“I thought you would feel that way, sir. Now to return to details. I suppose you haven’t the envelope that letter came in?”
“Never saw it,” Mr. Schoofs replied. “The clerk who opened it would destroy it.”
“Better have the clerk in, and we’ll ask the question.”
Mr. Schoofs made a sudden gesture.
“By Jove!” he cried. “It was Vanderkemp himself. He acts as head clerk when he is here.”
“Then we don’t get any evidence there. Either the letter came through the post, in which case he destroyed the envelope in the usual way, or else he brought the letter to the office and slipped it in among the others.”
French picked up the letter again. Experience had taught him that typescript could be extremely characteristic, and he wondered if this in question could be made to yield up any of its secrets.
It certainly had peculiarities. The lens revealed a dent in the curve of the n, where the type had evidently struck something hard, and the tail of the g was slightly defective.
French next examined the genuine letters, and was interested to find their type showed the same irregularities. It was therefore certain that the forged letter had been typed in the London office.
He sat thinking deeply, unconsciously whistling his little tune through his closed teeth. There was another peculiarity about the forged note. The letters were a trifle indented, showing that the typewriter keys had been struck with rather more than the usual force. He turned the sheet over, and he saw that so much was this the case that the stops were punched almost through. Picking up the genuine letters, he looked for the same peculiarity, but the touch in these cases was much lighter and even the full stop barely showed through. This seemed to justify a further deduction—that the writer of the forged note was unskilled, probably an amateur, while that of the others was an expert. French felt he could safely assume that the forged note had been typed by some unauthorised person, using the machine in the London office.