Smallbone Deceased

“Yes,” said Hazlerigg. There was no doubt about his interest now. “Please go on.”

“Abel Horniman got his hands, somehow, on quite a large capital sum. It isn’t obvious—but when you look for it you can see it. That leasehold depreciation account was built up again. The very heavy mortgages on both of Abel’s properties were reduced. And more than that, certain expenditure which should normally have come out of income, was made out of capital, which meant, of course, that what income there was went further, and everything looked much more healthy all round.”

“A blood transfusion, you said?”

“That was the metaphor that occurred to me.” Mr. Hoffman sounded apologetic, as if he realised that an accountant had no business to dabble in metaphors, let alone mixed metaphors. “But it really does explain in the simplest way that I can think of exactly what happened. Somewhere—and I may say that I haven’t the very least idea where—Abel Horniman got hold of this money. I can only tell you one thing about it. It came from outside. Maybe someone died and left it to him—only you’d have imagined we should have known about it. Possibly he robbed a bank.”

“Well, he may even have done that,” agreed Hazlerigg without a smile. “This sum of money—can you estimate how much it was?”

“Oh, quite a lot,” said Mr. Hoffman. “Ten thousand pounds, at least.”

VI

“After all,” said Miss Bellbas. “Murder’s a serious thing. It might be one of us next.”

“Even so,” said Anne Mildmay. “It seems to me rather like sneaking.”

“Oh, be your age, Anne,” said Miss Cornel crossly. “This isn’t the sixth form at St. Ethelfredas. I agree with Florrie. This is serious.”

“Well, you can tell him, if you like,” said Miss Mildmay. “It just doesn’t seem to me to be any of our business.”

“I think we should,” said Miss Bellbas.

“I’m going to,” said Miss Cornel.

Hazlerigg was on the point of leaving when Miss Cornel came in. He was on his way back to the Yard for an interview with Dr. Bland, the pathologist.

“Look here,” she said. “I won’t keep you long. It’s about that letter. The one that was found under my desk.”

“Yes,” said Hazlerigg.

“I might as well admit,” said Miss Cornel, “that there’s been a certain amount of difference of opinion about telling you this. But the general idea was that we ought to. It was something we all noticed at the time.”

“Something about the letter?”

“Yes. This mayn’t seem much to you—but if you remember it started ‘Dear Mr. Horniman’. Well, that wasn’t the way Mr. Smallbone ever wrote to Abel Horniman. It was always ‘Dear Horniman’, or ‘My Dear Horniman’. There’s quite a nice etiquette about these things, you know. When you get friendly, you drop the ‘Mr.’ and when you get more friendly still you add the ‘my’. It’s not a thing you’d be likely to get wrong.”

“No,” said Hazlerigg. “I appreciate that. Well, thank you very much for telling me. I don’t really see,” he added with a smile, “why you should have been so reluctant to let me have this information.”

His mind must have been working at half-speed that morning. It wasn’t until he was half-way to Scotland Yard that he saw the implication.

‌Chapter Twelve —Thursday P.M.— £48 2s. 6d.

Cloud rolls over cloud: one train of thought suggests and is driven away by another: theory after theory is spun out of the bowels of his brain, not like the spider’s web, compact and round—a citadel and a snare, built for mischief and for use, but like the gossamer… flitting in the idle air and glittering only in the ray of fancy.

Hazlitt: The Plain Speaker

I

“You’re asking me,” said Dr. Bland, “to be scientific about something that has no real scientific basis.”

“In other words,” said Hazlerigg, “we’re asking you to perform the impossible.”

“That’s it.”

“And, as usual, you are going to oblige.”

“Soft soap,” said Dr. Bland. “All right. So long as you don’t expect me to get up in court and explain it all to a jury.”

“That’s the last thing I shall ask,” said Hazlerigg. “All I want you to do is to narrow the field. If you can indicate that certain Saturdays are more likely than other Saturdays, then we can concentrate, first, on the people who were in the office on those days.”

Dr. Bland raised a tufted eyebrow at the chief inspector.

“So long as you’re not arguing ex hypothesi,” he said.

“What the devil do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t perhaps have some particular person in mind already?”

“James Bland,” said Hazlerigg, “you’ve got a damned diagnosing mind. Yes. I am thinking of one particular person.”

“Then this may be helpful.”

He unfolded on to Hazlerigg’s desk an enormous sheet of graph paper ruled with the usual axes and traversed by nine or ten very attractive apical curves, each one of a different colour.

“They all start,” explained the pathologist, “from the zone of maximum improbability—that is zero on the vertical axis, and move upwards towards maximum probability. The horizontal line is a time line, covering the four weeks in question.”