“This time it wasn’t there for them to take. The man said that the car came in with half the number-plate missing! It was broken clean across just after the number 7, and the owner said that he had been run into from behind by a lorry just outside Carlisle. Tubby had a talk with one of the cleaners who had had a good look at the car while he was working on it and he said that the number-plate was an aluminium one, the sort that will snap easily with a smart blow from a hammer. Except for the cracked mudguard there were no other signs of a collision, but there was paint, red paint, on the mudguard. He remembered trying to get it off. Tubby thinks it possible that the man broke the plate himself and that’s why the carter couldn’t see more than half.” “Looks as if our friend, Mr. Page, must have done it soon after he left Stockley’s garage. They certainly said nothing about a broken number-plate there.” “Tubby says he wouldn’t get far with only half a number-plate and, if he were stopped, we ought to be able to trace him.” “Did the garage people describe the man at all?” “If you can call it a description. It was very like Stockley’s. I think it must have been the same man. Tall and thin, with a heavy coat and goggles that he did not take off. He brought in the car on the evening of the twenty-third, about eight-thirty and took it out again on the twenty-sixth, but they are not certain of the time. Tubby says he’s sure that the man was trying to avoid observation or he wouldn’t have gone to that garage. It’s a rotten little place almost on the outskirts of Carlisle and it’s not near a hotel or on any of the direct routes north and south. It’s the last place any one would leave a car if he were just passing through. Tubby had an awful hunt before he found it.” “Page must have been in Carlisle from the twenty-third till the twenty-sixth, then. I wonder where he went after that? Probably south to London. The chances are that he didn’t dare risk having the mudguard mended in Carlisle, in which case there is a bare chance that we may trace him by it on the London route. And, as you say, he’d have to do something about the number.” “As for that, he could use a temporary number, but it would be more noticeable than an ordinary number-plate.” “I’ll send a line to Grey to-night and see if he can get onto anything at his end. He’ll know better how to set about it than I do. Frankly, I still think this man, Page, may have nothing whatever to do with the affair. He may have had his own reasons for lying low. After all, there’ve been several cars stolen in the north during the last few weeks. It’s becoming a regular profession and he may have been working his way to London with some car he had taken. We’ve got very little to go on.”