“He was probably taking three or four people to one letter. Roper was marking them as we fingered them. Roper wrote them while we were in the garden.” He chuckled again. “That was how I spotted it.”
“How?”
“You remember they were torn, don’t you, where the signature should have been ... well, the first two tears I saw, didn’t exactly coincide in shape ... see ... that was what I looked at when Baddeley was asking Jack Considine ... it’s deuced hard, Bill, to tear things exactly similarly. Torn, that is, in the way they were torn. He probably used a third letter later on ... but I wasn’t concerned with that.”
“Good Lord,” I groaned, “and I never knew.”
“I’m now proceeding with the last of things we know,” continued Anthony.
“(i) That Lady Considine has lost her pearls. Anything else? I think not! I think that just about exhausts what we know.”
“Prescott was robbed too,” I ventured.
“Of how much, Bill?—nobody knows.”
I saw his point. Then I broached a matter over which I had felt very curious.
“You told me this morning, after we had been first called to the billiard room that you had three distinct clues—two I think you said, in Group A and one in Group B. What were they?”