"Well, what do you make of it?" he demanded.
"It seems clear enough to me," Flamborough answered. "Look at the contents of that page as a whole. It’s as plain as one could wish. Silverdale and the Deepcar girl have had enough of waiting. Things can’t go on any longer in this way. They’ve been discussing various ways of getting rid of Mrs. Silverdale. ‘The plan we talked over last seems the best.’ That’s the final decision, evidently. Then you get a notion of what the plan was. Silverdale was going to prime Hassendean with information about hyoscine, and practically egg him on to drug Mrs. Silverdale so as to get her into his power. Then when the trap was ready, Silverdale and the Deepcar girl were to be on the alert to take advantage of the situation. And the last sentence makes it clear enough that they meant to go the length of murder and cover it up by making it look like a suicide-pact between young Hassendean and Mrs. Silverdale. That’s how I read it, sir."
Sir Clinton did not immediately endorse this opinion. Instead, he picked up the full copy of the manuscript page and studied it afresh as though searching for something in particular. At last he appeared to be satisfied; and he slid the photograph across the desk to the Inspector.
"I don’t wish to bias you, Inspector, so I won’t describe what I see myself. But will you examine the word ‘probably’ in that text and tell me if anything whatever about it strikes you as peculiar—anything whatever, remember."
Flamborough studied the place indicated, first with his naked eye and then with the magnifying glass.
"There’s no sign of any tampering with the paper that I can see, sir. The surface is intact and the ink lines run absolutely freely, without the halts and shakes one would expect in a forgery. The only thing I do notice is that the word looks just a trifle cramped."
"That’s what I wanted. Note that it’s in the middle of a line, Inspector. Now look at the word ‘shall’ in the fifth line from the bottom of the page."
"One might say it was a trifle cramped too," Flamborough admitted.
"And the ‘it’ in the third line from the foot?"
"It looks like the same thing."
Flamborough relapsed into silence and studied the photograph word by word while Sir Clinton waited patiently.
"The word ‘the’ in the phrase ‘about the use of hyoscine’ seems cramped too; and the ‘to’ at the start of the last line suffers in the same way. It’s so slight in all these cases that one wouldn’t notice it normally. I didn’t see it till you pointed it out. But if you’re going to suggest that there’s been any erasing and writing in fresh words to fit the blank space, I’ll have to disagree with you, sir. I simply don’t believe there’s been any thing of the sort."
"I shan’t differ from you over that," Sir Clinton assured him blandly. "Now let’s think of something else for a change. Did it never occur to you, Inspector, how much the English language depends on the relative positions of words? If I say: ‘It struck you,’ that means something quite different from: ‘You struck it.’ And yet each sentence contains exactly the same words."
"That’s plain enough," Flamborough admitted, "though I never thought of it in that way. And," he added in a dubious tone, "I don’t see what it’s got to do with the case, either."
"That’s a pity," Sir Clinton observed with a sympathy which hardly sounded genuine. "Suppose we think it over together. Where does one usually cramp words a trifle when one is writing?"
"At the end of a line," Flamborough suggested. "But these crampings seem to be all in the middle of the lines of that letter."
"That’s what seems to me interesting about them," Sir Clinton explained drily. "And somehow it seems to associate itself in my mind with the fact that Mr. Justice hasn’t supplied us with the original document, but has gone to all the trouble of taking photographs of it."
"I wondered at that, myself," the Inspector confessed. "It seems a bit futile, true enough."
"Try a fresh line, Inspector. We learned on fairly good authority that Mr. Justice took away a number of letters from Miss Deepcar’s house. And yet he only sends us a single page out of the lot. If the rest were important, why doesn’t he send them. If they aren’t important, why did he take them away?"
"He may be holding them up for use later on, sir."
Sir Clinton shook his head.
"My reading of the business is different. I think this is Mr. Justice’s last reserve. He’s throwing his last forces into the battle now."
"There seems to be something behind all this," Flamborough admitted, passing his hand over his hair as though to stimulate his brain by the action, "but I can’t just fit it all together as you seem to have done, sir. You can say what you like, but that handwriting’s genuine; the paper’s not been tampered with; and I can’t see anything wrong with it."
Sir Clinton took pity on the inspector’s obvious anxiety.
"Look at the phrasing of the whole document, Inspector. If you cared to do so, you could split it up into a set of phrases something after this style: ‘that things cannot go on any longer in this way. . . . The plan we talked over last seems the best. . . . When I have given . . . Hassendean . . . hints . . . about the . . . use of . . . hyoscine . . . he will probably see for himself how . . . to get what he wants. . . . After that, it merely means . . . watching them . . . and I am sure that . . . we shall soon have . . . her . . . out of our way. . . . It will be very easy . . . to make it seem . . . intentional . . . on their part . . . and no one is likely . . . to look further than that.’ Now, Inspector, if you met any one of these phrases by itself, would you infer from it inevitably that a murder was being planned? ‘Things cannot go on any longer in this way.’ If you consider how Mrs. Silverdale was behaving with young Hassendean, it’s not astonishing to find a phrase like that in a letter from Silverdale to the girl he was in love with. ‘The plan we talked over last seems the best.’ It might have been a day’s outing together that he was talking about for all one can tell. ‘He will probably see for himself how my wife is playing with him.’ And so forth."
"Yes, that’s all very well," Flamborough put in, "but what about the word ‘hyoscine?’ That’s unusual in love-letters."
"Miss Deepcar was working on hyoscine under Silverdale’s directions, remember. It’s quite possible that he might have mentioned it incidentally."
"Now I think I see what you mean, sir. You think that this document that Mr. Justice has sent us is a patchwork—bits cut out of a lot of different letters and stuck together and then photographed?"
"I’m suggesting it as a possibility, Inspector. See how it fits the facts. Here are a set of phrases, each one innocuous in itself, but with a cumulative effect of suggestion when you string them together as in this document. If the thing is a patchwork, then a number of real letters must have been used in order to get fragments which would suit. So Mr. Justice took a fair selection of epistles with him when he raided Miss Deepcar’s house. Further, in snipping out a sentence here and there from these letters, he sometimes had to include a phrase running on from one line to another in the original letter; but when he came to paste his fragments together, the original hiatus at the end of a line got transferred to the middle of a line in the final arrangement made to fit the page of the faked letter. That’s what struck me to begin with. For example, suppose that in the original letter you had the phrase: ‘he will probably see for himself how’; and the original line ended with ‘probably.’ That word might be a bit cramped at the end of the line. But in reconstructing the thing, ‘probably’ got into the middle of the line, and so you get this apparently meaningless cramping of the word when there was space enough for it to be written uncramped under normal conditions. Just the same with the other cases you spotted for yourself. They represent the ends of lines in the original letters, although they all occur in the middle of lines in the fake production."