When I reached Stone Hollow again, I found waiting for me a little wizened man with indeterminate features and a general air of dilapidation, though his eyes under shaggy grey brows were bright and piercing.
“Hullo, Stillman!” I cried, “you at last, is it? I have been expecting you for some time, but I suppose it wasn’t an easy job. Have you got it?”
Stillman sat for a few minutes gazing into the fire. I knew his habit well and did not attempt to hurry him. He was a very methodical person, with a way of arranging his thoughts and choosing his words that was sometimes a little irritating to those wanting to hear what he had to say. I, knowing him well, merely waited until he was ready.
“You told me to find out—” he began and then paused, glancing at me as if in inquiry.
“Why Tulmin was blackmailing Sir Philip Clevedon,” I replied promptly. “Tulmin had some hold over Clevedon—what was it?”
“Precisely.”
I had “discovered” Stillman some years before, and had made much use of him. What his past was I did not know, though I suspected that it would not bear a too detailed investigation. He was certainly an expert burglar, as I had more than once put to the test; he could copy a signature with the fidelity of the camera; he could empty a man’s pocket with the dexterity of a professional; he knew every possible trick with the cards; he seemed, in short, to be an expert in every form of roguery, and yet, as far as I knew, he had never engaged the attention of the police. If he had been a rogue, he had covered his tracks with singular skill.
But he may only have been, like myself, a student of roguery. I was an expert pickpocket, an accomplished burglar, could open a safe by listening, and would guarantee to copy any man’s signature so as to deceive even himself; and more than once during my investigations I had found my accomplishments extremely useful. I should have made a very dangerous criminal, but I kept within the law, and I was willing to give Stillman also the full benefit of the doubt. As a sleuth, I never met his equal; in the patient, persistent, unwearying, remorseless pursuit of an individual, in turning a person, man or woman, inside out, in penetrating the most sullen reserve and uncovering the secrets of the past he was unapproachable.
I had the first taste of his quality in the Strongeley case. He brought me some information and I happened to remark that I must have Robert Strongeley shadowed. “Try me,” he said, and as I was just then too busily occupied to do it myself, and had nobody else whom I could put on, I agreed. He followed Strongeley half round the world, and wormed out secrets that even Strongeley himself had forgotten.
Since then I had many times employed him, and he always promptly answered my call, possibly because I paid well, but even more, I think, because my cases were nearly always interesting. How he lived or what he did in the unemployed intervals I cannot say and never inquired. A lack of curiosity is often a form of wisdom.