This news interested La Touche greatly, and he sat smoking into the small hours seeing how far he could work these new facts into the theories of the crime which he and Clifford had discussed. If the prosecution were correct, Felix must have been the man who called at the cartage establishment at 7.30 on Tuesday evening. He would therefore have had undisputed possession of the cask from about 11.00 a.m. on the Wednesday until, say 7.00 on the following morning, and there were two obvious ways in which he could have put in the body. Either he could have procured another horse and taken the cask to St. Malo, where, in the privacy of the walled yard, he could have removed the statue and substituted the body, returning the cask to the shed by the same means, or he could have hidden the body in his two-seater and run it to the shed, making the exchange there. Unfortunately, La Touche saw, the facts he had just learnt would fit in only too well with the theory of Felix’s guilt. On the other hand they supplied another period for which an alibi might be found for the artist--7.30 on the Tuesday night. But, remembering his own and Clifford’s researches into the manner in which Felix spent that week, La Touche was not hopeful of help here. The detective then turned his thoughts to Clifford’s theory of Boirac’s guilt. And immediately he saw how the news crystallised the issue of the alibi. Up to the present the alibi had been considered as a whole, the portions which had been tested and those which had not, alike included. Generally speaking, it had been argued that if Boirac were in Paris and in Belgium during the fateful days, he could not have been in London. But now here was a direct issue between definite hours. At 7.30 on the Tuesday evening the bearded man was at Johnson’s in the Waterloo Road. At 2.30 that same day Boirac was at Charenton. La Touche looked up his Continental Bradshaw. A train arrived at Victoria at 7.10, which would just enable a traveller from Paris to reach the carting contractor’s at the hour named. But that train left Paris at 12.00 noon. Therefore it was utterly and absolutely out of the question that Boirac could be the man. But then there was the typewriter. . . . La Touche was back on the horns of the old dilemma. If Boirac was guilty, how did he work the alibi? if innocent, why did he get rid of the typewriter? He almost writhed in his exasperation. But it only made him more determined than ever to reach a solution, cost him what it might of labour and trouble. The next evening he set off to the Hôtel d’Arles in the rue de Lyon, to await with the goods yard porters the coming of sharp-featured carters with white hair.