When Simpson had taken his burnished presence out of the room, Grant sent for the men who had been on duty at King's Cross and Euston on Monday night, and asked them to describe the suspects they had examined. At the King's Cross man's tale of a young man with his mother, he halted. "Describe the mother," he said, and the man did, quite accurately.
"Were there no other possibles on that train?"
Oh, yes, the man said, several. He inferred bitterly that the original home of thin, dark men with high cheekbones must be the north of Scotland. They swarmed on all northbound trains.
"What made you think he wasn't the man you wanted?"
"His manner, sir. And the woman's. And his case was on the rack, with the initials outside for any one to see — G. L. And he had a golf-bag, and altogether looked too casual."
Well done, Mrs. Everett! thought Grant. It wasn't the man who left the notes in the drawer that thought of the golf-bag. He wondered if leaving the case like that had been deliberate. He could hardly credit that any one would risk unnecessarily the whole success of the thing on such an enormous bluff. It was probably accident.
Where was he going?
There were no labels on his luggage, but the ticket collector had said he was going to Edinburgh.
It did not take Grant long to find out Lamont's probable destination. There were not many Logans in the Church of Scotland, and only one had a church in Rossshire. He was minister of the United Free church in Carninnish — having evidently ratted from the stern faith of his fathers — and Carninnish was a village at the head of a loch on the west coast of the county.
Grant went in to Barker and said, "I'm going fishing in Scotland for a day or two."