“We were not suspicious; he came and played bridge in my room the same night. It gave him a very nasty turn when, as we all thought, the photograph altered its appearance. He was completely unstrung; and the form his nerves took was an intense desire that we should drop the inquiry altogether. He had begun to grow superstitious, as so many murderers do. But he made the best use he could of it, by trying to shut down our investigations on the strength of it. That failed, but something even better turned up—Davenant’s hiding in the secret passage. By the way, I’m pretty well convinced, though I can’t prove it, that it was Marryatt and not Davenant who took away the copy of that paper, with the cipher on it. Of course, when we found Davenant, it not only concealed the fact that he had taken away the cipher, but also turned the suspicion into quite a different channel. “Here, I must admit, Marryatt shows up badly. He saw an innocent man accused, and he took no action to exculpate him. On the contrary, he stated to me quite emphatically his belief in Davenant’s guilt. But we mustn’t judge him hardly; he may have meant—he may still mean, for all we know, to come forward if Davenant is found guilty. Meanwhile, there’s one more piece of evidence which I understand now, though it has bothered us a good deal. You remember the thing we call the ‘washing-list,’ the words we found on the back of the anonymous letter?” “Yes, rather. What about it?” “Well, it clearly wasn’t part of the cipher, was it?” “Probably not—one can’t be certain, but it didn’t look like it.” “Well then, you’ve got to choose, it seems to me, between two possibilities. One is that this sheet of paper—it’s only a half-sheet in any case—was blank until the cipher was written on it. Then it passed into Brotherhood’s possession, and Brotherhood, looking about for a piece of paper to jot down a list on, found this one and used it.” “That’s what I’d assumed.” “In that case, it’s hard to see any special significance about the list, isn’t it? It’s not in Brotherhood’s writing, apparently; but of course if he wrote it in the train, it’s possible that his handwriting would be untraceable.” “What’s the other possibility?” “Why, just the other way round. That the list, whatever its meaning may be, was written on that piece of paper first. And then the murderer, wanting to send the cipher message to Brotherhood, took up that piece of paper at random to write it on, without noticing that there were already four words pencilled on the back.” “That’s possible, certainly.” “Well, don’t you see, in that case the list becomes very important, because it was written not by Brotherhood but by the murderer, and it may accidentally give us a clue to the murderer’s character. “A rather obscure clue. As far as I remember all it said was Socks, Vest, Hem, Tins.”