Alone in the room, Pointer unlocked one of the two top drawers whose tidiness had struck him last night. He put his hand to the back and brought out a little box wrapped neatly in green and white striped paper. He compared it with the torn end which he had picked up in the manager's sitting-room. It was identical. The square in which a small box of pearl studs was folded was entire. It must have been from another piece this corner came. Had it also been wrapped around jewellery? He looked at the studs. They were small but good ones. Genuine as far as he could tell— at any rate the gold stems and general workmanship looked like a superior article. He took the little box from the drawer and promoted it to a resting place in his black bag, to be transferred on the morrow to his safe at the Yard. The piece of paper the manager had stepped on so promptly he put into an envelope beside it. Chapter III Pointer had been certain from the first that Eames must have had some place not far from the hotel to which his correspondence was directed. Moreover, early that morning he had marked a small tobacconist in a poor street around the corner, quite out of the run of usual passers-by, as the most likely nook to which Eames would have had his letters sent. Since then he had learnt more. The paper, ruled in little squares—suggesting a foreign origin—the small, close writing like that used by Cox in the hotel register next door; Eames' eager interest on the last morning he had been alive, his whistling later in the same day, were all additional material for the mosaic the police had to fit together. Downstairs Pointer learnt that the only Mr. Sikes known to the hotel had been there a few times, but had never been seen to come in merely as a visitor. Neither the clerk nor the hall porter remembered seeing him yesterday. But as that had been an unusually strenuous time of welcoming coming and speeding parting guests, Mr. Sikes might have passed unnoticed, though both men thought this most unlikely. He certainly had not made himself known in any way. On the register he was entered as a cycle-maker from Coventry. His description tallied with that of Mr. Beale as far as being a little, stout, reddish-haired, middle-aged man, though both clerk and porter ridiculed the idea of mistaking the one for the other. The manager turned very sharply, almost as though with a start, when the Chief Inspector stopped him a little later with: “I believe, sir, that a Mr. Sikes of Coventry often comes to your hotel. Was he here yesterday?” The manager, as so often to-day, hesitated before answering the officer. “I don't—I don't think so. No, no, I'm sure he was not. But why don't you look at the register?” This last in a tone of nervous irritation. “Oh, he didn't stop in the house, but I thought he might have been in just the same.” “And what the devil has this Mr. Sikes to do with the affair which you are presumably investigating, Inspector?”