“At the end of a line,” Flamborough suggested. “But these crampings seem to be all in the middle of the lines of that letter.”
“That's what seems to me interesting about them,” Sir Clinton explained drily. “And somehow it seems to associate itself in my mind with the fact that Mr. Justice hasn't supplied us with the original document, but has gone to all the trouble of taking photographs of it.”
“I wondered at that, myself,” the Inspector confessed. “It seems a bit futile, true enough.”
“Try a fresh line, Inspector. We learned on fairly good authority that Mr. Justice took away a number of letters from Miss Deepcar's house. And yet he only sends us a single page out of the lot. If the rest were important, why doesn't he send them. If they aren't important, why did he take them away?”
“He may be holding them up for use later on, sir.”
Sir Clinton shook his head.
“My reading of the business is different. I think this is Mr. Justice's last reserve. He's throwing his last forces into the battle now.”
“There seems to be something behind all this,” Flamborough admitted, passing his hand over his hair as though to stimulate his brain by the action, “but I can't just fit it all together as you seem to have done, sir. You can say what you like, but that handwriting's genuine; the paper's not been tampered with; and I can't see anything wrong with it.”
Sir Clinton took pity on the inspector's obvious anxiety.
“Look at the phrasing of the whole document, Inspector. If you cared to do so, you could split it up into a set of phrases something after this style: ‘that things cannot go on any longer in this way. . . . The plan we talked over last seems the best. . . . When I have given . . . Hassendean . . . hints . . . about the . . . use of . . . hyoscine . . . he will probably see for himself how . . . to get what he wants. . . . After that, it merely means . . . watching them . . . and I am sure that . . . we shall soon have . . . her . . . out of our way. . . . It will be very easy . . . to make it seem . . . intentional . . . on their part . . . and no one is likely . . . to look further than that.’ Now, Inspector, if you met any one of these phrases by itself, would you infer from it inevitably that a murder was being planned? ‘Things cannot go on any longer in this way.’ If you consider how Mrs. Silverdale was behaving with young Hassendean, it's not astonishing to find a phrase like that in a letter from Silverdale to the girl he was in love with. ‘The plan we talked over last seems the best.’ It might have been a day's outing together that he was talking about for all one can tell. ‘He will probably see for himself how my wife is playing with him.’ And so forth.”