During a frozen silence Dr Fell picked up the mouse, put it down, and glanced thoughtfully at his companions. `Driscoll was the hat-thief, you see,' he said.
15. The A fair of the Rubber Mouse
'Wait a minute!' protested Rampole. `They're coming over the plate too fast for me You mean… '
`Just what I say,' the doctor answered, testily. `Nobody could have doubted it from the first. I had proof of it here to-night; but I had to come here and get the proof before you would have believed me.
`Consider. Here's a crazy young fellow with a sense of humour and lots of intelligence. He wants to make a name for himself as a newspaperman. He can turn out a good, vivid news-story when he has, the facts; but he has so little news-sense that one managing editor swears he wouldn't scent a wedding if he walked through an inch of rice in front of a church.
`That's not only understandable, Hadley, but it's a further clue to his character. His long suit was imagination. The very imaginative people never make good straight reporters, they're looking for the picturesque, the bizarre, the ironic incident; and very often they completely neglect to bother about essential facts. Driscoll would have made a thundering good columnist, but as a reporter he was a failure. So he resolved to do what many a reporter has done before him: to create news, and the sort of news that would appeal to him.
'In every one of these important hat-thefts there was a sort of ironic symbolism, as though the stage had been arranged by an actor. Driscoll loved gestures, and he loved symbolism. A policeman's helmet is propped on a lamp-standard outside Scotland Yard; "Behold the power of the police!" says the Byronic Mr Driscoll, with the usual cynicism of very young people. A barrister's wig is put on a cab-horse, which was the nearest approach Driscoll could get towards underlining Mr Bumble's opinion that the law is an ass.'
Dr Fell paused to settle more comfortably. Hadley stared at him, and then the chief inspector nodded.
`Now I shouldn't go into this so thoroughly,' the doctor went on, `except that, it's a clue to the murder, as you'll see. He was preparing for another coup, a real and final coup, which couldn't help making — in his eyes — the whole of England sit up.' The doctor pawed among the papers he had taken from Hadley's brief-case. `Here's his notebook, with those notes which puzzled you so much. Before I read them to you again; let me remind you that Driscoll himself gave the whole show away. You recall that drunken evening with Mrs Bitton, which Mrs Larkin described for us, when Driscoll prophesied what was going to happen a week before it did begin to happen? He mentioned events which were shortly to occur, and which would make his name as a newspaperman. An artist, when comfortably filled with beer, can talk at length about the great picture he intends to paint, without exciting the least surprise. But when a newspaperman casually mentions what corking stories he is going to turn out about the murder which is to take place next week, there is likely to be considerable curiosity about his powers of foresight.
`But let's return to this big stroke Driscoll was planning, after having built up to it by degrees with lesser hats. First, you see, he carefully stole the crossbow bolt out of Bitton's house…'