“Humph!” observed Alec, handing it back. “Well, what do you make of it?” “I think it’s pretty simple,” Roger said, folding the paper and stowing it carefully away again. “Stanworth had just filled his fountain pen, or it wouldn’t work or something. You know what one does with a fountain pen that doesn’t want to write. Make scratches on the nearest piece of paper, and as soon as the ink begins to flow——” “Sign one’s name!” Alec broke in, with the nearest approach to excitement that he had yet shown. “Precisely! On the blotting pad are the preliminary scratches to bring the ink down the pen. What happens in nine cases out of ten after that? The ink flows too freely and the pen floods. This bit of paper shows that it happened in this case, too. Stanworth was rather an impatient sort of man, don’t you think?” “Yes, I suppose he was. Fairly.” “Well, the scene’s easy enough to reconstruct. He tries the pen out on the blotting pad. As soon as it begins to write he grabs a sheet from the top of that pile of fellow-sheets on his desk (did you notice them, by the way?) and signs his name. Then the pen floods, and he shakes it violently, crumples up the sheet of paper, throws it into the waste-paper basket and takes another. This time the pen, after losing so much ink in blots, is a little faint at first; so he only gets as far as the C in Victor before starting again, just below the last attempt. Then at last it writes all right, and his signature is completed, with the usual flourish. He picks up the piece of paper, crumples it slightly, but not so violently as before, and throws it also into the waste-paper basket. How’s that?” “That all seems feasible enough. What next?” “Why, the murderer, setting the room to rights afterwards, thinks he’d better have a look in the basket. The first thing he spots is that piece of paper. ‘Aha!’ he thinks. ‘The very thing I wanted to put a finishing touch to the affair!’ Smoothes it carefully out, puts it in the typewriter and types those few words above the signature. What could be simpler?” “By Jove, I wonder! It’s jolly ingenious.” Roger’s eyes were sparkling. “Ingenious? Yes; but in its very simplicity. Oh, that’s what happened, sure enough. There’s plenty of corroboration, when you come to think of it. The way the whole thing’s got into the top half of the sheet of paper, for instance. That isn’t natural, really, is it? It ought to be in the middle, with the signature about two thirds down. And why isn’t it? Because the signature was in the middle already, and the fellow had to work upwards from that.” “I believe you must be right,” Alec said slowly.