should be to say ‘On what?’ was inexplicable.

Except that no human reaction was inexplicable.

It was Grant’s experience that it was the irrelevant, the unconsidered words in a statement that were important. Quite surprising and gratifying revelations lay in the gap between an assertion and a non-sequitur.

Why had Lloyd said ‘On what?’

He took the problem to bed with him, and fell asleep with it.

In the morning he began his hunt through the authorities on Arabia, and finished it not at all astonished that it had produced no result. People who explored Arabia as a hobby very seldom had money to back anything. They were, on the contrary, usually prospecting for backing themselves. The only chance had been that some one of them had proved interested to the point of being willing to share his backing. But none of them had ever heard of either Charles Martin or Bill Kenrick.

It was lunch-time before he finished, and he stood by the window waiting for Tad’s call and wondering whether to go out to luncheon or to let Mrs Tinker make him an omelette. It was another grey day but there was a slight breeze and a smell of damp earth that was queerly countrified. A fine fishing day, he noted. He wished for a moment that he was walking down over the moor to the river instead of wrestling with the London telephone system. It wouldn’t even have to be the river. He would settle for an afternoon on Lochan Dhu in a leaky boat with Pat for company.

He turned to his desk and began to clear up the mess of this morning’s opened mail. He had stooped to throw the torn pages and the empty envelopes into the waste-paper basket, but he stopped with the action half spent.