"He often sends me private papers in that way," Miss. Jones explained, as had Sibella before. "I put them in his desk, just as they are, till his return."
Pointer saw a long envelope, looking much the worse for wear, having evidently been folded across the middle, sealed with black wax, and addressed to Professor H. Charteris.
"Where's the envelope it came in?" he asked.
Miss Jones fished it out of the waste-paper basket.
It was addressed to the professor at his club, and had been sent from Milan on the Friday that Rose had been found murdered.
The handwriting on the outer envelope was not Professor Charteris's, but Miss Jones explained that his eyesight being weak when he had mislaid his glasses, which occurred every five minutes, he would commission the nearest-at-hand waiter, or hall-porter, to address an envelope for him.
"You have not heard from him otherwise in any way?"
She had not. Like the solicitor, she was not in the least anxious on account of the silence, though the latter was beginning to think it time that Charteris should come across the daily advertisement asking him to wire or write, if he could not come to England.
"I should like to examine this a little more closely." Pointer still held the long envelope with the black seals. "I should like to photograph it at my rooms."
"Short of opening it, you're welcome to do whatever you think fit," Gilchrist said heartily. "The rest are a couple of circulars of no importance."
Pointer, in his own rooms at the police station, tried the little fragments of black sealing-wax that he had found in the professor's envelope that he had fished out of Rose's chain bag and taken from the table in the studio. He found that they were not too numerous to have dropped off the seals if the letter had been carried about for some hours.
He believed, from the envelope's frayed look, that this was the same letter that had been posted to England once before, reaching Rose on Thursday at tea-time, and which had not been seen since her death. There was still a faint fragrance lingering about the flap that matched the perfume in her bag. The description tallied absolutely. He looked up the trains in Bradshaw. It was now Saturday.
Suppose some one left London by the boat train either Thursday night or even Friday morning and his Paris-Milan express was on time, then he would have an hour in Milan station in which to post the letter back again in the returning Milan-Paris express.
That looked as though some one had taken the letter by mistake, or accident, and posted it from Italy in order to make it seem as though the professor were sending it. In that case, it must be some one who knew that the professor had sent it, to his daughter in the first place, but that she was now dead.
Suppose that he, Pointer, were right, and that Rose had taken it with her in her little bag to the studio, had noticed it when there, and, taking it out, had laid it on the table by the door, in a place where she thought that she could not overlook it on leaving, had forgotten it in her hurried dash when she heard the furious Italian at the front door. Suppose that di Monti, finding Rose gone, had swooped on the proof of her presence in the room. Pointer imagined that he might intend to keep it to confront her with. But after her murder the letter would be very incriminating evidence. Yet, however violent, di Monti was a gentleman. He might kill, but Pointer could not see him tampering with correspondence.
Pointer imagined him giving the letter to a friend. In all likelihood to a brother of the Prince Cornaro who had confirmed the count's alibi. For Scotland Yard knew that young Prince Amadeo Cornaro had left early on Friday morning for Italy. Certainly the envelope must have been returned by some one who knew of the professor's little way of sending securely fastened letters back to himself.
Pointer photographed the envelope. There were no signs of its having been tampered with in any way Or rather, to his microscopic scrutiny, it showed many little proofs that it had not been opened.
With a thin, warm knife he sliced off the seals, and then steamed open the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of paper, headed, in the professor's writing, "Memo on Refractions." Below came couple of lines of figures and equations.
Pointer photographed the paper and fastened the envelope up again exactly as it had been. When the wax was cold he returned it to Gilchrist, who put it with the professor's private papers.
CHAPTER SEVEN
DRIVING to New Scotland Yard at once, Pointer learnt that the memo was of no value, though it was connected, as he had surmised, with the manufacture of emeralds.
This was a blow. He had expected something from those algebraical formulae. What, he himself hardly knew. But something big.
He dropped in at his Bayswater rooms and found O'Connor waiting for him with lunch. Over the cheese, and a pile of the curly toast beloved of the Chief Inspector, thin, and brown, and crisp, as birch leaves in a frost, he told his friend of the latest developments.
"So the letter isn't the clue after all!"
"Why not? I seem to've been misled as to its contents. Suppose some one else was mistaken, too? Suppose I wasn't the only one who hoped for something different from what was there? A hunt after letters, or papers, runs through this case. There was the search among the professor's rooms shortly after his daughter was found dead. Then there's the theft of Miss Charteris's own letters from the chief constable's house."
"And there's the Odyssey of this enclosed letter itself. The one just sent back from Milan. Though, faith, it doesn't look the sort of thing to interest the count," mused O'Connor. "But it might some of the others. How about getting him back again, by the way?"
"It'll only be a matter of days before the Yard learns of his whereabouts, unless he intends to go permanently into hiding."
"But when you've got him," O'Connor went on, "you've still to find the motive for all the rest of that Thursday night show. The moving of the body, and what happened on those flags. D'ye think the colonel could help you to a short cut?"
"I told the superintendent that Scarlett's a difficult man to read, and so he is. At first he acted as though a weight were lifting off him. Yet every hour that passes without disclosing the criminal in a case of this kind usually gets on people's nerves. And now lately, he's just opposite. He looks to me like a man ridden by some ever-growing fear. He's all on the qui vive every time any one approaches him suddenly."
"Perhaps he's afraid for himself, or his daughter?"
"Neither. He never carries even a stout stick. There isn't a fire-arm handy in the house. He takes no precautions. But he does take two Italian papers since about a week ago. About the time of the murder."
"I wonder if he's in this," O'Connor speculated, "with di Monti and that Mrs. Lane. Of course, we know di Monti struck the blow, but who else was there?"
"The funny thing is," Pointer reached up for a Chinese ball-puzzle on the mantelpiece above him, "that I've a perfectly unsound idea, which I wouldn't mention to any one but you, connecting Mrs. Lane with—not di Monti nor the colonel—but with Thornton."
"How's that?"
"Difficult to explain. He's never natural when her name comes up. Either too indifferent, or changes the subject, or something—I can't put a name to it. But I've had from the first a very strong feeling that she moves him, touches him in some quite peculiar way."
"In love with her?"
"Why not be so openly? All our accounts show that he rarely talked much to her, nor she to him. Yet he kept his eyes on Mrs. Lane, and on Mrs. Lane alone, at the inquest, once the doctor began to stir things up. As she went out she looked at him. Odd look. One I haven't a label for."
"You'd expect that she and di Monti would be standing in together—"