“Hiding something? Not the thing that did the job? Why there was no trace of any injury about the man.”
“No doubt. But Mervyn is hiding something. When I find that something we shall have the key to the whole mystery.”
“Well, we didn’t search the whole house,” said Nashby. “It would take about a week to do that, and only three or four rooms were used at all. We searched that weird old family vault of a cellar though. There’s nothing loose there. It’s firm everywhere. He showed us over it himself.”
“Of course he did. He’d have been a fool if he hadn’t. But what he’s hiding isn’t in the house at all. It’s outside.”
“Outside?”
Helston Varne nodded.
“Has a smack of that Moat Farm affair,” said Nashby, “only there they had something definite to find—a body. Here we’ve nothing. But how did you get at that for a clue?”
“I’ve been down here three days—and a half, to be strictly accurate; there’s nothing like accuracy. Yet I’ve hit upon that much. The other day I thought I’d hit upon everything, but I hadn’t quite. It was just one of those exciting moments when you miss a thing just by a hairsbreadth, as it were. But it’s getting very warm—very warm indeed.”
Nashby filled a fresh pipe and said nothing. He was looking at the other enviously. Helston Varne’s reputation, among the secret few, was prodigious. If the scent was really getting very warm from his point of view, why then the mystery was as good as solved. But then, Nashby wanted the credit of solving it to be his own.
He wondered if Varne would manage things so that it might be. There was a good deal of the amateur about Helston Varne he had been given to understand, clever, marvellously clever as he had proved himself. At any rate, he was independent of material emolument, or at any rate seemed so. He seemed good-natured too. Perhaps whatever discovery he made he would contrive to let him—Nashby—get the benefit of some appreciable share in it.