“And that key is still in your possession?”
“Yes. I keep it in the safe in my dressing-room. I looked this morning, and it was there.”
The detective ruminated over this latest piece of information. While he was doing so, Morrice spoke again, with just a little hesitation, as if he knew that what he was going to say would cut the ground a little from under his strongly expressed theory of Croxton’s guilt.
“You ought to know the whole truth, Mr. Lane, and you shall have it for what it is worth. This present memorandum—I will speak of it by that name—is one that I wrote out from memory. I had an original one, perhaps just a trifle fuller, but I lost it, that is to say I could not find it amongst my papers, some two years ago.”
Still clinging obstinately to his theory, he added a few comments which, needless to say, did not make much impression on his listener, who went into possibilities and probabilities perhaps just a trifle too elaborately for the ordinary man.
“You know how easily papers get lost or mislaid. It is as likely as not that the original memorandum will turn up in the last place I should expect to find it. And if it got loose and was swept up by some careless servant, it would get into the hands of the dustman. To the ordinary person it would, of course, be quite unintelligible.”
To this Lane simply remarked that when a paper of importance had disappeared it was quite impossible to prophesy into whose hands it would fall. The dustman was a comforting theory, but it was no part of his business to adopt comforting theories that did away with the necessity to think. If “Tubby” Thomas had not been safely locked up at Dartmoor for the last two years, he would have been pretty certain that by some felonious means it had come into the possession of that accomplished safe-breaker.
His position had changed since Mr. Morrice had summoned him to Deanery Street on the occasion of the second burglary. He was now representing the financier as well as Richard Croxton. In a way he was glad, for Richard Croxton was poor according to Rosabelle, and this promised to be an expensive investigation. To Morrice money did not matter; he would not be stopped from ascertaining the truth by lack of funds.
But in another way it was awkward. They had already found out about Mrs. Morrice that, in conjunction with Sir George Clayton-Brookes, the supposed wealthy baronet, she was passing off as her nephew a young man who had no claim to the title. In course of time Morrice would have to be acquainted with that suspicious fact, and whatever degree of affection the banker felt for his wife, whether he loved her very much or hardly at all, it would be a terrible blow to him, either to his love or pride, or both.
Lane had a long talk with Sellars over the latest development of the Morrice mystery. The young man strongly maintained that it greatly strengthened the presumption of Croxton’s innocence, and although the detective, with his usual habit of caution, did not take quite such a decided view as his more impetuous lieutenant, he readily admitted that it told in his favour, that any man possessing the legal mind must concede as much.