"Not suicide," Sladen said positively. "Oh, dear ino! Not suicide! Very shrewd eye for a bargain. Very keen on having a quid for her quo>."
"That's a help," Pointer looked grateful for any assistance. It was his most useful mask when he had to go in his own person to make inquiries.
"Now, this Mr. Philpotts—lie might be able to confirm that too?"
"Rather!" Sladen laughed again. "Not much doubt but that he'll agree with me. Would you like his address in town? He's staying for over the funeral. He used to know Mrs. Tangye years ago in her father's parish, when she was quite a little girl, so he told me."
"Keen amateur photographer, isn't he? I seem to recollect his name as exhibiting now and then. I go in for a bit of that sort of thing myself."
"Ah? Dare say. I know nothing of him personally."
"Then how did you come to suggest him as a purchaser?"
Pointer seemed bewildered. Sladen decided that the low amount of serious crime in London compared with that in other capitals is due to the natural goodness of the Londoner, rather than to any fear of detection.
"I didn't suggest him," he explained, "we advertised the farm in the usual way. Mr. Philpotts answered, and as his money was there in the bank, and Mrs. Tangye very much favoured him as a purchaser after she'd learnt that he used to be one of her father's church-wardens, why the deal went through."
"Had they met since those early days?"
"Not as far as I know. Mr. Philpotts liked everything in writing. So did Mrs. Tangye. We forwarded the papers to her and put the thing through for her."
Pointer had asked last night at Riverview whether Philpotts had ever been to the house. As far as was known he had not.
Next, the Chief Inspector wanted a detailed list of the papers sent by Sladen to Tangye. He read it through—once, and then asked about a green cash book, and a brown account book of Mrs. Tangye's. Sladen had never had either in his care. Yet Pointer had found them in a locked drawer in Tangye's desk at his office, together with various other papers of Mrs. Tangye's which the Chief Inspector had duly listed, and which also, he now saw, were not on Sladen's list. How had they got into Tangye's possession? When Haviland had seized on the absence of all personal papers from his wife's desk as a proof of suicide, Tangye, though indignant, had had to fall back on the explanation that his wife had destroyed them as a preliminary to her tour abroad with him. All the papers which he had seen in Tangye's drawer had been folded into trim slips, neatly and very fully docketed in the dead woman's writing. They looked as though they had been compressed into the smallest possible space. They looked, in fact, to Pointer, as though Mrs. Tangye had selected them as essential and sufficient for her purposes before destroying the others. Pointer had spent some time last night with them spread around him, and had noticed that every necessary item and note and receipt was included. But no more.
Yet he had found them in Tangye's drawer. Though the presence of them in his wife's desk would have taken away one of the two main props of the suicide theory which he fought so persistently, and which it was so much to his interest to disprove.
There had been nothing in the papers kept which gave any reason for his objecting to their being found and read.
Pointer questioned Sladen about the withdrawal of the money yesterday.
He was told that the whole transaction occupied a bare five minutes. A cab had driven up just after two; Sladen was busy with a client. His head clerk had taken the sum in question, three thousand pounds, from the safe, and obtained the usual receipt. He had ventured to expostulate on the danger of carrying large sums in handbags. Mrs. Tangye had assured him that it was to be immediately invested. She declined his offer of sending an escort; that was all Sladen knew.
Pointer learnt nothing more from his head clerk except his opinion of such unorthodox proceedings, and his belief that in some dim way they were connected with the entry of women into the law courts. When it came to facts, Johnston could not even say whether Mrs. Tangye had walked away from the offices, or taken a taxi, or whether she had a friend with her waiting outside. Pointer gathered that the old head clerk had been thrown into a state bordering on coma by the speed, and irregularity of Mrs. Tangye's actions. Neither the clerk, nor Sladen had ever heard her mention her will, or will-making. Nor had she ever referred to the money invested in her husband's firm.
Pointer asked for a specimen of Philpotts's writing and the number of every note paid for Clerkhill farm. He knew already that Tangye had not drawn out nor paid in, any large sums to his, or his wife's banking accounts during the past month.
The stockbroker had only given him the numbers of the missing notes, but since the dead woman had removed them all from the solcitor's care only a few hours before her end, the Chief Inspector felt a keen interest in each.
Accordingly he next had a brief interview with a young Jew of his acquaintance. Hyam was a rising financier, and his moments were precious. But, for the sake of a time when Pointer had saved him from a very nasty position, he could always spare a few for the Chief Inspector. Pointer only needed one. He wished to trace any possible activities of Tangye on the cotton market and learn what had become of the notes which the stockbroker had taken over on his wife's death. Would Hyam use any private means of finding out both points? The investigation would be greatly hampered, and incidentally a quite possibly blameless man harmed by inquiries, however discreet, undertaken officially. Hyam said "Trust him!" And Pointer hurried off to the largest orchid importer in the world, Jaffinsky, near the China Docks.
Jaffinsky was asked whether any well-known orchid-hunters were in England, just now. Pointer thought that these intrepid men, few in number, who face deaths tragic and solitary, as part of their daily work, would be sure to know one another, and might keep touch in that loose, yet sufficient way common to men whose task needs very special training and special gifts.
"There's Smith; he's looking after our plants at the Tunbridge show. His beat's Burma and the Himalayas. Then there's van Dam—we could get hold of him for you, I dare say. Sumatra's the same to him as his back garden. Or what about Filon, the Frenchman? What he can't tell you of Madagascar, or North Africa—but I forgot, he went back last week. And if you're interested in the Congo, Bielefeld's a marvel. He—
"I'll try Smith," Pointer said. "It's only a toss-up. I want to inquire about a man, a one-time orchid-hunter too, so I was told."
Smith and the Chief Inspector were soon seated in a quiet little back room littered with moss and bamboo. Smith was a strange-looking fellow. The colour of mahogany, with a face apparently carved out of red stone, wide-apart eyes, gray in colour, very still and rarely blinking, a mouth like a slit, a chin like a grocer's scoop, and a body like a whip-thong.
Pointer explained in a few words what he wanted. Had Smith ever chanced to come across a man called in England, Oliver Headly? An Oxford undergraduate?
He was about to give a description, but Smith did not need more than the name.
"Headly? Oh yes, I knew him. About ten years ago. Afghan border. But he was no good."
"Why not?"
"Oh-h, many reasons. A good hunter of any kind of game—your kind, Chief Inspector, or my kind—is born, not made. Well, Headly wasn't born. Also he had too many irons in the fire. That border is rather tempting to a certain kind of man. Gun-running, opium smuggling, doped whisky, are all lucrative by-paths."
"And the kind of by-paths to appeal to Headly?"
"Anything with money in it would appeal to Headly. Especially if it was off the true. And if it had a spice of cruelty in it, so much the better. But why this interest in a chap who's dead?"
"Sure he's dead?"
"Filon told me a year ago that he saw him shot in Fez. Been gun-running for the Riffs. Shot under another name. Called himself Olivier, and refused to state his nationality. I'll give him that credit."
Pointer expressed a doubt as to Filon's information.
"I