«Did you get nothing at the house?»

«Only Levy's private diary. I brought it away with me. Here it is. It doesn't tell one much, though. It's full of entries like: “Tom and Annie to dinner”; and “My dear wife's birthday; gave her an old opal ring”; “Mr. Arbuthnot dropped in to tea; he wants to marry Rachel, but I should like someone steadier for my treasure”. Still, I thought it would show who came to the house and so on. He evidently wrote it up at night. There's no entry for Monday.»

«I expect it'll be useful,» said Lord Peter, turning over the pages. «Poor old buffer. I say, I m not so certain now he was done away with.»

He detailed to Mr. Parker his day's work.

«Arbuthnot?» said Parker, «is that the Arbuthnot of the diary?»

«I suppose so. I hunted him up because I knew he was fond of fooling round the Stock Exchange. As for Milligan, he looks all right, but I believe he's pretty ruthless in business and you never can tell. Then there's the red-haired secretary — lightnin' calculator man with a face like a fish, keeps on sayin' nuthin' — got the Tar-baby in his family tree, I should think. Milligan's got a jolly good motive for, at any rate, suspendin' Levy for a few days. Then there's the new man.»

«What new man?»

«Ah, that's the letter I mentioned to you. Where did I put it? here we are. Good parchment paper, printed address of solicitor's office in Salisbury, and postmark to correspond. Very precisely written with a fine nib by an elderly business man of old-fashioned habits.»

Parker took the letter and read:

«Dear me,» said Parker, «this is what you might call unexpected.»

«Either it is some extraordinary misunderstanding,» said Lord Peter, «or Mr. Crimplesham is a very bold and cunning villain. Or possibly, of course, they are the wrong glasses. We may as well get a ruling on that point at once. I suppose the glasses are at the Yard. I wish you'd just ring 'em up and ask 'em to send round an optician's description of them at once — and you might ask at the same time whether it's a very common prescription.»

«Right you are,» said Parker, and took the receiver off its hook.

«And now,» said his friend, when the message was delivered, «just come into the library for a minute.»

On the library table, Lord Peter had spread out a series of bromide prints, some dry, some damp, and some but half-washed.

«These little ones are the originals of the photos we've been taking,» said Lord Peter, «and these big ones are enlargements all made to precisely the same scale. This one here is the footmark on the linoleum; we'll put that by itself at present. Now these finger-prints can be divided into five lots. I've numbered 'em on the prints — see? — and made a list:

A. The finger-prints of Levy himself, off his little bedside book and his hairbrush — this and this — you can't mistake the little scar on the thumb.

B. The smudges made by the gloved fingers of the man who slept in Levy's room on Monday night. They show clearly on the water-bottle and on the boots — superimposed on Levy's. They are very distinct on the boots — surprisingly so for gloved hands, and I deduce that the gloves were rubber ones and had recently been in water.»

«Here's another interestin' point. Levy walked in the rain on Monday night, as we know, and these dark marks are mud-splashes. You see they lie over Levy's finger-prints in every case. Now see: on this left boot we find the stranger's thumb-mark over the mud on the leather above the heel. That's a funny place to find a thumb-mark on a boot, isn't it? That is, if Levy took off his own boots. But it's the place where you'd expect to see it if somebody forcibly removed his boots for him. Again, most of the stranger's finger-marks come over the mud-marks, but here is one splash of mud which comes on top of them again. Which makes me infer that the stranger came back to Park Lane, wearing Levy's boots, in a cab, carriage or car, but that at some point or other he walked a little way — just enough to tread in a puddle and get a splash on the boots. What do you say?»

«Very pretty,» said Parker. «A bit intricate, though, and the marks are not all that I could wish a finger-print to be.»

«Well, I won't lay too much stress on it. But it fits in with our previous ideas. Now let's turn to:

C. The prints obligingly left by my own particular villain on the further edge of Thipps's bath, where you spotted them, and I ought to be scourged for not having spotted them. The left hand, you notice, the base of the palm and the fingers, but not the tips, looking as though he had steadied himself on the edge of the bath while leaning down to adjust something at the bottom, the pince-nez perhaps. Gloved, you see, but showing no ridge or seam of any kind — I say rubber, you say rubber. That's that. Now see here:

D and E come off a visiting-card of mine. There's this thing at the corner, marked F, but that you can disregard; in the original document it's a sticky mark left by the thumb of the youth who took it from me, after first removing a piece of chewing-gum from his teeth with his finger to tell me that Mr. Milligan might or might not be disengaged. D and E are the thumb-marks of Mr. Milligan and his red-haired secretary. I'm not clear which is which, but I saw the youth with the chewing-gum hand the card to the secretary, and when I got into the inner shrine I saw John P. Milligan standing with it in his hand, so it's one or the other, and for the moment it's immaterial to our purpose which is which. I boned the card from the table when I left.

Well, now, Parker, here's what's been keeping Bunter and me up till the small hours. I've measured and measured every way backwards and forwards till my head's spinnin', and I've stared till I'm nearly blind, but I'm hanged if I can make my mind up. Question 1. Is C identical with B? Question 2. Is D or E identical with B? There's nothing to go on but the size and shape, of course, and the marks are so faint — what do you think?»

Parker shook his head doubtfully.

«I think E might almost be put out of the question,» he said, «it seems such an excessively long and narrow thumb. But I think there is a decided resemblance between the span of B on the water-bottle and C on the bath. And I don't see any reason why D shouldn't be the same as B, only there's so little to judge from.»

«Your untutored judgment and my measurements have brought us both to the same conclusion — if you can call it a conclusion,» said Lord Peter, bitterly.

«Another thing,» said Parker. «Why on earth should we try to connect B with C? The fact that you and I happen to be friends doesn't make it necessary to conclude that the two cases we happen to be interested in have any organic connection with one another. Why should they? The only person who thinks they have is Sugg, and he's nothing to go by. It would be different if there were any truth in the suggestion that the man in the bath was Levy, but we know for a certainty he wasn't. It's ridiculous to suppose that the same man was employed in committing two totally distinct crimes on the same night, one in Battersea and the other in Park Lane.»