"The coroner curtly interrupted his fatuous explanations by asking him at what time he had left his friends, and at what time he had met them again subsequently. Witness was not very sure; he thought he left the Café Royal about half-past eight, but it might have been earlier or later. He took a bus to the bottom of Fulton Gardens. It was beastly cold and wet, and he was very grateful to Ann for giving him a hot drink. He denied that he had been drinking too much, or that he had demanded the hot drink. It was Ann Weber who had offered to get it for him. Jolly pretty girl, Annie-bird, and not shy. Witness concluded his evidence by swearing positively that he had waited in the servants' hall all the while that Ann Weber got him the toddy; he had followed her down, and not gone upstairs or seen anything of Mr. Jessup all the time he was in the house. When he left Fulton Gardens he tried to get a bus back to Regent Street, but many of them were full and it was rather late before he got back to the Café Royal.
"It was very obvious that as the coroner continued to put question after question to him, Arthur Leighton became vaguely conscious of the feeling of hostility towards him which had arisen in the public mind. He lost something of his swagger, and his face under the tan took on a greyish hue. From time to time he glanced at Ann Weber, but she obstinately looked another way.
"Undoubtedly he felt that he was caught in a network of damnatory evidence which he was unable to combat. The day ended, however, with another adjournment; the police wanted a little more time before taking drastic action. The public so often blame them for being in too great a hurry to fasten an accusation on the flimsiest grounds that one is pleased to record such a noteworthy instance when they really did not leave a single stone unturned before they arrested Arthur Leighton on the charge of murder. They did everything they could to find some proof of the existence and identity of the individual whom Ann Weber professed to have seen while Leighton was still in the house. But all their efforts in that direction came to naught, whilst Leighton himself denied having had an accomplice just as strenuously as he did his own guilt.
"He was brought up before the magistrate, charged with the terrible crime. No one, the police argued, had so strong a motive for the crime or such an opportunity. Alternatively, no one else could have admitted the mysterious impersonator of Mr. Jessup into the house, the accomplice who did the deed, whilst Leighton engaged Ann Weber's attention, always supposing that he did exist, which was never proved, and which the evidence of the police constable refuted. People who dabbled in spiritualism and that sort of thing were pleased to think that the mysterious personage whom the housemaid saw was the ghost of poor old Jessup, who was then lying murdered in his office, stricken by Leighton's hand. But even the most psychic-minded individual was unable to give a satisfactory explanation for the ghost having changed hats while he walked away from that fateful No. 13.
"Altogether the question of hats played an important role in the drama of Leighton's arrest and final discharge. The magistrate did not commit him for trial, because the case for the prosecution collapsed suddenly like a pack of cards. It was the question of hats that saved Leighton's neck from the hangman's rope. You remember, perhaps, that in his evidence he had stated that before starting to interview his irate employer he had been with some friends at the Café Royal in Regent Street, and that subsequently he met these friends there for supper. Well, although it appeared impossible to establish definitely the time when Leighton left the Café Royal to go to Fulton Gardens, there were two or three witnesses prepared to swear that he was back again at a quarter to ten. Now this was very important. It seems that his friends, who were waiting at the Café Royal, were getting impatient, and at twenty minutes to ten by the clock one of them—a fellow named Richard Hurrill—said he would go outside and see if he could see anything of Leighton. He strolled on as far as Piccadilly Circus where the buses stop that come from the City, and a minute or two later he saw Leighton step out of one. He seemed a little fuzzy in the head, and Hurrill chaffed him a bit. Then he took him by the arm and led him back in triumph to the Café Royal.
"Now mark what followed," the funny creature went on, whilst all at once his fingers started working away as if for dear life on his bit of string. "A hat—a soft grey hat—with an overcoat wrapped round it, were found in the area of a derelict house in Blackhorse Road, Walthamstow, close to the waterworks, and identified as the late Mr. Seton Jessup's overcoat and hat. I don't suppose that you have the least idea where Blackhorse Road, Walthamstow, is, but let me tell you that it is at the back of beyond in the northeast of London. If you remember, the point policeman had stated that the first visitor had called at No. 13 Fulton Gardens at half-past eight, and stayed half an hour. He then walked away in the direction of Finsbury. That visitor, the police argued, was Arthur Leighton, who had murdered Mr. Jessup and sent the telephone message to Fitzjohn's Avenue; then, hearing Ann Weber moving about downstairs and frightened at being caught by her, he had put on the deceased's hat and coat and slipped out of the house. Ann, however, had recognised him. She had involuntarily given him away when the housekeeper asked her whom she was talking to, so she invented the story of having seen what she thought was Mr. Jessup in order to save her sweetheart.
"It was a logical theory enough, but here came the evidence of the hat. The man who walked away from Fulton Gardens at nine o'clock, whom the point policeman saw changing his hat in the street at that hour, could not possibly have gone all the way to Walthamstow, either by bus or even part of the way in a taxi, and back again to Piccadilly Circus all in the space of forty-five minutes. And Leighton, mind you, stepped out of a bus when his friend met him, and I can tell you that the police worked their hardest to find a taxi-man who may have picked up a fare that night in the neighbourhood of Clerkenwell and driven out to Walthamstow and then back to Holborn. That search proved entirely fruitless. On the other hand, Leighton had paid his bus fare from Holborn, and the conductor vaguely recollected that he had got in at the corner of Clerkenwell Road. Well, that being proved, the man couldn't have done in the time all that the prosecution declared that he did.
"After he was discharged, the Press started violently abusing the police for not having directed their attention to the second visitor who called at Fulton Gardens ten minutes or so after the first one had left. But this person appeared as elusive and intangible as the mysterious wearer of Mr. Jessup's hat and coat. The point policeman saw him in the distance, and Ann Weber admitted him into the house and chatted with him for over twenty minutes. She didn't know him, but she declared that she could easily recognise him if she saw him again. For some time after that the poor girl was constantly called upon by the police to see, and if possible identify, the mysterious visitor. Half the shady characters in London passed, I believe, before her eyes during the next three months. But this search proved as fruitless as the other. The murder of Mr. Seton Jessup has remained as complete and as baffling a mystery as any in the annals of crime. Many there are—you amongst the number—who firmly believe that Arthur Leighton had, at any rate, something to do with it. I know that the family of the deceased were convinced that he did. Mr. Aubrey Jessup, the eldest son of the deceased, who was one of the executors under his father's will, and who had gone through the accounts of the business, had noted certain irregularities in Leighton's books; he also declared that various sums which had come in on the sixteenth after banking hours were missing from the safe. Moreover, young Leighton himself had admitted that 'the guv'nor was waxy with him because a few pounds were missing from the till.' All these facts no doubt had influenced the police when they applied for a warrant for his arrest, but there was no getting away from the evidence of that hat and coat found ten miles and more away from the scene of the crime, and of the bus conductor who could swear that out of forty-five minutes which the accused had to account for he had spent twenty in a bus."
"It is all very mysterious," I put in, because my eccentric friend had been silent for quite a long time, while his attention was entirely taken up by the fashioning of a whole series of intricate knots. "I am afraid that I was one of those who blamed the police for not directing their investigations sooner in the direction of the second visitor. He seems to me much more mysterious than the first. We know who the first one was——"
"Do we?" he retorted with a chuckle. "Or rather, do you?"