“I thought it possible,” he said, “but it was merely a guess. In itself the evidence wasn’t worth anything; but it fitted well enough into the hypothesis I’d made.”
He turned to the Inspector.
“Did you get the five medallions as I expected?”
Armadale put his hand into his pocket and withdrew the five discs of gold, which he handed over to the Chief Constable. Sir Clinton took the sixth medallion from his own pocket and laid the whole set on the table beside him.
“They say,” he went on, “that the more outré a crime is, the easier it is to find a solution for it. I shouldn’t like to assert that in every case. But there’s no harm in paying especial attention to the bizarre points in an affair. If you cast your minds back to the case as it presented itself to us on the night of the masked ball, you’ll recall one point which undoubtedly seemed out of the common.”
He glanced round the circle of listeners, but no one ventured to interrupt.
“Here was a gang of thieves bent on stealing something. One of them—Foss—knew that in the show-case there were three medallions and three replicas. The medallions were of enormous value; the replicas were worth next to nothing. Foss, I was sure—and it turned out afterwards that I was right—Foss knew that the real medallions were in the top row and that the replicas were in the lower row.”
He arranged the six discs on the table as he spoke.
“And yet, with that knowledge, it was the replicas which they stole and not the real medallions. Amazing, at first sight, isn’t it? To my mind it was much more bizarre than the vanishing trick. And, naturally, it was on that point in the case that I fixed my attention. These weren’t blunderers, remember. The rest of the business showed that they were anything but that. The way they had seized upon that practical joke to serve their ends was quite enough to prove that there was a good brain at the back of the thing. That joke wasn’t in their original programme, and yet they’d taken it in their stride and turned it to account in a most ingenious way. They weren’t the sort of people who would make a mistake about the positions of the replicas. If they took the electrotypes instead of the real things, it was because the electrotypes were what they wanted.
“Why did they want them? That question seemed to thrust itself forward in front of all the others which suggested themselves in the case; and it was that question that had to be answered before one could see light anywhere.”