“Down comes the rain. Staveley gets soaked; and perhaps the chill revives him. He staggers up and puts on his rainproof. Then in comes the boat, and they shoot him without having to land on the rock at all. The ejector jerks the cartridge-case into the water, where it sinks into the sand and gets covered up by the wash of the waves. The murderer and his pal row off into the dark. Meanwhile Billingford has heard the shot, and he, not knowing anything about this little plot, rushes up—rather pluckily—to see what it's all about, and he finds the body on the rock. That explains the two shots and the general chronology of the affair. “Now, by this time friend Cargill had made his second error. He'd been keeping his eye on things at the hotel, and he'd got hold of that envelope which Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux addressed to Staveley and dropped in the waste-paper basket. He thought he could give me a fresh scent to follow up, and he was just going to produce it when he realised that Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux herself was with us; so he suppressed it then and handed it over later on. All it did was to confirm me in the idea that he was one of the gang. “Up to that point everything seemed plain sailing. I had, as I believed—and as it turned out in the end—got the thing cut and dried against the gang at the cottage. The case wasn't complete; but, short of getting some direct evidence from one of the two actual murderers, I didn't see how I was to make it absolutely water-tight. They'd been a bit too clever for a jury, I feared. And, of course, the Peter Hay case was getting clearer also, once you could assume that these fellows would stick at nothing. “Then, out of the blue, came the shooting of Cargill. That wouldn't fit in with the rest of the business. Cargill wasn't a pawn like Staveley and Billingford. He was watching one end of the business for them—keeping an eye on us for one thing; and, besides, I was becoming more and more sure that he was a brother of the faceless fellow, and possibly the brains of the gang. They had a use for him; they wouldn't shoot him. But, then, who did? “And at that point I took a long cast back and raked up again a possibility I'd dismissed at an earlier stage. Suppose that both the claimant _and_ Paul Fordingbridge were wrong 'uns, what then? Suppose friend Paul had been at some hanky-panky with the funds he held in trust for his nephew. Then, whether the claimant was an impostor or not, it would be very convenient for friend Paul if the claimant left this vale of tears. And the claimant and Cargill were much alike in build; and Cargill was shot after leaving the cottage. There might be something in it. And when I found that friend Paul carried a pistol in his pocket, and didn't care who knew it, by the look of his jacket, I began to think furiously.