It was after breakfast on the following morning. On the plea that business was business and that if he was to be any use in this affair at all Anthony must temporarily divest himself of the rôle of interesting young lover and assume that of the idiot friend, Roger had managed to restrain his cousin from making a hopeful bee-line, immediately his last mouthful had been swallowed, along the top of the cliffs in the direction of a certain small grassy ledge just below their summit. With tactlessly patent reluctance Anthony had been persuaded to bring his after-breakfast pipe down to the sea level, where Roger had insisted upon scrambling out to the very farthest rock which remained unsubmerged in order, as he carefully explained, to obtain the necessary privacy for airing his theories. There he had immediately removed his shoes and socks and proceeded to paddle.
Making the best of a bad business, Anthony had watched with a cold eye his cousin’s undignified behaviour and unhesitatingly refused to follow such infantile deportment.
“How can Woodthorpe have been telling the truth?” he repeated, as Roger showed signs of being less interested in his question than in a limpet which was sturdily countering all his efforts to dislodge it from its native rock. “That copy of London Opinion clinches that. If the inspector’s got any sense at all, he’ll draw the same deduction from it as we did and arrest the fellow right away, before he bolts.”
Roger abandoned the limpet with a slight sigh. “But supposing, Anthony, that it wasn’t Woodthorpe who left it there at all?” he said patiently. “Hadn’t that occurred to you?”
“No, it hadn’t,” Anthony returned, not without scorn. “It’s so dashed likely, isn’t it? You said yourself that it couldn’t have been Mrs. Vane. Who else could it have been?”
“Ah!” said Roger thoughtfully. “Who, indeed?” He withdrew his feet from the water and, hunching his knees, clasped his hands round them and stared out to sea. “Now just let’s see, for the sake of argument, what we can deduce from that copy of London Opinion, shall we? Forgetting for the moment all about Woodthorpe, I mean, and our slight complex about his veracity. Shall we do that, Anthony?”
“Fire ahead, then,” replied his cousin resignedly.
“Well in the first place, and confining ourselves to bare probabilities, with every likelihood of error, who constitute the majority of London Opinion’s public, would you say? Men. That’s why I advanced the unlikelihood of Mrs. Vane having left it there; it doesn’t sound to me at all the type of paper that we might expect to find Mrs. Vane reading. Besides, she’s much more likely to have brought a novel. Do you agree, so far?”
Anthony grunted.
“Very well, then; in all probability that paper was left there some time since last Saturday morning, by a man. Now what type of man reads London Opinion? Not the upper classes; they read Punch. Not the lower classes either. The middle classes—upper, middle and lower middle-classes. Our man, therefore, was probably an upper, middle or lower middle-class man. Now that doesn’t sound very much like the son of Sir Henry Woodthorpe, does it?”