Presently Price gave vent to an exclamation. “Hang it all!” he cried irritably, and then: “I suppose those numbers couldn’t be soundings? Could they give depths at the circles?”
“That’s an idea,” Cheyne cried, but French shook his head.
“I think there’s more in it than that,” he observed. “If you examine those numbers you’ll find that they’re consecutive, they run from one to thirty-six. Soundings wouldn’t lend themselves to such an arrangement. You may be right, Mr. Price, and we must keep your idea in view, but I don’t see it working out for the moment.”
Silence reigned for a few moments, then Price sat back from the table and spoke again.
“Look here, Inspector,” he said, knocking the ashes out of his pipe and beginning to fill it with his strong, black mixture, “you said something just now I didn’t quite follow. Let’s get your notion clear. You talked of this thing beginning with the sea—at Schulz, and ending with the sea—at L’Escaut, and Schulz’s message being a map. Just what was in your mind?”
“Only the obvious suggestion that if you leave a message which provokes an expedition, you must also convey in your message the destination of that expedition, and a map seems the simplest way of doing it. But on second thoughts I question my first conclusion. There must be an explanation of the secret as well as a direction of how to profit by it, and it would seem to me doubtful that such an explanation could be covered by a map.”
“Sounds all right, that,” Price admitted. “Have you any idea what the secret might be? Sounds like treasure or salvage or something of that kind.”
“I scarcely think salvage,” French answered. “The L’Escaut is not a salvage boat, and a boat not specially fitted for the purpose would be of little use. But I thought of treasure all right. This Schulz might have robbed his ships—there would always be money aboard, and even during the war many women traveled with jewelry. The man might easily have made a cache of valuables somewhere round the coast.”
“Easily,” Cheyne intervened, “or he might have learned of some valuable deposit in some out of the way cove round the coast, like those chaps in that clinking tale of Maurice Drake’s, WO₂.”
“As at Terneuzen?” said French. “I read that book—one of the best I ever came across. It’s a possibility, of course.”