“I have something to show you later,” he said. “Our men have been at the Post Office all night, making enquiries as to Mr. Trasmere’s correspondence. It appears that he has had a whole lot during the past year or two. We shall probably come across it in the boxes that remain unsearched. But that wasn’t the big thing we found. Most of the telegraph staff were off duty yesterday. It was only this morning that we learnt a telegram had been received at Mayfield about ten minutes before Walters disappeared.” When they were in the sitting-room and the door was closed, Carver produced the telegram from his pocket. It was handed in at the General Post Office and ran: “Remember 17th July, 1913. Newcastle police coming for you at three o’clock.” It was unsigned. “I have been searching the newspaper files this morning,” said Carver, “to discover the reference to that date. On the 17th July, 1913, I find that Felling was sent down to Newcastle for seven years, and the judge said that if he ever came before him again on a similar charge, he would send him down for life.” “Then the telegram was despatched by some friend of Walters?” suggested Tab. Carver nodded. “It was delivered five minutes before he disappeared, that is to say, exactly at five minutes to three. I have seen the lad who delivered the telegram, and he says that Walters himself took in the message.” “Would that account for his disappearance?” “In a sense it might, yet it does not necessarily follow that Walters is innocent of the murder. The telegram may have come to him immediately after the murder was committed and have decided him to get away. If he was responsible for the murder, there would be even more reason why he should leave in a hurry. The arrival of the police, who would find the body, would, of course, have been fatal to him.” “Did anybody see Wellington Brown go into the house?” asked Tab. It was a question he meant to have put before. “Nobody,” said the detective. “At what hour he arrived only Walters can tell us.” He folded the telegram and put it away, then unlocking the door from the study which led to the passage, he went down the steps and stopping only to switch on the lights, made his way into the vault. One by one the boxes were taken down, emptied of their contents and carefully examined. Money was everywhere; banknotes, treasury bills, money in the greasy notes of a Chinese Government bank, money in the shape of Greek drachmas and Italian lira. Sometimes a box would contain nothing but these valuable squares of paper, sometimes a box held thick packets of correspondence addressed to Trasmere, at queer looking towns in Northern China. All bore the same clerkly number, generally written in green ink, and none of them threw any light whatever upon the tragedy they were investigating.