"Then you don't give the case up?" Mr. Kingscote asked anxiously.
"Oh, no! I don't give it up just yet. Do you know anything of your brother's private papers—as they were before his death?"
"I never knew anything till after that. I have gone over them, but they are all very ordinary letters. Do you suspect a theft of papers?"
Martin Hewitt, with his hands on his stick behind him, looked sharply at the other, and shook his head. "No," he said, "I can't quite say that."
We bade Mr. Douglas Kingscote good-day, and walked towards the station. "Great nuisance, that setting to rights," Hewitt observed, on the way. "If the place had been left alone, the job might have been settled one way or another by this time. As it is, we shall have to run over to your old lodgings."
"My old lodgings?" I repeated, amazed. "Why my old lodgings?"
Hewitt turned to me with a chuckle and a wide smile. "Because we can't see the broken panel-work anywhere else," he said. "Let's see—Chelsea, isn't it?"
"Yes, Chelsea. But why—you don't suppose the people who defaced the panels also murdered the man who painted them?"
"Well," Hewitt replied, with another smile, "that would be carrying a practical joke rather far, wouldn't it? Even for the ordinary picture damager."
"You mean you don't think they did it, then? But what do you mean?"