What they did, of course, was to find a clue—instantly and upon the spot. I stared blankly up and down the street—it was a quiet road in Belsize Park—but I could see nothing that looked like a clue. Perhaps the commonest sort of clue was footprints. But the weather was fine and dry, and the clean, hard pavement was without a mark of any kind. Besides, I had a feeling that footprints as a clue were a little threadbare and out of date; they were so obvious—so "otiose" as I have heard it called. No respectable novelist would depend on footprints alone, nowadays. Then there was a piece of the thief's coat, torn off by a sharp railing, or by a broken bottle on top of a wall; and there was also a lost button. I remembered that many excellent detective stories had been brought to breathless and triumphant terminations by the aid of one or other of these clues. I looked carefully along the line of broken glass that defended the top of Aunt Sarah's outer wall, but not a rag, not a shred, fluttered there. I tried to remember something else, and as I gazed thoughtfully downward, my eye was attracted by some small black object lying on the pavement by the gate. I stooped—and behold, it was a button! A trouser button, by all that's lucky!
"BEHOLD, IT WAS A BUTTON."
I snatched it eagerly, and read the name stamped thereon, "J. Pullinger, London." I knew the name—indeed it was the name of my own tailor. The scent would seem to be growing stronger. But at that moment I grew conscious of an uneasy subsidence of my right trouser-leg. Hastily clapping my hand under my waistcoat, I found a loose brace-strap, and then realized that I had merely picked up my own button. I went home.
I spent the evening in fruitless brain-cudgelling. My brightest idea (which came about midnight) was to go back to Aunt Sarah's the first thing in the morning. True, she had forbidden me to come into her presence without that brooch, but that, I felt, must be regarded rather as a burst of rhetoric than as a serious prohibition. Besides, the case might have been stolen by one of her own servants; and, moreover, if I wanted a clue, clearly I must begin my search at the very spot where the theft had been committed. She couldn't object to that, anyhow.
So in the morning I went. Aunt Sarah seemed to have forgotten her order that I must not approach her without the brooch, but she seemed hurt to find I had not brought it. She had had no sleep all night, she said. She thought I ought to have discovered the thieves before she went to bed; but at any rate, she expected I would do it to-day. I said I would certainly do my best, and I fear I found it necessary to invent a somewhat exciting story of my adventures of the previous evening in search of the brooch.
There was a plain-clothes constable, it seemed, still about the place, and the police had searched all the servants' boxes, without discovering anything. Their theory, it seemed, was that some thief must have secreted himself about the garden, entered by a French window soon after Aunt Sarah's arrival, made his way to the bedroom—which would be easy, for there were two staircases—and then made off with the case; and, indeed, Aunt Sarah declared that the clothes in the box were much disturbed when she discovered her loss. The police spoke mysteriously about "a clue," but would not say what it was—which, no doubt, would be unprofessional.
All the servants had been closely questioned, and the detective now in the place wished to ask me if I had observed anything unusual. I hadn't, and I told him so. Had I noticed whether any of the French windows were open when I called the first time? No, I hadn't noticed. I didn't happen to have called more than once before my aunt had come in? No, I didn't. Which way had I entered the house when I came back after my aunt's arrival? By the front door, in the usual way. Was the front door open? Yes, I remembered that it was—probably left open by forgetfulness of the servants after the luggage had been brought in; so that I had come in without knocking or ringing. And he asked other questions which I have forgotten. I did not feel hopeful of his success, although he seemed so very sagacious; he spoke with an air of already knowing all about it, but I doubted. All my experience of newspaper reports told me that when the police spoke mysteriously of "a clue," that case might as well be given up at once, to save trouble. That seemed also to be Aunt Sarah's opinion. Before I left she confided to me that she didn't believe in the police a bit; she was sure that they were only staring about and asking questions to make a show of doing something, and that it would end in no result after all. All the more, she said, must she rely on me. The punishment of the thief was altogether a secondary matter; what she wanted were the jewels—or, as a minimum, the brooch with Uncle Joseph's hair in it. She would be glad if I would report progress to her during my search, but whether I did or not, she must insist on my recovering the property. I was a grown man now, she pointed out, and, with my intelligence, ought to be easily equal to such a small thing; certainly more so than mere ordinary ignorant policemen. Of those she gave up all hope. She would not mind if I took a day or two over it, but she would prefer me to find the brooch at once.
I felt a little desperate when I left Aunt Sarah. I must do something. She had made up her mind that I was to recover the trinkets, or at least the brooch, and if I failed her she would cut me off, I knew. There was a fellow called Finch, secretary to the Society for the Dissemination of Moral Literature among the Esquimaux, who had been very friendly with her of late, and although I had no especial grudge against the Esquimaux as a nation, I had a strong objection to seeing Aunt Sarah's fortune go to provide them with moral literature, or Mr. Finch with his salary—the latter being, I had heard, the main object of the society. I spent the day in fruitless cogitation and blank staring into pawnshop windows, in the remote hope of seeing Aunt Sarah's brooch exposed for sale. And on the following morning I went back to Aunt Sarah.
I confess I had a tale prepared to account for my time—a tale, perhaps, not strictly true in all its details. But what was I to do to satisfy such a terrible old lady? I must say I think it was a very interesting sort of tale, with plenty of thieves' kitchens and receivers' dens in it, and, on the whole, it went down very well, although I could see that Aunt Sarah's good opinion of me was in danger for lack of tangible result to my adventures. The police, she said, had given the case up altogether and gone away. They reported, finally, that there was no clue, and that they could do nothing. I came away, feeling a good deal of sympathy with the police.