Pointer nodded. He had done with the boy. He now asked for the lift's mechanician, and a ladder. Together the two mounted on top of the cage. The workman flashed a repairer's lamp around. There, hidden from view by a deep ornamental border, lay a brown kit-bag, marked P. V.
"That's what I'm after!" Pointer picked it up, and gave a receipt—on a luggage insurance company's paper—to the hall porter.
What had happened must have been that the first boy left the bag on the top landing by an oversight. The second boy, seeing the number of a room on a lower floor chalked on it, had heaved it into the lift as he thought, but on to the lift as it turned out, which had already been sent down. The dim light, and dark shaft had at once suggested this to Pointer. No man but an absolutely fearless one rises high, either at Scotland Yard, or in the Force. Yet Pointer held his very breath as he tiptoed past the coffee-room door, at which Barbara was casting constant glances.
His footsteps would not have disturbed a tigress with a wounded cub. But Barbara heard them. She darted out into the hall just as he was arranging a message to be delivered to her later—much later.
"You've got the bag? Phil's bag? Oh, well done."
Pointer made the best of what he considered a very bad job, and let her accompany him back to his car. Nothing but actual violence would have torn her from his find. He span out the tale of his discovery to the utmost as they drove along.
"You're taking it to Mr. Vardon, of course?"
"Of course!" Pointer echoed loftily as though nothing in the world could ever induce him to trifle with, or detain, another's property. "But I think we'll just call in and tell Mr. Dorset Steele its found. He's on our way."
"I want to be there when it's opened." Barbara's fine little nostrils were quivering like a filly's with eagerness.
Pointer was very official.
"I'm afraid this kind of thing—routine work—must be done as routine," he said stiffly. "I think you can trust Mr. Dorset Steele to state the case accurately to you afterwards."
Barbara seemed duly crushed as he had hoped.
"Where would you like me to put you down?" he asked as they came in sight of the solicitor's office.
"My bank is quite close," she suggested pleasantly. It was next door. Pointer glanced sharply at her, but Barbara was counting some change in her purse with the look of incredulous and pained surprise which that operation generally calls forth on a woman's face. Her whole air was business-like. Absorbed.
She shook hands with him and tripped into the lobby. To run swiftly through a passage, out the other side, up a back stair and into the office of Dorset Steele. She tried the knob of his private office. It was locked.
"No one can come in!" snapped Dorset Steele's voice. "It's me, grandfather," she said meekly. He made no reply.
The head clerk who had witnessed her mad swoop upon the inner room, proffered a paper. Barbara wrapt herself in it haughtily, blinking to keep back the tears.
"Phil's bag! I know they're opening it without waiting for him!" So, she was not to be there. To see his vindication. She wanted to read that piece of paper more than any of them could. It would be balm to her quivering, doubt-tormented spirit.
The door was finally unbolted. Barbara was in like a wind-driven bird.
"Well?" she asked, "well?" For there stood the bag in the centre of the table. "Have you opened it? Without Philip?"
"A pretty state of things!" fumed Dorset Steele, putting an arm around her. "My private door practically forced open like—"
"Did you find it?" she asked in quivering suspense.
"A paper signed Mable Tangye giving Mr. Vardon the money to invest for her, is here all right, Miss Ash," Pointer reassured her.
"Then, what's wrong?" she asked her grandfather, looking searchingly into his face, "what's wrong?"
"Nothing!" he snapped, dropping his arm, and turning away.
Barbara's gaze grew more agonised.
"I think you'd better explain, sir," Pointer said quietly. He opened the bag again; he lifted out an envelope.
"There's the paper giving him the use of the money. But would you say that was written by Mrs. Tangye?" he asked Barbara reluctantly.
Barbara stared at it. Her eyes blurred.
"I—I don't know her writing well enough to say."
"It's not like any specimens which Mr. Dorset Steele and I have," Pointer explained. "And it's written with Mr. Vardon's stylograph. And on his paper. The last is natural of course. So is the pen, perhaps, but that writing?" He eyed it very hard.
"I know you'll take his word—" she began. It was a silly sentence. But she was speaking as much to her own heart as to Pointer. She turned to him, confident of being met half-way. Then she stared. He had altered. She had thought his eyes kind; they were steel. For the first time Barbara sensed that the man beside her was by nature a close-in fighter. The cut of his nostrils, the set of his lips, the very bone formation of his good-looking face, would have told a skilled observer as much at a glance. But for the first time in her knowledge of him, the invincible, fiery, essence of the spirit was flaming through the calm exterior of the man.
Instinct told her that nothing would move the Chief Inspector to alter the course which he thought the true one, by the breadth of an atom. She was right, nothing would.
He seemed to her suddenly very awful. Very terrible. She would not be the first who had had cause to think him so.
She looked dumbly at her grandfather.
"The Chief Inspector believes it's a forgery," he said curtly.
Pointer did not go as far as that, he only considered a forgery as possible.
Barbara sat down. She felt faint. What was this law that never seemed satisfied? She thought of the gulls that she had fed only this morning on the Embankment. Their stretched necks and greedy eyes intent on more, always more. Cruel and insatiable by some law of their very being. Remorseless.
"Philip's clever with his pen," she said swiftly, "if he had wanted to copy Mrs. Tangye's writing, he'd have done it better than that."
Her grandfather's eyes stopped her. Dorset Steele looked as though he were going to bite.
"We maintain that it was written with Mrs. Tangye's left hand, and as such would naturally show great differences," the solicitor said at once.
"Leaving that on one side for the moment. As we three are together, and since Mr. Vardon hasn't got here yet—we telephoned to him to come on," Pointer explained to Barbara—"there's another point I'd like to ask you about, Miss Ash."
"You don't need to answer, mind!" Dorset Steele threw in. "A man came to Twickenham police station this morning. To see the Superintendent. He spends his free afternoons going over the fields close to Richmond golf links with his dog picking lost balls. It seems he heard you and Mr. Vardon together last Saturday afternoon. He was out of sight, he says, behind a thicket at the time. According to him, Mr. Vardon was speaking as though he hadn't any certainty that you would marry him. Yet you told us that you had become engaged some days before then."
Pointer stopped Barbara with a gesture as cautionary as her grandfather's might have been.
"I don't want you to answer without thinking very carefully over your reply. According to this man, Mr. Vardon spoke unwillingly of a screw that he could turn—if need be-which would let him make a good deal of money. According to this man, you called over your shoulder as you moved away, out of earshot, that if so, he had better turn it, and turn it hard. Now, if you care to explain this conversation when you've thought over your answers—they are very important, Miss Ash—I would like to hear what you have to say. You're not bound in any way to reply, as Mr. Dorset Steele, here says,