`But this is a different thing, you see. This chap isn't a lunatic collector. He steals the hat and props it up somewhere else, like a symbol, for everybody to see. There's one other explanation, nonetheless..'
Sir William's thin lips wore a wintry smile as he glanced from Rampole to the absorbed face of the doctor; but shrewd calculation moved his eyes.
`You're a quaint parcel of detectives,' he said. `Are you seriously suggesting that a thief begins pinching hats all over London so that he can pinch a manuscript from me? Do you think I'm in the habit of carrying valuable manuscripts around in my hat? Besides, I might point out that it was stolen several days before either one of my hats.'
Dr Fell ruffled his big dark mane with a thoughtful hand. `The repetition of that word "hat",' he observed, `has rather a confusing effect. I'm afraid I shall say "hat" when I mean almost anything else…: Suppose you tell us about the manuscript first — what was it, and how did you get it, and when was it stolen?'
`I'll tell you what it was,' Sir William answered, in a low voice, `because Hadley vouches for you. Only one collector in the world — no, say two — know that I found it. One of them had to know; I had to show it to him to make sure it was genuine. The other I'll speak of presently. But I found it.
`It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe. Myself and one other person excepted, nobody except Poe has ever seen or heard of it…. Find that hard to believe, do you?'
There was a frosty pleasure in his look, and he chuckled without opening his mouth.
`I've never collected Poe manuscripts. But I have a first edition of the Al Araaf collection, published by subscription while he was at West Point, and a few copies of the Southern Literary Messenger he edited in Baltimore. Well! — I was poking about for odds and ends in the States last September, and I happened to be visiting Dr Masters, the Philadelphia collector. He suggested that I have a look at the house where Poe lived there, at the corner of Seventh and Spring Garden Streets. I did. I went alone. And a jolly good thing I did.'
`It was a mean neighbourhood, dull brick fronts and washing hung in gritty backyards. The house was at the corner of an alley, and I could hear a man in a garage swearing at a back-firing motor. Very little about the house had been changed.
`From the alley I went through a gate in a high board fence, and into a paved yard with a crooked tree growing through the bricks. In a little brick kitchen a glum-looking workman was making some notations on an envelope; there was a noise of hammering from the front room. I excused myself; I said that the house used to be occupied by a writer I had heard of, and I was looking round. He growled