“Then your grate was cleaned yesterday morning, not this morning. This pipe-cleaner is very dirty, which shows that your visitor did not, like yourself, wrap up his tobacco in those irritating little circles of paper which destroy all the taste. Gordon, you use them too, don’t you? This was a stranger, then, though not necessarily the same who took the book. I think he came here yesterday, not this morning.” “Why?” “Because the first pipe of the day is seldom foul; it has dried in the night. This was thoroughly foul. Of course, if the person who used this pipe-cleaner was the person who took the book, it’s obvious he did not come in with any felonious intentions, or he would hardly have made himself so much at home.” “But that might have been a sudden idea.” “Of course. But I should be careful how you accuse people of theft merely because their pipes are newly cleaned. Let us just see if he emptied out his pipe first; if it was a plain tobacco, it will have left a dottle. . . . Yes, here it is—as I feared, the inevitable Worker’s Army Cut; half the Club smokes that. No, I’m afraid we can’t put the handcuffs on anybody just yet. But, of course, you might find an excuse for going round your friends’ rooms and looking for the lost book.” “During evening church,” suggested Gordon, cynically, it is to be feared, for the function did not noticeably attract the Club members. “Well, it all wants thinking out. You and Gordon had better go and play your round, while I see if I can make anything of it.” Chapter XIX Mordaunt Reeves talks to Himself For some time after they had left, Mordaunt Reeves sat in his arm-chair hunting that most difficult of quarries, an intellectual inspiration. Merely artistic inspiration greets us when it wills, at the sight of a flower or of two lovers in a lane—we cannot chase it or make it come to our call. A merely intellectual problem can be solved by will-power, by sitting down to it with a wet towel round your head. But there are moments in an intellectual inquiry when inspiration can only come to us from dogged envisaging of the facts. Such was the point at which Reeves found himself; his clues were sufficient to exonerate, in his own mind at least, the arrested Davenant; they were not yet positive enough to mark out any victim who could be substituted. “A golf-ball,” he kept saying to himself, “a golf-ball by the side of the railway line, a few yards behind the spot from which the murdered man fell. It must have something to do with it, but where, where does it fit in?” At last, weary of cudgelling his brains over the unlighted grate, he seized his cap and strode out into the air. Half of set purpose, half under the fascination of his thoughts, he found himself climbing once more the steep path that led up the railway embankment and on to the forbidden precincts of the line.