The red hoop at the bottom was not complete; there was a space where the spliced handle of the racket would fit in, the space filled by the town of Dijon, and at the point on the right hand side where the line started Frobisher read in small but quite clear figures:
"Ten twenty-five a.m."
Jim was more bewildered than ever.
"I don't understand one word of it," he cried.
Hanaud reached over and touched the point with the tip of his pen.
"This is where the motor-cyclist started, the cyclist who met you at the branch road at eleven-forty."
"The tourist?" asked Jim. A second ago it had seemed to him impossible that the fog could thicken about his wits any more. And yet it had.
"Let us say the man with the portmanteau on his trailer," Hanaud corrected. "You see that he left his starting point in Dijon thirty-five minutes before you left yours. The whole manoeuvre seems to have been admirably planned. For you met precisely at the arranged spot at eleven-forty. Neither the car nor the cycle had to wait one moment."
"Manoeuvre! Arranged spot!" Frobisher exclaimed, looking about him in a sort of despair. "Has every one gone crazy? Why in the world should a man start out with a portmanteau in a side-car from Dijon at ten twenty-five, run thirty or forty miles into the country by a roundabout road and then return by a bad straight track? There's no sense in it!"
"No doubt it's perplexing," Hanaud agreed. He nodded to Moreau who went out of the room by a communicating door towards the front of the house. "But I can help you," Hanaud continued. "At the point where you started after tightening the strap of the tool-box, on the edge of the town, a big country house stands back in a park?"