But as the days slipped by without bringing any news, French grew seriously uneasy and redoubled his efforts. He suspected every one he could think of, including the typist, the office boy, and even Mr. Duke himself, but still without result. The typist proved she was at home all the evening, Billy Newton was undoubtedly at a Boy Scouts’ Rally, while guarded inquiries at the principal’s club and home proved that his statement as to how he had passed his evening was correct in every particular. Stanley Harrington’s movements he had already investigated, and though the young man’s alibi could not be absolutely established he could find nothing to incriminate him.
Baffled in every direction, French began to lose heart, while his superiors asked more and more insistent and unpleasant questions.
CHAPTER IV
MISSING
About ten o’clock on the morning of the tenth day after the murder of Charles Gething, Inspector French sat in his room at New Scotland Yard wondering for the thousandth time if there was no clue in the affair which he had overlooked, no line of research which he had omitted to follow up.
He had seldom found himself up against so baffling a problem. Though from the nature of the case, as he told himself with exasperation, a solution should be easily reached, yet he could find nothing to go on. The clues he had obtained looked promising enough, but—they led nowhere. None of the stolen notes had reached the bank, nor had any of the diamonds come on the market; no one in whom he was interested had become suddenly rich, and all his possible suspects were able more or less satisfactorily to account for their time on the fatal evening.
French had just taken up his pen to write out a statement of what he had done, in the hope of discovering some omission, when his telephone rang. Absent-mindedly he took up the receiver.
“I want to speak to Inspector French,” he heard in a familiar voice. “Say that Mr. Duke of Duke & Peabody is on the ’phone.”
There was a suggestion of eagerness in the voice that instantly roused the Inspector’s interest.
“Inspector French speaking,” he answered promptly. “Good-morning, Mr. Duke. I hope you have some news for me?”
“I have some news,” the distant voice returned, “but I don’t know whether it bears on our quest. I have just had a letter from Schoofs, you remember, the manager of our Amsterdam branch, and from what he tells me it looks as if Vanderkemp had disappeared.”