Next morning Chief Inspector Pointer found a letter waiting for him at the Yard which he opened before any of the other correspondence in his basket. It was in Gilmour’s rather sprawling writing and ran:
“Dear Chief Inspector Pointer,
“I am sorry if my going away bothers your inquiry in any way, and I know that, strictly speaking, I should not have tried to dodge your man, but a clue has come my way, or rather it has been in front of me all the time, but I have only just recognized it as what it is. I am on the right road, I know, but should I find things getting too hot for me, I may be glad of your assistance. In which case I will manage to get a message through to you. I only hope that you will not take my disappearance as a sign of guilt, but I must risk that.
“Faithfully yours,
“Lawrence Gilmour.”
Pointer docketed the letter and reached for another. He knew already how Gilmour had got away, and a certain watcher was even now sadly making for a provincial town where detection might be simpler and demand less keen wits. For the moment, there was no possibility of laying hands on Gilmour, and Pointer therefore dismissed him from his mind. He had many things to see to this morning. There was his—to him—engrossing hunt for a missing person who should fulfill the few stipulations that he had laid down. Town seemed to be half-empty, judging by the accounts that had already come in of people who were no longer seen in their accustomed places. Pointer flung most of them into the discard as soon as he glanced at them, but there were a few which he reserved for inquiries.
As for the party at The Tall House, it had broken up with a vengeance yesterday. Mrs. Pratt and Winnie were in a Dover Street hotel. Later on it was understood that the mother had accepted an invitation for both of them oft Haliburton’s yacht. Haliburton himself had left his usual club and home addresses with the police, but at this time of the year he generally spent a fortnight anonymously with one of his boys’ camps at the seaside, acting, it was said, merely as a friendly scoutmaster, and hiding the fact of his being the provider of the camp from all but a few of the men helping him.
Mrs. Appleton was leaving as soon as possible for Cape Town, where she had friends. Appleton would not be able to go with her, he had explained, but as he too needed a change, he was going over to Paris almost at once.
Tark had told the police that he was off for his home in Beausoleil and was likewise leaving today. Miss Longstaff had left The Tall House last night, giving an address near Hammersmith Broadway, where she had taken a room. She had no intention of leaving England.
Frederick Ingram had left last night by ‘plane for Paris, and already Pointer knew that he had gone on at daybreak to Marseilles. The south of France is not often chosen in midsummer, especially by as poor a sailor as Pointer had learned that Frederick Ingram was, unless there is some strong attraction. In his case, since he still seemed devoted to Winnie Pratt, Pointer fancied that it was the green of the tables rather than of the waves that drew him. The chief inspector would have to see for himself if this were so or not, and also why Tark seemed to have such a sudden attack of home sickness just now. He had a word with the assistant commissioner before leaving.
“You think the case can breathe by itself, that you won’t have to stay to apply artificial respiration?” Pelham asked him.
Pointer said that there was no reason why he should not absent himself for a short time, especially as all the wheels would turn just as well without him as with him.
The other shook his head. “Too modest, Pointer. Fatal flaw in an otherwise sensible man. However, perhaps you’ll give me just a notion of what your merry men will be at?”
“Overcoming an osmotic reluctance to seeping through the cilia, sir,” Pointer said gravely. One of the superintendents came in at that moment, and stared at him with a dropped jaw. Pelham burst out laughing, and gave Pointer his blessing. “Any special time limit?” he asked.
“Well, sir, there’s something that may help us coming along shortly. And that’s quarter day.”
“Next week,” murmured the superintendent mechanically.
“Just so, sir. Hitherto for some five years past Mr. Ingram had a thousand pounds to dispose of just after that date. It’s possible some or all of it may come in to his estate...I’m rather counting on that...until then we must just seep, as I said,” and he was off.
He traveled as plain Mr. Pointer, and went directly to Cannes. The air service has tremendously shortened that weary journey to Marseilles. In his case he flew directly to the little town itself lying in a half-circle around its Croisette. He had often been there before. Pointer was no lover of the Riviera. Many other parts of France have wonderful things to show, but Cannes, to him, holds all the vice of Monte Carlo, all its rapacity, its misery, its pitilessness, only with a little more gilding. He dined at the Casino where the prices, at our rate of exchange, made him decide to do a little slimming. Frederick Ingram was there at a table well in front of Pointer, who sat in a corner near the door.
Frederick did not order a long meal. He looked like a man in a sort of pleasant dream, but a dream which entailed a lot of looking at a little black notebook that he carried in an inner pocket. After his dinner, he made for the gaming rooms, greatly to Pointer’s interest, for baccarat had been the young man’s passion in former days. But he passed that great chamber, passed the Boule room and finally took a seat at a table at the end of the Roulette room. Pointer had learned from a word with the head of the Casino detectives that Frederick had played at that table and in that room last night, winning all the time, but playing for modest stakes, so that he came away with about ten thousand francs.
“It’s not any system we have come up against before,” the head detective added, “but it must have been one from the fact that in the beginning he noted every stake in a little pocketbook. As he did nothing but win he stopped his entries but he consulted it regularly each time before staking.”
Pointer was exceedingly interested. There are several cast-iron systems of playing roulette, by which, in the long run, the player is bound to win. The trouble is that the run may be so very long that a fortune has to be spent to win a few francs. Had Fred Ingram got hold of a shorter, better one than any yet known? If so, where had he found it? Pointer thought of that dusty roulette wheel in a cupboard of Charles Ingram’s flat. A system was just the sort of thing that a genius at figures might have devised. And apparently it had come into Fred Ingram’s hands only after his brother’s death.
Pointer watched Fred seat himself with a certain air of assurance. He staked, after consulting his little book with the same air, and took his winnings with a smile that said that all this was a matter of course. He won again and yet again, but he always staked low. There was a flush on his cheeks and a light in his eyes as he did so. The third time he lost, and then he lost in an unbroken sequence for the next couple of hours. Yet in all, Pointer calculated that he was only some thousand francs down when he jumped up, his face which had first seemed only a little troubled was now that of a man half beside himself with amazement. He pushed back his chair onto the toes of another waiting gambler, and hurried into the gardens, looking as though he had received the shock of his life. He fairly ran to a seat outside in the gardens under a lamp, and spread his pocketbook open beside him, before drawing out with great difficulty something from an inner pocket. It was a sheet of writing paper, which he laid down and began to compare with his notes, figure by figure.
Pointer came up behind him on the grass, fortunately the light fell so that he cast no shadow, and waiting until Fred had buried his nose in his pocketbook again, reached over, and snatched up the paper. It was covered with what, to his sharp sight, were Ingram’s figures, those neat small figures of the dead mathematician’s, which looked as though drawn with tiny wires.
Frederick whirled about with a shout, making a grab at his property. But Pointer held it high in the air.
“I’ll have you broken for this!” Frederick was very white about the gills. “You’ve no more right to take that, than any footpad has. Hand it back at once!”
“I want first to know that it is yours,” was the reply. “You see, Mr. Frederick Ingram, we are not satisfied that your brother’s death was not for the sake of something that he owned. Say, a system of play. It might be considered by some people as much more to be coveted than jewels or securities. This sheet of paper was in your brother’s possession at the time of his death. How did it come into your hands?”
Pointer spoke with such an air of certainty that no one, not even the assistant commissioner, let alone rattled Frederick Ingram, would have known that he was guessing.
Frederick Ingram turned blue.
“You mean that you think Gilmour shot him intentionally?” he asked, his eyes round and staring.
“That’s just what you’ve maintained all along, isn’t it?” Pointer asked.
“But I didn’t really believe it!” burst out Fred, his face still shiny and streaked with red from his play in the hot rooms. “I didn’t really think it!” he repeated.
Pointer, looking at him, thought that excitement had broken down the barriers of self-control as far as speech was concerned. It can act as insidiously as scopolamin on some natures.
“It’s quite possible that someone intentionally changed a loaded for a blank cartridge in his little automatic,” Pointer said slowly, “someone who wanted something that Ingram refused to hand him over.”
Frederick’s eyes only looked excited, he said nothing.
“Come,” Pointer went on pleasantly, “leaving that on one side, suppose you tell me exactly how this paper came into your possession. And when.”
“I’ve lots of my brother’s papers, of course—and books. This was among some he handed to me a few days ago.”
“You place yourself in a dangerous position,” Pointer went on very seriously, “unless you can establish the fact that it was found by someone else—or that someone else was present when you found it.”
Frederick seemed to think that very likely.
“As a matter of fact, Miss Pratt and I were looking through Charles’ books at my flat the afternoon of the day when he was shot. I knew that such a paper existed She didn’t. She dropped in to find something—anything—that would prove that those cartridges of Gilmour’s were all blanks. The receipt from his gunsmith was really in her mind, I think. But from the first book that she picked up, by the merest chance, out fluttered this. She didn’t know what it was, of course, and I picked it up and put it back until she had gone, but knew that my brother had devised what he believed to be a unique system of winning at roulette. He was certain that it was so perfect that any casino would purchase it, if tried out at their tables.” Here Fred Ingram gave a bitter laugh. “I thought he couldn’t be mistaken, but, my hat!” Again he gave a laugh that was half a groan. “Fortunately, I tried it quietly, or I should be in queer street. It’s an absolute wash-out and I thought I must have made some mistake in copying it out, but not a bit of it! Besides, I knew I hadn’t.”
Pointer was looking at the paper which he had just taken from him. At the top was written: System for Winning at Roulette. The letters were Ingram’s, yet...the figures were his, and yet...
Pointer himself could copy any writing with a degree of mechanical accuracy, such as had been his work before. But there is much more than that in a good forgery. Quite apart from the silly notion that forgery is always done slowly, for only a half-wit copies swift writing without at least equal speed, there is something that cannot be put down on paper and yet which must be imitated. A something much more subtle than accuracy of angle or length of stroke. The more Pointer looked at the sheet before him, looked at it as a whole, not into its details, the less did it convey the peculiarly firm, settled, orderly, almost sedate mind that the other writing of the dead man had done. He thought it highly probable that what he held in his hand was a forgery.
Another incidental confirmation was the fact that, as far as he had yet seen, Ingram always wrote with an ordinary pen, this was a similar nib to his, but had been written with a fountain-pen. One thing was certain, this system, as he had seen, was calculated to ruin anyone who staked high on it. Had Ingram intended this? Had he reason to suspect that his life was in danger?...Could this system be linked with those quarterly thousand pound increases in his capital? Had he sold the original system for a quarterly pension? This was a new possibility. But there was a more immediate one. Was Frederick Ingram by playing it, trying to place a shield between himself and any suspicion? Say he had the real thing, and was only pretending that he had been taken in by a worthless dud? Who better than he would know Ingram’s writing? Who could easier place a paper where he wanted it found. Was it likely that Ingram the careful would have left such a paper lying in a book?
He questioned Frederick cautiously on this last doubt. Frederick could not but acknowledge the singularity of the place where the so-called system had been found. But he suggested that, as it had been devised some years ago, about five, he thought, Ingram might have mislaid it. The book in question was one of Arabic Equations which Ingram rarely opened. That, too, might explain, Frederick went on to say, why his half-brother had quite brusquely refused to discuss letting him have the system of which he had himself once, spoken as infallible.
There still remained the possibility that Frederick, having openly played this travesty, would be freer, he might think, to produce what he might claim was his own improvement or revision of it, and play the real system devised by that brilliant mathematician, Charles Ingram. He had staked very small sums last night and tonight. He had lost only a matter of some fourteen pounds. Pointer broached that question now. Frederick looked awkward.
“It’s odd. I’m generally a bit of a plunger. I meant to go all out on this. But—somehow—at the last moment, when I drew that pocketbook out and laid it beside me, I found myself only willing to try it for small stakes. I can’t account for it myself.” He looked genuinely puzzled.
Pointer eyed him closely with his seemingly indifferent glance. Fred Ingram was a good actor, if he was not honest. But then, if false, all this would have been carefully prepared, and mentally rehearsed many times.
“You aren’t going to try the system again?” he asked.
Frederick said that he was returning to England at once. Having proved his half-brother’s great idea to be a failure, he intended to forget all about it. “After a flutter at baccarat,” he added with a smile. “I brought a hundred with me with which to break the bank, a lot of it still remains, thanks to my luck last night, which I thought was the system. And thanks to that unexpected wind of caution that suddenly blew on me when I sat down at the tables.”
The baccarat room at Cannes is a noble hall. Vaulted ceilings, beneath which crystal chandeliers glitter like hanging baskets of diamonds, luxurious chairs for those who wish to sit on a central dais and watch the scene, while sipping cocktails or black coffee.
Two long rows of baize-covered tables at some of which people were standing three deep already. This is the Court of Midas. There was silence in the big hall. Only the clack of chips and the sound of the croupier’s flat wooden rake as he called his “Banco. Mesdames, messieurs, marquez vos jeux. Rien ne va plus.” Frederick passed on to the next room, where the stakes were still higher. Here he bought some brown thousand-franc chips, others were playing with oblong blue chips worth ten times his, and many with white ovals which represented a hundred times his stakes. It was late. The hour of the real gamblers. The air of the room was tense in here. Within a few minutes it was tenser still. And when an hour was over Frederick Ingram was the richer by the equivalent of ten million francs, roughly eighty thousand pounds.
Pointer meanwhile had had another word with the chief of the Casino detectives. Could a man have a system at baccarat or chemin de fer? Impossible, the chief thought, as did Pointer. But they were puzzled. It is held not to be possible for a man to win at baccarat except by sheer luck, any more than he could cheat at that nimble gamble which may run to thousands of pounds on the draw of the all-important third card. The doubts of the two were soon answered. When another hour had passed Frederick was the poorer by some seventy-nine thousand eight hundred pounds. Finally he made way for another player, his face all streaked with the curious red that gambling brings out on a pale face. His voice shook a little as he drew a deep breath outside. “Well, I’m still my journey out and back in hand, and the hundred pounds with which I started.” He turned in at his hotel. Pointer who was staying there too, asked him to his room. He did not think the paper a shield any longer. After his first run of luck at baccarat, Frederick would only have had to return to the roulette table and try the real system, if he had it, claiming that his luck was still holding. But he had left the Casino with no effort to get back again the ephemeral fortune which had been his.
Pointer left his own door unlocked, making an excuse to pop out and speak to Frederick as the latter was leaving, so as to make him aware of this, just as he had placed the paper taken from him on the mantel while he was still in the room.
No attempt was made on room, or paper, during what remained of the night. If Frederick really left Cannes in the morning, Pointer felt that he would have gone far to substantiate his story. Frederick did, repeating that, after all, he had had a change of air, and would be back home not a penny the worse, and with the charming memory of having been worth eighty thousand pounds for over half an hour.
Pointer stepped up into his compartment, which he had to himself. There was still five full minutes before the train was timed to start.
“Look here, Mr. Ingram, did you ever speak of your brother’s system to anyone?”
Frederick seemed to think back.
“I may have,” he said, looking up. “It’s the sort of thing one’s apt to mention.”
“I very much want the names of anyone who knew of it, as well as you.”
“Well, of course my sister and her husband know. Charles spoke about it once, before the three of us. Then, well, I think I once told Mrs. Pratt about it, not that she was interested...I think Miss Long-staff knew, too, whether from me or not, I can’t say. Haliburton? No, he didn’t know. Gilmour? I fancy he must have known, but I couldn’t say for certain. You see, Charles never referred to it after the one week during which he worked it out.”
Pointer saw him off, went back to his own room, and took out the paper again. He had brought with him several letters of Ingram’s to Moy. He compared them all. Yes, he felt sure—though experts could be asked to pronounce on it if it should ever be necessary—that this paper was a forgery. It was empty of all significance, and Ingram’s writing had plenty of personality.
Who could have forged the paper, if it was a forgery, as he assumed it to be? Someone who wanted to stop Frederick’s search? Therefore someone who knew both of that hunt’s purpose and of the existence of such a paper among Ingram’s effects? Someone had searched the bureau before Pointer first saw it. Mrs. Appleton had hunted for what might well have been just such a half-sheet as this...Appleton had been with Ingram on the night that he died...
One thing the chief inspector expected, and that was, that if someone had intentionally forged a system, the original was in his possession, for there had been no interest of late in Ingram’s papers. Gilmour had never shown any. Nor had Haliburton. Nor had Moy, except for those papers with which, as a solicitor, he was expected to deal. Moreover, if the room had been searched after the murder, and the body was discovered, then Moy, Haliburton and Gilmour could all give each other alibis.
He could make a guess as to where that system was now. Before the day was over, he knew that his guess was being strengthened.