“Still, old chap, you did very well with that robbery down at Ramsgate. It gave you your leg-up.”
There was nothing Pointer enjoyed more than talking his cases over with his friend, whose discretion was as much to be trusted as his own. Not that he often got an opinion out of the Irishman, but the mere reciting aloud of the various phases of a problem in itself helped to clear his mind.
“They are the very devil all the same. You never know where you are. Take a private house—and the servants, the furniture, the rooms, the very walls can give you points, but a hotel! How can you follow up a hundred or so possible criminals? Personally, if I ever go in for a murder I should never dream of choosing any other place.”
“A murder case, eh?”
“Did I say so? Well, see what you think. This is how things stand at present.”
He told of his call to the Enterprise and the results of the inquiry so far.
“Why don't you think it's a suicide, what's wrong with that letter?” Jim handed it back. “You say the writing is the same as on the register.”
“By the same hand you'd think, but this letter's been written with an ordinary pen, same nib and ink as is supplied in the hotel bedroom, yet Eames had a filled fountain-pen in his pocket. He signed the register with it, why didn't he use it to write this letter with? It wasn't as if he had been trying to disguise his handwriting. Then the way he was huddled into the wardrobe looked as if his feet had been shoved in first and the rest of his body afterwards. You'll see what I mean when I show you Lester's photos on Monday. His coat and tie were half over his head at the back. And where is his trunk key? You might say that he got rid of his bag beforehand to save tracing his home, but he left the trunk. Then why not leave the key? And the things he had put into the wardrobe from his bed and washstand—pyjamas, shaving-tackle, and that sort of thing—well, of course a man might lock himself into a pitch-dark wardrobe and then proceed to tidy all the articles neatly against the front, but it's difficult to see why.”
“Especially if he was drugged. Sure it wasn't an overdose of whisky? That would explain so many puzzles.” O'Connor loved to impersonate guileless curiosity at these talks. It moved the Chief Inspector to a fury at times which the Irishman took as a tribute to his histrionic powers.
“Any finger prints?” he asked after a moment.