“ ‘Have you lived there at all since then?’
“ ‘No. I let the place at once. And Wickley let his too. Neither of us have lived in Devorset since.’
“ ‘Did you by any chance lose an overcoat about that time?’
“Spencer stared at me very hard.
“ ‘Lose an overcoat?’ he repeated. ‘No — or rather yes, now I come to think of it. I used to have rather a nice Burberry, which must have gone missing just about that time. I remember wondering what had become of it, though such trifles didn’t worry me much then.’
“ ‘And a felt hat?’
“He stared and then thought again.
“ ‘Possibly; but I had several felt hats, and one might have gone astray without my noticing it, especially in the state of mind I was in. Why?’
“ ‘Just a vague idea I had. It was getting towards dusk, you say, when you saw the body in the wood?’
“ ‘I don’t think I said so, but it was.’
“ ‘Well, I’ll think over the whole story,’ I told him, and Mr. Spencer shook hands and walked off.”
III: The Lost Engineer
“Now,” said Carrington, “we come to the one really remarkable coincidence. There was present at that Devorset dinner a man with an unsolved riddle lying on a dusty shelf at the back of his memory, and he wasn’t a Devorset man either, but a guest like myself. He was a fellow Tuke, a London solicitor; he knew the man who was acting as my own host that night, and so I made his acquaintance at the dinner and had quite a yarn with him. Furthermore, Tuke’s host knew Spencer and introduced Tuke to him. It was Tuke’s two meetings with Spencer and myself that brought him to my office a couple of days later, and one can trace cause and effect just as in the cases of Wickley’s and of Spencer’s visits to me. But it was an extraordinary chance that Tuke, with that riddle on the dusty shelf, should have happened to be at the Devorset dinner that night.
“He was a nice, gentlemanly, solid-looking man was Tuke, and didn’t suggest anything very exciting when he sat down and told me he had come to see me professionally. But when he said that it was the meeting with Spencer which had reminded him of an unsolved, half-forgotten mystery, I assure you I pricked up my ears.
“ ‘About nine years ago,’ he began, ‘a poor girl came to me with a very queer story, and a very sad story too it was. She was a Mrs. Borham, or thought she was — a pretty slender young thing of barely twenty-one, full of pluck, but with the marks of pain and worry stamped too clearly on her face for any one with any observation to miss. And this was the story she told me.
“ ‘She was the daughter of an impecunious half-pay Naval Officer and was staying with some relatives at Dover when she met Reginald Borham. He was a man of twenty-five or twenty-six, a mechanical engineer by profession, remarkably good-looking, with the manners and address of a gentleman, and a most romantic tale of high-born relations who had disowned him owing to his refusal to marry an heiress whom he did not love. It was a cock-and-bull story if ever there was one, but as he professed to having fallen in love with this poor girl, and as she certainly fell in love with him, she swallowed it whole, and to make a long story short, married him.
“ ‘Reading between the lines of her story, and interpreting it by what I was able to pick up about the man, he seems to have married her simply because she wouldn’t succumb to his advances otherwise. She was unusually attractive, and he was evidently carried away by her for the moment very completely, for it wasn’t his usual procedure with women by any means. As a rule he specialised in married ladies, and lived either on their bounty or on blackmail. In fact he was the worst type of animal that goes about on two legs, a creature vicious to the core, without a rag of honour to cover him or an ounce of compunction in his heart. Such animals ought to be shot at sight!
“ ‘He actually had an engineer’s training, plenty of brains, and considerable aptitude for mechanical work, and at the moment was connected with some Admiralty job at Dover, but within three months of his marriage he deserted his work and his wife and vanished into space. I traced another woman in connection with his flight, but she lost sight of him too, and as his employers strongly suspected his honesty, they didn’t make any effort to trace him. In fact every man he has been connected with has been thankful to see the last of him, and every woman has bitterly regretted she ever met him.
“ ‘The poor young wife came up to London and determined to make her own living. She had no money, her people had strongly disapproved of the marriage, and things weren’t pleasant at home. Having no business training of any kind and being passionately fond of children, she took on the job of nursemaid in the house of some people she knew, and there she was in a dark-blue uniform and bonnet, wheeling a perambulator about the Park and the streets of Bayswater when I made her acquaintance.
“ ‘Well, now I’m coming to the part where I want your detective mind to follow me very closely, Mr. Carrington. Just ask any questions you like if things don’t seem clear. It was about a year after her marriage, and she had been nearly nine months on this job, when she was wheeling her pram one day along a quiet street in the neighbourhood of the Edgware Road. Suddenly on the opposite pavement she spied her husband walking rather quickly in the opposite direction, with a lady at his side! They never glanced across the street, and of course it would never have entered the blackguard’s head to suspect that a nursemaid wheeling a pram could be his wife; but she, on the other hand, studied them carefully and described them to me exactly.
“ ‘Borham himself was got up immaculately as the young man about town — silk hat fashionably tilted backwards, morning coat, black and white striped trousers, patent boots with yellow tops, and all the rest of it! The lady had extremely golden hair, a face which even her rival admitted was remarkably pretty, with long eyelashes and very red lips, decidedly of the actress type.
“ ‘Mrs. Borham stopped short on the opposite pavement and bent over her charge as a nurse might naturally do, but her eyes were following the couple across the way, and she was prepared to wheel round and follow them when they were safely past. However, they didn’t go very much farther. There was a quiet hotel in this street, one of that type which probably does a pretty mixed sort of business, but with a very large smart-looking motor-car standing in front of it. She was struck at once, she said, with the contrast between the car and the hotel. Borham and the lady glanced over their shoulders as if to see that the coast was clear.
Then they turned into the hotel. “ ‘Imagine the poor girl’s feelings as she watched this performance! Fortunately she had heaps of pluck and resource and she determined to see the affair through, so she crossed the street and paced backwards and forwards for about half an hour, taking care never to come near enough to the hotel to be seen from the windows. Unfortunately she was just about at the farther end of her beat when the lady reappeared, and she didn’t even see her actually come out of the hotel. In fact, when Mrs. Borham looked round, the lady was on the pavement just about to get into the car that was standing by the curb, and the only person with her was the chauffeur, who was just at her back. He opened the door of the car, she got in, and off they went.’
“ ‘And Borham himself?’ I asked.
“ ‘Never came out at all. His wife waited and waited in that street, but there was not a sign of him.’
“ ‘Could he have come out before the lady, while his wife happened to be walking away from the hotel?’
“ ‘She declared it was quite impossible, for she kept constantly glancing over her shoulder. No; for some reason or other he must have remained in the hotel till after his wife went away. Conceivably he had spotted her.’