“Before dawn,” said the Queen with rapture.
“Third, the cisterns in the cave. Let’s go and see the cisterns.”
“No,” said the Queen. “The great thing is not to be carried away by passion. We must be cold, purely intellectual. We must be thoroughly systematic. We’ll begin with the torn envelope. It happened first.”
They retired to a shady corner of the balcony outside the Queen’s rooms and studied the torn envelope for two hours. They were analytical, keenly and minutely observant, coldly cautious in forming conclusions. They tried every method of detection known to detective science. They held the envelope up to the light in order to discover a watermark. They examined the texture of the paper, the ink and the postage stamp, carefully through a powerful magnifying glass. They scraped one corner of the envelope with the blade of a penknife. They took four photographs, two of the front and two of the back, with the Queen’s hand camera. They talked a good deal about fingerprints.
Phillips had a logical mind and a capacity for synthetic induction. The Queen was perhaps the more careful observer. She had certainly the more brilliant imagination. After two hours’ work they summed up their conclusions, making careful notes with the Queen’s fountain pen on the blank pages at the end of a large diary.
“A man or men——” said Phillips.
The Queen wrote down “A man or men” in the diary.
“Has,” said Phillips, “or have, been present on the island of Salissa at some date between December 15, 1913, and April 30, 1914. The said man or men was or were during part of that period in occupation of the royal palace.”
“Royal palace,” said the Queen, writing rapidly.
“This man—or men, of course—was in correspondence with some person at present unknown, resident in the city of London.”