I bowed.
"See what you can do in spite of it," she said wistfully.
3
I need not take the space to put down all the operations of my early reasoning on the case. I had plenty to think about. But every avenue my thoughts followed was blocked sooner or later by a blank wall. Never in my whole experience have I been asked to take up such a blind trail—and this was my first case, remember. Six weeks lost beyond recall! It was discouraging.
I narrowed myself down to two main theories:
(a) The pearls had been stolen by experienced specialists after long and careful plotting or,
(b) They had been picked up on impulse by a man or woman dazzled by their beauty. In this case the thief would most likely hoard them and gloat over them in secret.
Not the least puzzling factor in the case was my client herself. It was clear that she had been passionately attached to her pearls; she spoke of them always in almost a poetic strain. Yet there was a personal note of anguish in her grief which even the loss of her treasure was not sufficient to explain. She was a quiet woman. And strangest of all, she seemed to be more bent on finding out who had taken them, than on getting them back again. She had waited six weeks before acting at all, and now she hedged me around with so many conditions that the prospect of success was nil.
I had an intuition which warned me that if I wished to remain friends with her I had better be careful whom I accused of the crime. It was a puzzler whichever way you looked at it. However, an investigator must not allow himself to dwell on the hopelessness of his whole tangle, but must set to work on a thread at a time. Whichever way it turned out, I was to have the delight for a long time to come of seeing her frequently.