“There's no sign of any tampering with the paper that I can see, sir. The surface is intact and the ink lines run absolutely freely, without the halts and shakes one would expect in a forgery. The only thing I do notice is that the word looks just a trifle cramped.”
“That's what I wanted. Note that it's in the middle of a line, Inspector. Now look at the word ‘shall’ in the fifth line from the bottom of the page.”
“One might say it was a trifle cramped too,” Flamborough admitted.
“And the ‘it’ in the third line from the foot?”
“It looks like the same thing.”
Flamborough relapsed into silence and studied the photograph word by word while Sir Clinton waited patiently.
“The word ‘the’ in the phrase ‘about the use of hyoscine’ seems cramped too; and the ‘to’ at the start of the last line suffers in the same way. It's so slight in all these cases that one wouldn't notice it normally. I didn't see it till you pointed it out. But if you're going to suggest that there's been any erasing and writing in fresh words to fit the blank space, I'll have to disagree with you, sir. I simply don't believe there's been any thing of the sort.”
“I shan't differ from you over that,” Sir Clinton assured him blandly. “Now let's think of something else for a change. Did it never occur to you, Inspector, how much the English language depends on the relative positions of words? If I say: ‘It struck you,’ that means something quite different from: ‘You struck it.’ And yet each sentence contains exactly the same words.”
“That's plain enough,” Flamborough admitted, “though I never thought of it in that way. And,” he added in a dubious tone, “I don't see what it's got to do with the case, either.”
“That's a pity,” Sir Clinton observed with a sympathy which hardly sounded genuine. “Suppose we think it over together. Where does one usually cramp words a trifle when one is writing?”