“Caught anything?”
“I don’t know whether to call it anything or not, my lord,” said Bunter, dubiously. “I’ll bring the prints in.”
“Do,” said Wimsey. “Hallo! here’s our advertisement about the gold chain in the Times—very nice it looks: ‘Write,’phone or call 110, Piccadilly.’ Perhaps it would have been safer to put a box number, though I always think that the franker you are with people, the more you’re likely to deceive ’em; so unused is the modern world to the open hand and the guileless heart, what?”
“But you don’t think the fellow who left that chain on the body is going to give himself away by coming here and inquiring about it?”
“I don’t, fathead,” said Lord Peter, with the easy politeness of the real aristocracy; “that’s why I’ve tried to get hold of the jeweller who originally sold the chain. See?” He pointed to the paragraph. “It’s not an old chain—hardly worn at all. Oh, thanks, Bunter. Now, see here, Parker, these are the finger-marks you noticed yesterday on the window-sash and on the far edge of the bath. I’d overlooked them; I give you full credit for the discovery, I crawl, I grovel, my name is Watson, and you need not say what you were just going to say, because I admit it all. Now we shall—Hullo, hullo, hullo!”
The three men stared at the photographs.
“The criminal,” said Lord Peter, bitterly, “climbed over the roofs in the wet and not unnaturally got soot on his fingers. He arranged the body in the bath, and wiped away all traces of himself except two, which he obligingly left to show us how to do our job. We learn from a smudge on the floor that he wore india rubber boots, and from this admirable set of finger-prints on the edge of the bath that he had the usual number of fingers and wore rubber gloves. That’s the kind of man he is. Take the fool away, gentlemen.”
He put the prints aside, and returned to an examination of the shreds of material in his hand. Suddenly he whistled softly.
“Do you make anything of these, Parker?”
“They seemed to me to be ravellings of some coarse cotton stuff—a sheet, perhaps, or an improvised rope.”