“More than once.”
“And each time of course you destroyed the envelope, to make sure that if anyone had handled it we should none of us have a chance of finding it out,” said Derek, with what seemed to him the most penetrating irony.
But it was lost apparently on Mark Thewliss, who replied earnestly:
“No, Derek, no, I can’t allow you to do me that injustice. I know that men in the sixties must by the nature of things be very, very foolish and incompetent. But I never destroyed the envelope, though I am bound to say it was mere indolence which made me preserve it. I broke the seal each time. But I opened the envelope by slipping my round pencil-case under the flap and carefully rolling down to the point until the flap came away. It’s a perfectly simple process which doesn’t take a minute, and it saved me the bother of writing out a note about the contents on a new envelope. When I wanted to replace it safely—”
“Yes, I should like to hear how you did that,” Derek interposed meekly.
“I did it this way. I put the formula back into the envelope, smeared a lick of gum on the inside of the flap with the gum-brush” — he pointed to a camel’s hair brush which stood in a bottle of gum upon his table— “gummed the flap down and stamped a seal on it again somewhere else.”
“I should like to see that envelope,” Derek remarked grimly, and Mr. Wyatt’s left hand rose automatically to his right-hand breast-pocket.
“All in good time, Mr. Wyatt,” said Lord Thewliss. “Let us be business-like above all, and do things in their proper order.”
Derek gasped. There are forms of effrontery which would paralyse the most adventurous and strike even an orator dumb. In Derek’s opinion, Mark Thewliss had been guilty of one of them. Derek said not a word.
“Let us take the written formula first,” continued Mark. “Come over here, Derek!”
He laid the sheets flat upon the table with their edges even. Then he covered them with a sheet of blotting-paper. Derek crossed the room and stood behind his chair, looking down over his shoulder.
“Now watch!”
Thewliss moved the blotting-paper a little to the right, disclosing the left-hand edges of the five sheets of note-paper and a little of the edges at the top and bottom.
“You see? Just five sheets of the note-paper I use, one above the other, all aligned and as they came from the stationer’s shop. My handwriting, too, practically in a straight line from top to bottom and with each lateral line at practically the same distance from the edge of the paper. Is that agreed?”
“Yes,” said Derek.
“No doubt about it,” Mr. Joseph Wyatt added. But he had not moved from his chair in front of the fire. These details were long since familiar to him. But his right hand stroked and stroked his upper lip, so that while the left horn of his moustache pointed upwards, martial as a Kaiser’s, the other drooped like a Chinaman’s.
“Good! Now let us look at the other side,” said Mark, and he moved the blotting-paper from right to left until the right-hand edges of the sheets were exposed.
“Do you see, Derek?”
For a moment Derek didn’t see. For a moment he thought: “Mark began his writing a little farther from the left-hand edge of the paper and ended it a little nearer to the right-hand edge.”
Then he uttered an exclamation. Mr. Wisberry, of Somersetshire, would have cried “By gum!” Colonel Crayle merely stuttered out a feebleness not worth recording. He did see now. The edge of the five sheets slanted a little from the top, straightened again, and towards the bottom slanted a trifle once more, but this time slanted inwards.
“The sheets have not been cut evenly,” exclaimed Derek.
“And how can that be?” asked Thewliss. “They are cut by a machine, a quire at a time at the least. I haven’t one other sheet which has the fault these five have. No, these right-hand edges have been pared away.” And as Derek stooped down over his shoulder to examine them, Mark added: “And by a very sharp razor held in a very steady hand.”
“But where’s the sense of it?” cried Derek. “And how was it done if the papers were in the envelope and the seal not broken?”
“I’ll show you,” said Mark, and he turned to Joseph Wyatt. “Now will you produce the envelope, please?”
Wyatt took from his pocket a small parcel. It consisted of two oblong pieces of stiff cardboard held together by india-rubber bands, and between them a wrapper of white linen. He carried the packet to Thewliss’ table, and removing the oblongs of cardboard, laid the wrapper on the table. He opened it and disclosed the ivory white envelope matching in tint and in size the sheets of paper on which the formula had been written. The envelope was lying with its back upwards, the flap open and the edges of the flap rather thin where the pencil-case in loosening it had worn some of the paper away. There were three broken seals, each with Thewliss’ initials intertwined to make an anchor and a cable. Mr. Wyatt had been careful not to touch the envelope with his bare hands.
“I opened the envelope twice, you see,” Mark explained. “And each time I sealed it afresh.”
“Here or at Upper Theign?” Derek asked.
“Both times here. The last time a couple of days before Mr. Wyatt was called in. That last time I noticed that the edges of the notepaper had been shaved on the right-hand side. It was a mere chance that I noticed it. I was standing at this table looking down upon the sheets, rather lost in picturing in my mind the sequence of the processes, and my eyes must have spotted that tiny mutilation for some time before they telegraphed the news to my brain. I made sure first of all that the fault occurred only in these sheets, and in none of the paper bought at the same time. Then I turned my attention to the envelope, and I found by measuring it — I was careful to put on a pair of gloves first — that the envelope was a tiny bit longer between the point of the flap in the middle and the edge on the left-hand side than it was on the right-hand side. I made an experiment. The notepaper, as I told you, is made to fit exactly into the envelope. Well, a new sheet of paper wouldn’t just go in flat into that envelope. It would need a tiny fold before it could be inserted. And here’s the explanation.”
Thewliss put on a glove and lifted the envelope, holding it so that the left-hand edge was uppermost.
“You see! Here’s a normal envelope. There’s no join or cut. It’s just a fold of paper pressed. Now look at the right-hand edge.”
He turned the envelope round, and it was just discernible that there were two edges, not one, but joined so finely together and smeared so carefully with a white, thin, smooth paste which had been allowed to dry and soiled so neatly to shade it to the tint of the rest of the envelope that a man who had no reason to examine it could hardly have discovered the trick at all.
“What has happened is clear,” said Mark. “Someone with a very sharp razor has sliced off the edge of the envelope, extracted the sheets of paper without breaking the seal, and when his business with them was finished, replaced them in this ingenious way. Mr. Wyatt tells me that it was a method practised during the War.”
“During the earlier part of the War,” Mr. Wyatt corrected. “It was detected, as, indeed, it was bound to be, fairly soon, and other means had to be discovered.”
Mark Thewliss folded up the envelope again and returned it to Mr. Wyatt. Mark resumed his seat.
“Now we have got as far as this, Derek: there are no finger-prints on the sheets of paper except mine. Whoever extracted them did so probably with a pair of tweezers and put on gloves to handle them Mine, of course, are all over them. As they are on that envelope. But there are some others on that envelope, too.”
“Whose?” cried Derek, and he turned to Joseph Wyatt. “You have found out?”
Mr. Wyatt shook his head.
“No. By various ruses I have been able to get fair examples from the whole staff, but none of them fit.”
“Then we’re up against it,” said Derek. “At any moment we may find a patent taken out which will rob you of your own discovery.�
��
Mark reflected and shook his head.
“The thief wouldn’t dare to do that. It’ld be fraud.”
“You couldn’t prove it.”
“Well, we are not at the end of our efforts,” Mark resumed. “Although I only noticed that intelligent piece of roguery a fortnight ago, it doesn’t follow that it wasn’t there for me to notice it the first time I opened the envelope.”
Derek agreed.
“No, it doesn’t. I shouldn’t have noticed it myself. It’s known, of course, that you have invented something which is going to revolutionise the dye industry. It’s been known ever since July. Very likely someone was on the look-out. Very likely that envelope was taken from your safe and put back again the day after you brought it up to town.”
“Why not before, Derek?” Mark asked quietly.
The eyes of the two men met and interchanged a suspicion. There was the same thought in the mind of each. Mark a fortnight ago, Derek during these last ten minutes — each of them had instantly selected the most possible culprit. And both were rather aghast.
“At Upper Theign?” said Derek.
“The formula was there for a couple of months,” answered Mark.
Again both men were silent.
“There were heaps of opportunities, of course,” Derek exclaimed, and there was a world of reproach in the cry.
“Yes.”
Mark accepted the censure ruefully.
“Yes. You were quite right. I was a damned fool about that secret drawer. I am sorry. I trusted everybody.”
“I didn’t,” said Derek.
“That’s so. I remember.” Then Mark Thewliss glanced at Mr. Wyatt. “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t use names quite plainly. Wyatt’s our man.”
“Quite,” said Mr. Wyatt.
“Very well, then! Here it is!” Mark declared. “Hoyle came to see me twice at Upper Theign after I returned from my cruise. Once at the beginning of September and once towards the end of that month. On both those occasions the formula was in my library there. On either one of them he might have bribed one of my servants to get it for him. I hate to think that any of them would have consented. But, honestly, I can’t see any other possible explanation.”
“Hoyle would only have needed the formula for a few hours,” Derek Crayle suggested.
“That’s all.”
“And it would have been just as easy to replace it afterwards as to take it away before.”
“Quite as easy.”
“What are you going to do, then?” asked Crayle.
“I am going to ask Wyatt to come down to Upper Theign. He mustn’t follow us at once. But with the pressure of reorganisation it’ll be quite natural that in a few days’ time he should come, bringing some important papers for our consideration. Then he’ll stay and do what he has done here, get the fingerprints of the staff, discover if any of them has been spending money, and generally investigate the case. I think it’s pretty horrible, but it’s a necessity.”
“Yes, my lord, it’s a necessity,” said Mr. Wyatt, and he got up from his chair. “I shall come to Upper Theign, then, next week.”
They fixed upon Thursday as the day, and with a formal salute Mr. Wyatt marched out of the office.
Derek, however, was not satisfied that the discussion should end in this inconclusive way. He had a question still to put and he put it.
“But suppose the marks on that envelope in Wyatt’s pocket were made by Hoyle! What then?”
“There we are done to the wide,” said Mark with a grin and a lift of his eyebrows. And suddenly in the midst of all his doubts and fears and speculations, Derek Crayle was turned off to a quite different consideration. How Mark Thewliss had changed in his appearance, in his mind, too, since that distant day when Tony Westram had first fetched him down to Gissens! It was just that grin, and that lift of the eyebrows, which had swept away the glaze of habit from Derek’s eyes and enabled him to see acutely, poignantly. Compared with that good-humoured elephant trampling his way through the world’s jungle, Mark was now a different being. His face had taken on the spiritual look which comes from great sorrows quietly endured. His face had grown thinner, longer. Derek had the impression of a clear flame burning behind it, illuminating it. There was something familiar in his aspect, familiar but quite out of keeping with this office, with the war of High Holborn outside its walls. One had to remember those queer ambitions of Mark’s — the spirit of peace spread abroad through colour within the reach of everyone — before one could reconcile the man with the house in which he did his work. He looked more and more like — and Derek Crayle seized upon the image of which he was in search — more and more like some old engraving of Don Quixote.
“Yes, then we are done to the wide,” Mark repeated. “For we can’t go about to get Hoyle’s finger-prints,” and he brought his fist down with a thump upon his table and jumped up from his chair. “But I’d give a great deal if that were so and we could be sure of it. I would! You can’t imagine the relief it would be to me to know that not one of the people who have served me, whom I have tried to look after according to my lights, had become traitors and turned on me. Hoyle — yes, he’s against me. He doesn’t want new processes. He wants to go on in the old way. I can understand his going to any lengths — even to stealing my formula for half a dozen hours — if by that means he can beat me. But the people who are about me, my people — no! That makes me miserable. Yes, ridiculous as it may sound, actually miserable. I’ve got to know. Yes! It’s a bad business bringing Wyatt down to Upper Theign to spy upon my household. It’s humiliating. But I’ve got to know!”
He was speaking like a man greatly troubled, greatly ashamed. The discomfort which the possible treachery of his servants caused him seemed to have obliterated altogether from his mind the enormous loss in prestige and fortune which the appropriation of his discovery by someone else would certainly entail.
“And you don’t mind that?” Derek cried in amazement.
Mark’s grin expanded. It took in all his face. It became very human and rather pleasantly sly. He went to the door, opened it a trifle and shut it again. Then he returned, a mimic conspirator, on tiptoe:
“Hush!” he whispered, and he really looked like a sleuth in a melodrama. “I didn’t say a word of this before Wyatt, because I don’t want him to slack off and take it easy. I want to know the truth. But between you, me and the bedpost, Derek, I am not such a damned old fool as you take me for. There were six sheets of the blue paper which I brought out from the laboratory and showed you after dinner at Upper Theign.”
“Yes, six sheets. I remember.”
“Well, this note-paper is the same size and there are only five sheets.”
“Yes,” Derek agreed. “And the handwriting couldn’t well be smaller than it was on the blue paper.”
“So?”
“So the thief has lost or kept one of the sheets.”
“No,” said Mark. “Those five sheets of formula are absolutely useless not only to Hoyle, but to any chemist he might set to work on them. For when I wrote the process out in the library at Upper Theign behind the locked door, I omitted the important stages — the real me. They are written somewhere else, and where nobody except myself will ever find them.”
Derek Crayle sprang up and burst into laughter. He laughed with relief and admiration.
“Who was it said that you had always something up your sleeve? So there’s a hiatus in the formula. I might have guessed from the absence of real distress in you.”
“A hiatus!” Mark repeated. “There’s a trinity of hiatuses, and I am sorry for the man who tries to make a coherent process out of those sheets of notepaper — all the wet towels between the Minch and the Solent won’t appease his headache.”
And sitting down once more at his table, Mark Thewliss sealed up his ivory-white note-paper once more in an ivory-white envelope and locked it away in his safe.
XXIV. EXIT MR. WYATT
“MY DEAR,
I must have a clerk down here to-morrow,” Mark announced casually at luncheon on the Wednesday.
“Mark!” Olivia exclaimed in dismay. “Not to stay?”
“Just for a few days — that’s all. It’s really necessary.”
“But you are shooting on Saturday and Monday and you have a dance here on Monday evening.”
“I know, my dear. But you can put him up anywhere.”
Olivia raised her hands.
“Isn’t that like a man?” she cried to the world at large. “First of all he wants a ball, and a shooting party at the same time. But he must have a ball, and there’s an end of it. So his whole house is upset, except, of course, the rooms he uses. Then, when every arrangement is made and every bedroom labelled, he announces the arrival of a clerk, as if the house were one of those new expanding portmanteaux. We shall have to send the footman out to sleep in one of the cottages.”
“That’ll do splendidly,” said Mark. “You see, it’s all easy. Mr. Wyatt won’t give the least bit of trouble.”
And, indeed, Mr. Wyatt did not. On the contrary, he was the life and soul of the housekeeper’s room; he made himself welcome in the butler’s pantry, and in five minutes knew all the maids by their favourite names.
“Such a one!”
“A regular comic.”
“Fierce, I call him.”
Such were the admiring terms in which he was described. And Olivia herself was forced to admit that the household ran none the less smoothly because of this amiable soul with the red moustache who was always ready, when the office work was done, to lend a hand or crack a joke. He told the fortunes of the whole staff, making each one select a card and put the card in an envelope and hand it back to him. Then he put the card in its envelope against his heart next to the skin, and sat in a trance until that particular destiny was made clear to him. At another time he devised a most gigglesome game for the girls. He made them lay their hands flat on a sheet of paper and took the contours of their fingers with a pencil, saying, “Now if I catch any of you girls asleep, I shall know the size of the gloves I’ve got to buy you.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 607