“One curious feature of the case is that Mrs. Audley, on receipt of the telegram, apparently burned it by applying a match, as the tinder was found in the fireplace of her bedroom. Another most curious feature is that her mother Mrs. Shaylor received on the following day a telegram handed in at Waterloo Station, with the words, ‘Am all right, do not worry. Back soon—Thelma.’
“Mrs. Audley and her mother are well-known in Bexhill, where they have lived for two years. The young lady married early in the New Year, but her husband being called abroad, she has remained at home during the summer. Any information concerning the missing lady will be gladly received by her mother, and can be given to any police station. Her description which was circulated yesterday is as follows:—”
Then followed a very minute description of Thelma, and of the clothes she wore when she left Bexhill.
Thelma had disappeared! Did that mysterious message emanate from her husband? Had she gone to join him in hiding?
Why had she been so careful to destroy that message which called her to London? If it were from Stanley, as I felt certain it was, then what more natural than that she would have told her mother and explained that she was rejoining him?
She was elated at receipt of the message! Why?
“This is even more amazing than the past events,” I declared to Hensman when, at last I found my tongue. “What do you think of it?”
“I don’t know what to think of it, old chap,” was my partner’s reply, “except that it makes the whole affair more mysterious than ever. It is quite clear she has disappeared of her own free will. Possibly she has some motive, as her husband undoubtedly had, for effacing himself, and I should think it quite possible she has gone to join him, wherever he is.”
I put in a telephone call to Mrs. Shaylor at once. Her strained voice clearly betrayed acute distress and anxiety. When I told her I had read the account of Thelma’s disappearance, she said:
“Oh! Mr. Yelverton, I am so terribly distressed. What do you think of it all? I suppose you know nothing of my girl’s whereabouts.”