In front of the window was a small early Victorian escritoire. Upon it were several loose sheets of paper from a new writing-pad, an ink-stained envelope, and a couple of bills from a local chemist.
Seton opened two or three of the drawers and from one of them drew a folded wad of papers. “More notes!” he ejaculated, as he felt with his fingers the crisp familiar crackle.
There were three notes for fifty pounds each, obviously quite new. Clearly Graydon, in his hurry, had forgotten that they were there.
“It seems to me,” I said to Seton, “that Graydon must have been frightened by something and had to get away quickly.”
“Frightened, but of what?” Seton asked. “I saw him only half-an-hour before you came, and he seemed all right then.”
“Do you think my visit might have frightened him?” I asked.
“Well, sir, I don’t know. But why did he burn a fifty-pound note and how did he get out? That’s what puzzles me. I could have understood it if he had locked his door on the outside.”
“It beats me, anyhow,” I said, looking round the room. I noticed Graydon’s two suitcases stood open and some of his clothes were hanging in the wardrobe. Why, and above all how had he vanished so suddenly? But for the fact that he had actually called to see me—showing that he certainly was not afraid of meeting me—I might well have thought that he would be alarmed on recognizing my voice. But he had evidently not done so and must have thought I was someone else whom he urgently desired to avoid.
Those fifty-pound notes puzzled Lord Kenhythe’s ex-butler as completely as they did myself. Men do not usually go about burning fifty-pound notes. We knew that the young fellow who, in Switzerland, had posed as a hard-working electrical engineer welcoming the prospect of a “rise,” was on the contrary, a rich young man. But that he should burn bank-notes of such value or leave them discarded as he had done, was simply inexplicable on any hypothesis we could frame.
I was deeply chagrined. I had come within an ace of capturing the truant bridegroom and yet he had eluded me. Could it really, I asked myself, have been the same man? Again I carefully described to Seton the man I had known as Stanley Audley. He was emphatic in his assertion that it was Philip Graydon, the man who had been in that very room barely half-an-hour before. And as if to make assurance doubly sure, I found on one of his suitcases a label of the Kürhaus Hotel at Mürren and another put on at Mürren station, registering this case through to Victoria.