The inspector glanced up from the shoe, his twinkle again to the fore. “Only what you did, I fancy, Mr. Sheringham, sir,” he replied blandly. “A copy of London Opinion, eh?”
“Well, I hope you found that as interesting as I did,” Roger returned, somewhat discomfited.
Anthony had been watching this exchange without joy. When one has been anointed ass enough to suspect, on grounds of mere material evidence, a particularly high-souled young woman, it would only be decent, to Anthony’s mind, on finding one’s self confronted with the said high-souled young woman at least to exhibit signs of uncontrollable embarrassment and gloom. Yet so far from exhibiting any such signs, the inspector had completely ignored the high-souled young woman’s existence. Things like that were simply not done.
“I expect you’d probably like to be getting back now,” said Anthony to the high-souled young woman, in tones of frigid correctness. “May I see you home?”
“Thank you, that is very kind of you,” replied the high-souled young woman no less stiffly.
They turned and walked, like two faintly animated ramrods, back the way they had come.
Inspector Moresby must have been singularly devoid of all sensibility; even this pointed behaviour failed to move him to any exhibition of remorse. “You’re quite right, Mr. Sheringham, sir,” he observed, inhumanly unconscious of the censure conveyed in every line of the dignified retreating figures. “This is interesting, this shoe. I’ll send a man down some time to look for its fellow. Now sit down and tell me all about it. What made you think that the murderer is a man, and what had that copy of London Opinion got to tell you?”
Now it had certainly been no part of Roger’s plans to give the inspector, for the time being at any rate, any idea of his new theory. Beyond reporting to him, as in duty bound, the discovery of that significant shoe, he was going to say nothing of the deductions he had been able to draw from it. The inspector himself had chosen to establish a rivalry between them, and Roger had not been slow to accept the challenge. Yet in a quarter of an hour’s time, by a judicious mixture of flattery, cajolery and officialism, the inspector had succeeded in scooping from Roger’s mind every thought that had passed through it during the last twelve hours, together with the full story of his activities for that period. It was not for nothing that Inspector Moresby had reached the heights he now adorned.
“Well, I’ll not say you’re on the wrong tack, sir,” he observed cautiously, when Roger had hung the last bow and tied the final ribbon about his newly decorated theory. “I’ll not say I think you’re on the wrong tack, though I won’t say I think you’re on the right one either. The reasoning’s clever, and though it’s easy enough for me to pick holes in it, it’s just as easy for you to fill ’em up again. The thing’s too vague to say either way just yet.”
“I made a perfectly legitimate set of deductions, and I’ve just had them confirmed in a rather remarkable way,” Roger insisted not altogether too pleased with this hardly exuberant praise of his efforts.