“Not much of a clue,” growled Beau. “Just a plain, ordinary, garden variety of automatic pencil. He might just as well have dropped nothing.”
“Well, now, I don’t, know,” murmured Mr. Queen. “Doesn’t anything about this pencil strike you as familiar?”
Beau stared at it. “Not guilty.”
“You’ve never seen one like it before?”
“I’ve seen thousands like it before,” retorted Beau. “That’s just the trouble.”
“No, no, not a pencil. Don’t you recall another writing implement of hard black rubber composition, with a gold clip?”
“Cole’s fountain-pen?” Beau laughed shortly. “That’s quite a deduction. Are you trying to tell me that, just because Cole’s pen was hard black rubber stuff and had a gold clip, this pencil was part of Cole’s pen-and-pencil set?”
“I’m trying to tell you exactly that,” said Mr. Queen, “but not for the reason you give, although the similarity of construction and appearance are striking. Where are your eyes?”
He held the pencil up. Beau looked it over without touching it — from its leaded point, where Ellery was gripping it, up its body to the eraser-cap.
And just below the cap he saw something that made him exclaim. The hard rubber was considerably scratched and dented in a sort of arced pattern; some of the nicks were deep.
“Those nicks look like the ones in Cole’s pen... But that’s impossible!”
“Disregarding philosophical considerations,” said Mr. Queen with a certain excitement, “I think we may prove or disprove the theory by completely material means.”
He laid the pencil carefully down on the rug between them and produced his wallet. From an inner pocket of the wallet he extracted a series of tiny squares of film.
“The microphotographs of the nicks in Cole’s pen I asked you to take,” he explained.
“But I thought they were in the office.”
“Too valuable to be left lying about. I’ve been carrying them in my wallet ever since.” Mr. Queen compared the photographs with the pencil on the rug. Then he handed the films to Beau.
When Beau looked up there was an expression of incredulity in his eyes. “The same!”
“Yes, the marks on this pencil and the marks on Cole’s pen were created by the same agency. Consequently this pencil is a companion of Cole’s pen.”
“Cole’s pencil,” mumbled Beau. “Cole’s!”
“Without a doubt.”
Beau got to his feet. Mr. Queen squatted on his hams Buddha-like, musing over the photographs and the pencil.
“But it can’t be,” Beau said.
“There’s the evidence.”
“But — Cole’s been dead for nearly three months! Unless the pencil’s been lying here—”
“I explained before,” replied Mr. Queen with a trace of impatience, “why that’s probably not so. But if you insist on confirmation, run your hand over the rug and patch of flooring under the radiator and between the radiator and wall. You’ll find it completely free of dust. Indicating that the rug and floor have been cleaned very recently. No, this pencil was dropped tonight by the person who shot Margo Cole.”
“By Cole, I suppose?” Beau laughed shortly. “You’ll be asking me to believe in the boogey man next!”
“There are other possibilities,” murmured Mr. Queen. “But if you insist on being argumentative — why not by Cole?”
“What?” cried Beau.
“Well, why not?” Mr. Queen stared at his partner impassively. “What proof have we that Cole is dead?”
Beau looked groggy. “It’s beyond me. Cole not dead?”
“I’m not asserting a fact, I’m posing a question. We have only one person’s word for the alleged fact that Cole died — Edmund De Carlos’s. Captain Angus, the crew — every one who could possibly substantiate De Carlos’s story is gone. No body was produced — ‘buried at sea,’ wasn’t the report?”
“But...”
“Is the reason Cole hired us three months ago beginning to emerge? Has Cole been hanging around all this time under the cloak of the perfect disguise — death and burial?”
“It’s true,” muttered Beau, “that we wouldn’t know him even if he were alive — no, that’s not true. We did see him. In our office. So that doesn’t wash. Then that would mean he’s hiding out somewhere. But why?”
“I can think of at least two reasons,” replied Mr. Queen, “either of which is perfectly sensible and makes the theory very attractive — very.”
“You mean you think Cole’s behind the whole business — the attacks on Kerrie, the murder of Margo? Then why did he hire us in the first place? Or, if he’s alive, where do the heirs fit in? Heirs can’t inherit from a living man; if they do, if that’s what he planned...” Beau shouted: “I’m going nuts!”
Mr. Queen said nothing.
“Wait! We’re both crazy. Of course there’s the simplest explanation! Cole is dead. This is his pencil, all right, but somebody else got hold of it and has been using it. Whoever that was is our man. Phew! For a few minutes there you had me going.”
Mr. Queen still said nothing. He wrapped the pencil in his breast-pocket handkerchief and tucked it away. Then he rose.
“Here! What are you doing?” demanded Beau. “Hand over that pencil.”
“I think not,” said Mr. Queen, buttoning his coat.
“But it’s our only evidence that some one was in this room. We’ve got to give it to your old man, Ellery.”
“We shan’t even tell him about it yet.”
“But — for the love of Pete, why not?”
“The trail’s a little too involved for the regular police mind,” said Mr. Queen egotistically. “Acute as dad is. And we’re not destroying evidence — we’re merely suppressing it temporarily. By itself it means little; we’ve got to make it mean more. And handing it over to the police means inevitably publication of its discovery. We can’t afford to warn off our man before all the cards are in our hands.”
“But — Kerrie!” stormed Beau. “Where’s the poor kid come in? At least that pencil establishes that some one was in this room tonight. To that extent it bolsters her story of the shots having come from this window.”
Mr. Queen looked grave. “If I really thought the pencil would clear her, Beau, I’d tell dad myself. But it won’t, and you know it won’t. She’s in a tight spot; the circumstances under which she was found are so damning by contrast with the tenuous reasoning from the pencil that she’s bound to be held. Let her tell her story by all means, truthfully; exactly as it happened. Dad will examine this room and find” — he grinned— “a burnt match-stick and the ashes and butt of my cigaret. That’s even better evidence than the pencil that the room was occupied tonight — the maid would certainly have removed those if they’d been present when she cleaned up.”
“You mean we don’t even tell him we’ve been in here?”
“He’ll probably guess it,” said Mr. Queen comfortably. “And then there’s the light in here. But he can’t prove it’s my butt if we don’t talk, can he?”
Beau stared at him. “You’d doublecross yourself, I swear, if you thought some good would come of it!”
“Dad and I have been on opposite sides of the fence before,” said Mr. Queen in a thoughtful way, “although I will admit this business tonight is in the nature of a dirty trick.”
“My God! He’s actually got a conscience!”
“So long, Beau. Let me know in the morning exactly what happened.”
XIV. Inspector Queen Inspects
When Beau stepped past the detectives on guard in 1724 he found Kerrie gone from the sitting room and the door to the bedroom shut.