He summed up for an open verdict, and the jury as a matter of form went out to consider it. Most of them thought that the passport looked very bad, and one (who was a small money-lender, and therefore strong on finance), shook his head over the Bearer Bonds. But even he saw that the will which left forty thousand pounds to Mr. Habershon minimised the evidential value of the bond business.

  “And then he had no luggage with him,” said one.

  Their foreman nodded. “It doesn’t look too good about Mr. Habershon, but if he didn’t do it we don’t want to put a slur on his memory, gentlemen. Then there is another thing. No more justice can be done than has been done. If we brought in a verdict of murder against the man, it couldn’t be carried into effect. I plump for a fair and truthful verdict, and that is ‘Murder against some person or persons unknown.’ Mr. Habershon may be the person, but we can’t be sure.”

  A faint look of triumph came to Superintendent Langley’s face as he saw the jurymen file back. He knew that look—“Five shillings each way” he used to call it. He was quite satisfied when the record flaunted this open verdict, and the second inquest was resumed.

  The inquiry into the death of Mr. Habershon brought out more strongly the possibility of accident. To bring this in as anything but accident would be impossible; to impeach the soundness of Mr. Habershon’s mind or morals at the time of his death, indecent. If there was any safe, impartial, and happy verdict to bring in, other than that finally brought in by the jury, the police did not know of it. And yet the jury managed to give it a little twist which saved them from being regarded as a set of complete mugwumps. They found that Mr. Habershon met his death by drowning, but how definitely he came to fall into the pond they were unable to say.

  But not one pressed for a more definite finding. The coroner put it in proper form, and the affair came to an end so far as he was concerned.

  “What did you think of it?” asked Ned, when he and Nancy were driving back to town. “Not bad?”

  Nancy nodded. “I should think it was as far as they could get. And it leaves everything open for Brews.”

  The atmosphere of an inquest is a complete depressant. After it, for part of that day at least, Ned and Nancy had no more taste for sleuth work. Ned left her at home, promising to come in to see her that evening. The afternoon was partly taken up with an interview with his publisher, who was anxious to capitalise the publicity Ned had obtained at the inquest. Then Ned went through two rounds of the billiard handicap at his club, dined on the premises and reached the Hampstead flats where Nancy lived at a quarter-past eight.

  He had hoped to put all memories of the grisly Fen Court business out of his mind that day. But Nancy had a visitor who revived them. Inspector Brews, in a smart blue serge suit, was sitting in the flat, smoking and talking to Nancy, when Ned arrived. He jumped up at once, beamed more broadly than ever, and announced that he had better be going.

  “What, before I’ve had time to look at you?” said Ned, ironically. “Sit down, Inspector, please, and let me know who you’re chasing now.”

  “I’m off duty till to-morrow, sir,” said Brews, willingly resuming his seat. “I hoped Miss Johnson wouldn’t mind my coming round. You see, after this unsatisfactory verdict, I’m all unsettled again. You and the lady gave me a bit of help before.”

  Ned grinned. “You call it an unsatisfactory verdict—which one do you refer to, Brews?”

  The inspector shrugged. “Just my joke, sir. I call it a model jury. I wish we could always have ’em so easy to satisfy.”

  “Do you know, Inspector,” said Nancy, “that Mr. Hope here thinks he must begin at the beginning once more?”

  Brews smiled. “That’s right. Now we have that business over, I don’t mind telling you that the evidence against Mr. Habershon wouldn’t hang a goat. It was very nice to look at from a point of view of orderliness. We had Mr. Habershon getting the Bearer Bonds, getting the passport for South America. We had Mr. Habershon getting mordinal, and mordinal found in those poor young things, and some in the thermos flask. Then we had cousins wishing to marry, and the wicked uncle wanting to stop them, and finally we had the bit of paper pinned on the young lady’s dress to show their state of mind. Why, bless me, sir, it’s just the kind of plot you would make up for your detective stories, isn’t it?”

  “Quite,” agreed Ned.

  “I read one lately and very good it was,” went on the detective. “One thing followed another, and you made your detectives more or less like people; not like mugs, or not like wizards either. But the thing that struck me was the nice way everything fitted in.”

  “Absolutely,” said Ned. “I told you. Make the circumstance fit the crime.”

  “But, now that I’m free to look into the cases sir, and I can’t frighten any of the birds away, I may tell you that the sequence of events, while true in each fact, is as tangled and contradictory as it well could be.”

  “I won’t mention what you say outside this room, inspector,” Ned promised.

  “I knew you wouldn’t, sir.”

  “Then tell us where the sequence goes wrong,” said Nancy, smiling. “We have quite an inkling ourselves.”

  She provided him with a fresh cigarette, and he began: “We’ll go back to the Bearer Bonds, since that starts the case. Had you any views about those Bearer Bonds, sir?”

  Ned told him what he had told Nancy on their return from North Finchley. Brews nodded approvingly.

  “That’s one up to you and the lady, sir. I admit I hadn’t time to go into that, and it might not have struck me either. But the point I was going to make is this: Bearer Bonds have no particular value as investments, and, unless you keep them in the safe of your bank, or in a safe deposit, they may be stolen without giving you much hope of recovery. In the case of Mr. Habershon, who was dealing with money that did not belong to him, I can see no reason for his action except a rather unpleasant one.”

  Nancy started. “You don’t mean that he committed the murders after all?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But I can’t get away from the idea that he converted the investments in part into bonds which could be negotiated easily and safely abroad. Our man, who went into his financial affairs, discovered that, just before this odd conversion, Mr. Habershon had struck a snag. He’d been betting heavily and about half of his original capital had gone west.”

  “By Jove!” cried Ned.

  Brews nodded. “Now that was my idea, and this rather smart deduction of yours about the amount of the money converted into Bearer Bonds saves me a good deal of thought and investigation. I admit that freely. It’s my private idea—and unofficial, of course—that Mr. Habershon did meditate a bolt; that he took a lot of money, or intended to take it, but did not wish to loot the lot. That is to say, he had some scruples, though not many.”

  “My idea too,” murmured Nancy,

  Brews waved his cigarette to and fro. “It wouldn’t even have paid him to murder his nephew and niece, in the way they were murdered. That way would leave him alive, if his plans went right, and faced with the probate people, to whom he would have had to show the bonds, when he was accounting for the estate. When that was cleared up, he would have come into forty thousand pounds, less death-duties. To put it more plainly, he stood to get less than forty thousand by their deaths, but sixty thousand if he bolted with the Bearer Bonds.”

  “I can’t make out, in either case, why he opposed the marriage of his wards,” said Ned, thoughtfully.

  “You could, sir, if you had read the full terms of the wills of Habershon’s widow sisters. He was to come into the money on the death of both, failing issue. If they had got married, and had children, as most likely they would, he wouldn’t even have inherited the smaller sum. Not that I think that matters. He was obviously anxious to get off with the bonds, but not sufficiently determined as a criminal to do it. It’s three months since he bought those bonds, but the bolt had not come off.”

  “Well, we are agreed that he was not likely to commit the murders,” said Ned. “What next?

  “The next incongruity, sir, is the use of the car—the particular use he made of it that night. I am not saying that he might not have heard from Mr. Hench of the proximity of your house (which he might think untenanted), or of the convenient ponds. I am thinking of the route he took, which brought him to a café. There half a dozen people, if not more, were able to see the party, discover that the young people were having ices, and note that none of the three was at all hysterical, or worried, or upset. To make things real for a fake suicide, if he had visited the café at all with his wards, he would have created some sort of a scene coming down. He could have made the young man angry, anyway, and perhaps had the young woman looking red-eyed and tearful. Instead of that they all turn up serene and quiet, and linger a bit over some refreshments.”

  Chapter XVII

  ONCE more, as the inspector paused, Ned asked himself why they had been so bountifully blessed with the detective’s confidences. The “Judges’ Rules” might have something to do with it, but there was another possibility. Did he think Ned knew something, and was keeping it to himself? Confidences breed confidences. Was that his hope?

  “You hit it, Brews,” he murmured.

  Brews nodded, absently. “That is the first time that car takes the wrong turning, from the point of view of the old theory. What is the second? Well, next the car gets to Pudstey——”

  “Or is left at Pudstey cross-roads.”

  “Taken there, first or last, sir. It is not on the right road anywhere. You can go on back to Upperton, or swing round, and cross the river. But why was Mr. Habershon out, if not to visit Pear Cottage? However, we’ll let that drop and go back to the routine that failed—” here he grinned at Ned, who shook a finger at him, and added—“failed to show what it ought to have shown.”

  Nancy smiled. “We felt quite disappointed, inspector, because you never even mentioned finger-prints. A detective without finger-prints is no detective at all!”

  “Quite right,” he agreed. “You’ll catch a few out with them now and again, as long as the human mind isn’t made to remember everything. Naturally we had a go at that; just as we put on our clothes every morning without thinking of it. But there were no finger-prints.”

  “No finger-prints—on what?”

  “The car, Mr. Hope.”

  Ned smiled. “We wear driving-gloves in March, Brews.”

  “So we do, sir, and thick ones, too. But the difficulty of thick gloves is handling things. You can’t do everything in a car with thick gloves on, lighting cigarettes, drinking out of the cups attached to thermos flasks, for instance. I never saw a car so free from any one’s finger-prints. Mr. Habershon, though he had no need to do it, being the owner of the car, seems to have carefully wiped everything in sight, even the handles of the doors, the wheel, and the spokes of the wheel—I mean the driving wheel. I never saw such a careful man!”

  “Gosh!” cried Nancy, excitedly. “Negative evidence.”

  “That’s right. Supposing people had a dinner-party and all the glasses on the table after were found to be polished clean? What would you say? Either that the party were brought up as kitchen-maids, or dotty, or not anxious to leave their marks where they might be seen. In a way, absence of finger-prints isn’t even negative evidence, it’s positive.”

  “Good point,” cried Ned. “Some one had evidently handled the car, or the flask, or both, and could not be sure where his finger-prints were. So he wiped out the lot. Does Hench drive?”

  “Didn’t you get that at North Finchley, sir?” asked Brews.

  “No, and you haven’t interviewed Mrs. Bray, have you?”

  “No. I simply asked Hench, and he admitted that he used sometimes to drive his brother out into the country.”

  Ned nodded. “That’s good. Now let’s hear what else is wrong?”

  “Well, the most salient thing is the scrap of paper—or scraps, for they were better than the one we found first. Even the man Hench said he thought the first scrap looked like a bit torn out of a letter. From the nature of the wording, it was a complaint or a reproach. To whom was Miss Rowe likely to direct a reproach?”

  “To her uncle, since he was against her engagement to Ivor Rainy, and, if Mr. Huston is telling the truth, rather encouraged another suitor,” Nancy replied.

  “Exactly, miss. Not that we can be sure of it, but that seems the likeliest recipient. But she and her cousin lived in Habershon’s house. Why write a letter to him? Naturally I didn’t go any further until I had squared that up. My man who went to town asked Mrs. Hoing, the housekeeper, if the young people had been out of town lately. She told him that they had. The two had been asked to a house in Scotland. Mr. Rainy didn’t shoot, but he went to look at birds. Both of them only returned three days before the tragedy. More than that. I got a trunk call to their late host, and he said they had both determined to leave a week before the time first fixed.”

  “They were worried about something?” said Ned.

  “I asked that. The answer was that both seemed a bit upset, and were not as good company as usual. Their host said frankly that he did not press them to stay when they told him of the change of plan, first because he could see they were anxious to get home, and next because they were rather wet-blanketing the rest of the house-party.”

  “You got on the right line, Brews.”

  “Well, it certainly seemed a pointer, so I asked the host if he would mind asking about letters sent off by the pair with him, and let me know. He wrote this morning, saying Miss Rowe had despatched a letter to her uncle, four days before they left Scotland.”

  “That will be the letter,” cried Nancy.

  “I think so, Miss. Now, taking that as a hypothesis, we get back to Mr. Habershon. He’s an educated man, and, if guilty of these murders, a cunning one. What, on the old theory, does he do? He tears a bit out of the letter addressed to him by his niece. He tears out a bit from the middle, he selects a bit that would show even a mutton-headed constable that it was a part of some other writing, having neither a real beginning nor end to it. Then he pins it on her frock.”

  “Bad staff-work.”

  “No work at all, sir. If Mr. Habershon was fool enough to do that, he must have had cottonwool instead of brains. The next thing about it is this. A man of sense would know that paper dissolves in water. How long would that scrap last in the pond to explain the suicide?”

  “Wait a moment,” Ned interrupted. “You made a bloomer there! On the old theory, Mr. Habershon was to rush off for help; say the two had jumped into the pond, and have them got out. Then the paper would be fresh enough.”

  Brews smiled. “That’s a valid objection; only for one thing. How did Mr. Habershon expect to explain how he had seen them go into your pond on a dark night? He could only have seen it if he had been actually in the garden, and pretty near the pond. And how could he have run almost as fast from where the car was to your garden as the young people did?”

  “I am not so sure of that,” Ned said, obstinately. “I don’t mean the running. I mean your particular point about the paper and its dissolving. That reminds me—did they find out what kind of coffee was in the thermos?”

  “Brazilian,” said Brews. “Mrs. Hoing was right. Though it does not follow that the coffee found in the flask was part of that originally put there. Or why was the flask wiped clean of fingerprints?”

  Nancy smiled. “Every day you grow better and better, inspector! If you go on like this, you’ll soon catch up on Mr. Hope and myself.”

  She passed the cigarettes, and Brews took one.

  “That’s what I want to do,” he said. “We country fellows need a bit of smartening up. However, working with the poor brains given to me, I have come to the conclusion that Mr. Habershon was only half a rogue.”

  “And half a fool,” put in Ned. “Or why did he leave those bits of Miss Rowe’s letter—where you found them? And why did he leave the passport in the pocket of the car, when he had no luggage for a journey. Wherever you put passports, unless you are actually touring abroad, I am sure it is not there.”

  “I want to know about the Bearer Bonds,” said Nancy. “Are they spurlos versenkt —gone altogether, you know?”

  “If not lost, they have at least gone before,” said Brews, with his head on one side.

  “Perhaps he bunged those into the pocket of the car, too, with the passport,” said Ned.

  The inspector looked pained. “They’re a complication in the case. You see, Mr. Habershon may have sent off a bundle of papers as a red herring, and posted the bonds to himself somewhere, for a later flight. On the other hand, he may not. Their disappearance may lead us to believe that they were the object of the crime, while it may be that they were not.”

  This was rather over Nancy’s head, and she said so, frankly. “Go easy, Monsieur Dupin! How could the theft of the bonds have any connection with the crime?”

  “To lead us to believe that Mr. Habershon killed his nephew and niece, but got drowned doing it. To let us think that he staged a fake suicide which, from its very nature (that silly scrap of paper and so on), we would see to be a fake, Miss. You can do a clumsy crime because you are clumsy, or because you are subtle enough to make it so. If we can be got to believe that the suicides were faked, then we must conclude that it was the wicked uncle who faked them, and was the man who intended to pinch the bonds. If we believe that, then we find him dead, and label him the murderer. If he is the murderer, then that’s an end to it. We can’t hang his corpse.”