“What's the next step?” he asked bluntly.
“I'll have to leave here. It's too expensive.”
“And after that, what?”
“I'll get a job. I suppose a man is as well hidden here as anywhere. I can grow a beard—that's the usual thing, isn't it?”
Bassett made an impatient gesture, and fell to pacing the floor. “It's incredible,” he said. “It's monstrous. It's a joke. Here you are, without a thing against you, and hung like Mahomet's coffin between heaven and earth. It makes me sick.”
He went home that night, leaving word to have any letters for L 22 forwarded, but without much hope. His last clutch of Dick's hand had a sort of desperate finality in it, and he carried with him most of the way home the tall, worn and rather shabby figure that saw him off with a smile.
By the next afternoon's mail he received a note from New York, with a few words of comment penciled on it in Dick's writing. “This came this evening. I sent back the money. D.” The note was from Gregory and had evidently enclosed a one-hundred dollar bill. It began without superscription: “Enclosed find a hundred dollars, as I imagine funds may be short. If I were you I'd get out of here. There has been considerable excitement, and you know too many people in this burg.”
Bassett sat back in his chair and studied the note.
“Now why the devil did he do that?” he reflected. He sat for some time, thinking deeply, and he came to one important conclusion. The story Gregory had told was the one which was absolutely calculated to shut off all further inquiry. They had had ten years; ten years to plan, eliminate and construct; ten years to prepare their defense, in case Clark turned up. Wasn't that why Gregory had been so assured? But he had not been content to let well enough alone; he had perhaps overreached himself.
Then what was the answer? She had killed Lucas, but was it an accident? And there must have been a witness, or they would have had nothing to fear. He wrote out on a bit of paper three names, and sat looking at them: