Cheyne felt a surprisingly keen disappointment.
“But mayn’t I come and report progress in the afternoon?” he begged.
“Not until after four. I shall be painting up till then.”
He wanted to see her home, but this she would not hear of, and soon he was occupying one of these deep chairs in the hotel smoking room whose allure had seemed so strong to him in the draughty porch of the half-built house. As he sat he thought over the turn which this evening’s inquiry had given to the affair in which he was engaged. It was clear enough now that Miss Merrill’s view had been correct and that the Dangles were scared stiff by the absence of information about the finding of his body. As he put himself in their place, he saw that flight was indeed their only course. What he marveled at was that they should have taken time to remove their furniture. From their point of view it must have been a horrible risk, and it undoubtedly left, through the carrying contractor, a certain clue to their whereabouts.
But when Cheyne began his inquiries on the following morning he rapidly became less impressed with the certainty of the clue. A direct request at the firm’s office for Dangle’s address was met by a polite non possumus, and when during the dinner hour Cheyne succeeded in bribing a junior clerk to let him have the information, at a further interview the lad declared he could not find it. It was not until after five hours’ inquiry among the drivers of the various vans which entered and left the yard that he learned anything, and even then he found himself no further on. The furniture, which had been collected from an unoccupied house, had been stored and still remained in Messrs. Watterson & Swayne’s warehouses.
It was a weary and disgruntled Cheyne who at six o’clock that evening dragged himself up the ten flights to Miss Merrill’s room. But when he was seated in her big armchair with his pipe going and had consumed a whisky and soda which she had poured out for him he began to feel that all was not necessarily lost and that life had compensations for failures in the role of amateur detective.
She listened carefully to his tale of woe, finally dropping a word of sympathy with his disappointment and of praise for his efforts which left him thinking she was certainly the good pal he expected her to be.
“But that’s not the worst,” he went on gloomily. “It’s bad enough that I have failed today, but it’s a great deal worse that I don’t know how I am going to do any better. Those Watterson & Swayne people simply won’t give away any information, and I don’t see how else it’s to be got.”
“There’s not much to go on certainly,” she admitted. “That’s where the police have the pull. They could go into that office and demand the Dangles’ address. You can’t. What about the others, that Sime and that Blessington? Could you trace them in any way?”
Cheyne moved lazily in his chair.