«Dear me,» said Parker, «this is what you might call unexpected.»
«Either it is some extraordinary misunderstanding,» said Lord Peter, «or Mr. Crimplesham is a very bold and cunning villain. Or possibly, of course, they are the wrong glasses. We may as well get a ruling on that point at once. I suppose the glasses are at the Yard. I wish you'd just ring 'em up and ask 'em to send round an optician's description of them at once — and you might ask at the same time whether it's a very common prescription.»
«Right you are,» said Parker, and took the receiver off its hook.
«And now,» said his friend, when the message was delivered, «just come into the library for a minute.»
On the library table, Lord Peter had spread out a series of bromide prints, some dry, some damp, and some but half-washed.
«These little ones are the originals of the photos we've been taking,» said Lord Peter, «and these big ones are enlargements all made to precisely the same scale. This one here is the footmark on the linoleum; we'll put that by itself at present. Now these finger-prints can be divided into five lots. I've numbered 'em on the prints — see? — and made a list:
A. The finger-prints of Levy himself, off his little bedside book and his hairbrush — this and this — you can't mistake the little scar on the thumb.
B. The smudges made by the gloved fingers of the man who slept in Levy's room on Monday night. They show clearly on the water-bottle and on the boots — superimposed on Levy's. They are very distinct on the boots — surprisingly so for gloved hands, and I deduce that the gloves were rubber ones and had recently been in water.»
«Here's another interestin' point. Levy walked in the rain on Monday night, as we know, and these dark marks are mud-splashes. You see they lie over Levy's finger-prints in every case. Now see: on this left boot we find the stranger's thumb-mark over the mud on the leather above the heel. That's a funny place to find a thumb-mark on a boot, isn't it? That is, if Levy took off his own boots. But it's the place where you'd expect to see it if somebody forcibly removed his boots for him. Again, most of the stranger's finger-marks come over the mud-marks, but here is one splash of mud which comes on top of them again. Which makes me infer that the stranger came back to Park Lane, wearing Levy's boots, in a cab, carriage or car, but that at some point or other he walked a little way — just enough to tread in a puddle and get a splash on the boots. What do you say?»
«Very pretty,» said Parker. «A bit intricate, though, and the marks are not all that I could wish a finger-print to be.»