Detective and mystery stories; French, Joseph (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Police -- Great Britain -- Fiction
“Yes. I have been for the last six weeks in Switzerland and Savoy, and
two days ago, on last Tuesday afternoon, to be exact, I left Chamonix. I
caught the night train from Geneva, was in Paris next morning, and
reached Charing Cross yesterday, Wednesday, afternoon. To-day I went
through my correspondence, and after lunch took in my dividends and some
spare cash to lodge in the bank.”
“And the two ten-pound notes, sir?”
“The two ten-pound notes, as I say, I believe I received at the Chamonix
hotel. I found I had to return home sooner than I had intended, and as I
was leaving the country I wanted to change back all but a small amount
of my foreign money. It was convenient to do it at the hotel, and
besides, you can’t always be sure of getting enough change at Calais or
on the boat. I asked the manager of the Beau-Sejour to give me English
money for my francs, and he did so at once.”
“Why do you think these particular notes were handed over by him?”
“He paid me in ten-pound notes only. He gave me five of them—I changed
fifty pounds’ worth of francs altogether. It is true that I had some
other English notes, and there were some at home here, but so far as I
can remember, there were no tens among them—only fives and Treasury
notes.”
With this, French had to be content. Though he asked many other
questions he could learn nothing further to help him. But on the pretext
that the notes might have been received at some other place, he obtained
a note of the Colonel’s itinerary while abroad. According to this, it
appeared that on the night of Charles Gething’s murder, the traveller
had slept in the Bellevue Hotel at Kandersteg, prior to walking over the
Gemmi Pass on the following day. This French noted as a point capable of
being checked, should checking become desirable.
He had kept his taxi, and after a little trouble he found the address of
the teller of the City of London Bank, and paid him a late call. But
from him he learnt nothing new, except that the man seemed much more
certain that Colonel FitzGeorge had really handed in the notes than the
letter of his manager had led French to believe. He admitted that he was
relying on memory alone, but said he had checked over his money just
before the Colonel’s visit, and he was positive the stolen notes were
not then there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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