“You get flashes of it at times; you call them ‘hunches’. It is really your atrophied instinct asserting itself. But you won’t give it a chance. You slay it with the hands of logic and smother it with argument, and my instinct tells me that the hand that opened Mr. Lander’s trunk was the hand that destroyed Trasmere. I had a queer feeling when you telephoned to me,” he went on, “a queer feeling as though you or somebody was going to hand to me a ready-made solution of Trasmere’s death.”
“And you are disappointed. My poor old Carver,” said Tab, pityingly. “You think too much!”
“We all think too much,” said Carver, relapsing into his natural gloom.
The next morning the tenant who occupied the flat below came up whilst Tab was dressing and Mr. Holland was a little taken aback to see one who so seldom put in an appearance on any day. He was a red-faced gentleman, somewhat sportily attired.
“I hope you didn’t mind my shouting up at you last night,” he said apologetically, “but I had been travelling night and day and I had had no sleep and naturally I was a little rattled when I heard that noise going on overhead. Did you drop a box or something?”
“To be exact, I didn’t drop a box at all,” said Tab. “In fact, the noise you heard was made by a burglar.”
“A burglar?” said the startled man. “I heard the row and it woke me up. I got out of bed and yelled up, as I thought, to you.”
“What time was this?”
“Between ten and half-past,” said the other. “It was just getting dark.”
“He must have dropped the box as he was putting it on the bed,” said Tab thoughtfully. “You didn’t by any chance see him?”