“Now, for reasons which I’ll give you immediately, it seemed likely that this affair was only a first step in a more complicated plan. On the spur of the moment, I decided it was worth while taking a hand. So I got a patrol set round the spinney and issued orders that no one was to go up to the terrace until I’d been over the ground. I took good care that everyone knew about this; and I took equally good care not to go there myself. I rather advertised the thing, in fact. That was to assure the fellows that no one had seen the empty pedestal. They were pretty certain to rout about for information; and they’d hear on all sides that no one had been up to the terrace. That left the thing open for them to try again if they wanted to.
“Another thing confirmed my notions. When the Inspector was dragging the lake, he got a largish piece of marble out of it. That fitted in with the view that the broken statue was down in the water in fragments, hidden by the weeds. It all fitted fairly well, you see.
“Then came another bit of evidence—two bits, in fact. The village drunkard put abroad some yarn about seeing a White Man in the woods; and a little girl saw a Black Man. That might have been mere fancy. Or it might have been true enough. When the hunters had gone, the pseudo-statue would come down off his pedestal. Suppose he wandered off into the wood and was seen by old Groby. There’s your White Man. But he couldn’t possibly get back to the house in white tights. He’d want to get in as quietly as possible. What about a set of black tights under the white ones? When he took off the white ones, he’d be next door to invisible among shadows; and he’d be able to sneak in through a window in the servants’ wing—in the shadow of the house—fairly inconspicuously. Perhaps that’s how it happened.”
“That was it,” the Inspector confirmed, looking up from a sheet of paper which he was consulting from time to time.
Sir Clinton acknowledged the confirmation but refused to lay much stress on the point.
“I thought it possible,” he said, “but it was merely a guess. In itself the evidence wasn’t worth anything; but it fitted well enough into the hypothesis I’d made.”
He turned to the Inspector.
“Did you get the five medallions as I expected?”
Armadale put his hand into his pocket and withdrew the five disks of gold, which he handed over to the Chief Constable. Sir Clinton took the sixth medallion from his own pocket and laid the whole set on the table beside him.
“They say,” he went on, “that the more outré a crime is, the easier it is to find a solution for it. I shouldn’t like to assert that in every case. But there’s no harm in paying special attention to the bizarre points in an affair. If you cast your minds back to the case as it presented itself to us on the night of the masked ball, you’ll recall one point which undoubtedly seemed out of the common.”
He glanced round the circle of listeners, but no one ventured to interrupt.
“Here was a gang of thieves bent on stealing something. One of them—Foss—knew that in the showcase there were three medallions and three replicas. The medallions were of enormous value; the replicas were worth next to nothing. Foss, I was sure—and it turned out afterwards that I was right—Foss knew that the real medallions were in the top row and that the replicas were in the lower row.”
He arranged the six disks on the table as he spoke.
“And yet, with that knowledge, it was the replicas which they stole and not the real medallions. Amazing, at first sight, isn’t it? To my mind it was much more bizarre than the vanishing trick. And, naturally, it was on that point in the case that I fixed my attention. These weren’t blunderers, remember. The rest of the business showed that they were anything but that. The way they had seized upon that practical joke to serve their ends was quite enough to prove that there was a good brain at the back of the thing. That joke wasn’t in their original programme, and yet they’d taken it in their stride and turned it to account in a most ingenious way. They weren’t the sort of people who would make a mistake about the positions of the replicas. If they took the electrotypes instead of the real things, it was because the electrotypes were what they wanted.
“Why did they want them? That question seemed to thrust itself forward in front of all the others which suggested themselves in the case; and it was that question that had to be answered before one could see light anywhere.”
He leaned forward in his chair and glanced at the two rows of medallions on the table before him for a moment.
“If one thinks about a point long enough, it often happens that all of a sudden a fresh idea turns up and fits into its place. I think it was probably the notion of the pseudo-statue that put me on to this affair. There you had a fraud imposing itself on some people simply because they had no reason to suppose that any fraud was intended. I doubt if any of you people, Mr Clifton, gave a second glance at these statues that night. You simply regarded them as statues, because you knew that statues were on all the pedestals in normal circumstances. You were off your guard on that particular point.
“That idea seemed to give me the key to this mysterious preference for replicas. If they’d taken the real medallions that night, with all the fuss that was made, then you Ravensthorpe people would have known at once that the true Leonardos had gone; and, naturally, with the theft of them dated to a minute, the risk was considerable. But suppose that the theft of the replicas was only the first stage in the game, what then? They had the replicas; you had the real medallions. Foss, as the agent for Kessock, had every excuse for asking to see the medallions again.
“Now at that point there would come in the very same subconscious assurance that played into their hands in the case of the statue. Maurice would know for certain that the three things in his safe were the real Leonardos. He’d fish them out for Foss to examine; and he’d put them back in the safe without any minute inspection when Foss handed them over. The replicas would be off the board—lost, gone for good. He’d never think of them.”
Sir Clinton glanced mischievously at Joan before continuing.
“As it happens, I can do a little parlour conjuring myself. It comes in handy when one has to live up to the part of Prospero or anything like that. I know what one can do in the way of palming things, and so forth. And as soon as I hit on this idea of the case, I saw how things might be managed. Foss would fake up some excuse for handling the real medallions; and during that handling, he’d substitute the replicas for the Leonardos. Maurice, having apparently had the things under his eye all the time, would never think of examining the medals which he got back from Foss’s hands. He’d simply put them back into the safe. Foss would have the real things in his pocket; the deal would fall through; Foss Co. would retire gracefully . . . and it was a hundred to one that no minute examination of the medallions in the safe would be made for long enough. By that time it would be impossible either to find Foss or to bring the thing home to him even if you did find him.