"Who is it, this time?" he demanded curtly.
"It’s that fellow Whalley, sir—the man who seemed to have some information about the bungalow affair."
The Chief Constable leaned back in his chair and gazed at Flamborough with an expressionless face.
"This is really growing into a wholesale trade," he said, drily. "Four murders in quick succession, and we’ve nothing to show for it. We can’t go on waiting until all the population of Westerhaven, bar one individual, is exterminated; and then justify ourselves by arresting the sole survivor on suspicion. The public’s getting restive, Inspector. It wants to know what we do for our money, I gather."
Inspector Flamborough looked resentful.
"The public’ll have to lump it, if it doesn’t like it," he said crudely. "I’ve done my best. If you think I ought to hand the thing over to someone else, sir, I’ll be only too glad to do so."
"I’m not criticising you, Inspector," Sir Clinton reassured him. "Not being a member of the public—for this purpose, at least—I know enough to appreciate your difficulties. There’s no burking the fact that whoever’s at the back of this affair is a sharper man than the usual clumsy murderer. He hasn’t left you much of a chance to pick up usable clues."
"I’ve followed up every one that he did leave," Flamborough argued. "I don’t think I’ve been exactly idle. But I can’t arrest Silverdale merely because I picked up his cigarette-holder in suspicious surroundings. Confound the public! It doesn’t understand the difference between having a suspicion and being able to prove a case."
"Let’s hear the details of this latest affair," Sir Clinton demanded, putting aside the other subject.
"I’ve been trying to get hold of this fellow Whalley for the last day or two, sir, so as to follow up that line as soon as possible," the Inspector began. "But, as I told you, he’s been away from Westerhaven—hasn’t been seen anywhere in his usual haunts. I’ve made repeated inquiries at his lodgings, but could get no word of him except that he’d gone off. He’d left no word about coming back; but he obviously did mean to turn up again, for he left all his traps there and said nothing about giving up his bedroom."
"You didn’t get on his track elsewhere?"
"No, I hardly expected it. He’s a very average-looking man and one couldn’t expect people to pick him out of a crowd at a race-meeting by his appearance."
Sir Clinton nodded as a permission to the Inspector to continue his narrative.
"This morning, shortly before seven o’clock," Flamborough continued, "the driver of a milk-lorry on the Lizardbridge Road noticed something in the ditch by the roadside. It was about half an hour before sunrise, so I expect he still had his lamps alight. It’s pretty dark, these misty mornings. Anyhow, he saw something sticking up out of the ditch and he stopped his lorry. Then he made out that it was a hand and arm; so he got down from his seat and had a closer look. I expect he took it for a casual drunk sleeping things off quietly. However, when he got up to the side of the road, he found the body of a man in the ditch, face downward.
"This milkman was a sensible fellow, it seems. He felt the flesh where he could get at it without moving the body; and the coldness of it satisfied him that he’d got a deader on his hands. So instead of muddling about and trampling all over the neighbourhood, he very sensibly got aboard his lorry again and drove in towards town in search of a policeman. When he met one, he and the constable went back on the lorry to the dead man; and the constable stood on guard whilst the milkman set off with the lorry again to give the alarm."
"Did you go down yourself, by any chance, Inspector?"
"Yes, sir. The constable happened to recognise Whalley from what he could see of him—I told you he was pretty well known to our men—and knowing that I’d been making inquiries about the fellow, they called me up, and I went down at once."
"Yes?"
"When I got there, sir," the Inspector continued, "it didn’t take long to see what was what. It was a case of the tourniquet again. Whalley had been strangled, just like the maid at Heatherfield. Quite obvious symptoms: face swollen and congested; tongue swollen, too; eyes wide open and injected a bit, with dilated pupils; some blood on the mouth and nostrils. And when I had a chance of looking for it, there was the mark of the tourniquet on his neck sure enough."
Flamborough paused, as though to draw attention to his next point.
"I hunted about in the ditch, of course. And there, lying quite openly, was the tourniquet itself. Quite a complicated affair this time; he’s evidently improved his technique."
"Well, what about it?" Sir Clinton demanded rather testily, as though impatient of the Inspector’s comments.
"Here it is, sir."
Flamborough produced the lethal instrument with something of a flourish.
"You see, sir, it’s made out of a banjo-string threaded through a bit of rubber tubing. The handles are just bits of wood cut from a tree-branch, the same as before; but the banjo-string and the rubber tube are a vast improvement on the bit of twine he used last time, at Heatherfield. There’d be no chance of the banjo-string breaking under the strain; and the rubber tube would distribute the pressure and prevent the wire cutting into the flesh as it would have done if it had been used bare."
Sir Clinton picked up the tourniquet and examined it with obvious interest.
"H’m! I don’t say you’ve much to go on, but there’s certainly more here than there was in the other tourniquet. The banjo-string’s not much help, of course; one can buy ’em in any musical-instrument shop. But the rubber tubing might suggest something to you."
Inspector Flamborough scrutinised it afresh.
"It’s very thick-walled, sir, with a much smaller bore than one would expect from the outside diameter."
Sir Clinton nodded.
"It’s what they call ‘pressure-tubing’ in a chemical laboratory. It’s used when you’re pumping out vessels or working under reduced pressures generally. That’s why it’s made so thick-walled: so that it won’t collapse flat under the outside air-pressure when you’ve pumped all the gas out of the channel in the middle."
"I see," said the Inspector, fingering the tubing thoughtfully. "So it’s the sort of thing one finds in a scientific place like the Croft-Thornton Institute?"
"Almost certainly," Sir Clinton agreed. "But don’t get too sure about your rubber tubing. Suppose someone is trying to throw suspicion on one of the Croft-Thornton staff, wouldn’t this be an excellent way of doing it? One can buy pressure-tubing in the open market. It’s not found exclusively in scientific institutes, you know."
Flamborough seemed a shade crestfallen at the loss of what he had evidently regarded as a promising line.
"Oh, indeed?" he said. "I suppose you’re right, sir. Still it’s a bit uncommon, isn’t it?"
"Not what you’d expect the ordinary criminal to hit on straight off, I suppose you mean? But this fellow isn’t an ordinary criminal. He’s got plenty of brains. Now doesn’t it strike you as strange that he should go to the trouble of leaving this tourniquet for your inspection? He could have slipped it into his pocket easily enough and it wouldn’t have bulged much."
"Well, sir, a glance at the body would show anyone that something of the sort had been used. He wasn’t giving much away by leaving the thing itself, was he?"
Sir Clinton did not seem altogether satisfied with the Inspector’s view.
"The less a murderer leaves behind, the more difficult it is to catch him, Inspector. That’s a truism. Now this fellow is no fool, as I’ve frequently remarked to you. Hence one might have anticipated that he’d leave as few traces as possible. But here he presents us with the actual weapon, and a weapon that has fairly salient peculiarities of its own. Queer, isn’t it?"