act a card. As the other uttered the last
sentence, the pocket-book half slipped from his fingers, and several
other cards fluttered onto the table. Nepcote picked them up hastily,
but not before Colwyn's quick glance had taken in their contents. It
seemed to him something more than a coincidence that the name and
address displayed in neat black lettering on one of the cards should be
identical with one of the Hatton Garden addresses given him by Musard at
the moat-house the previous day.

CHAPTER XX

Colwyn spent a couple of hours that night reading the depositions he had
obtained from Merrington, and next morning he studied them afresh with a
concentration which the incessant hum of London traffic outside was
powerless to disturb. He was well aware that a report was a poor
substitute for original impressions, but in the typewritten document
before him lay the facts of the Heredith case so far as they were known.
It was a clear and colourless transcription of the narrative of the
witnesses, set down with a painstaking regard for the value of
departmental records, and chiefly valuable to Colwyn because it
contained the expert evidence which sometimes reveals, with the pitiless
accuracy of science, what human nature endeavours to hide. In the
balance of the scales of justice it is the ascertained truth which
weighs heavier than faith, reason, or revealed religion.

When he had finished his study of the depositions, he sat awhile
pondering over his own discoveries since he had been called into the
case by the husband of the dead woman. These discoveries, due apparently
to chance, invested the murder with a complexity which stimulated all
the penetrative and analytical powers of his fine mind, because they
brought with them the realization that he was face to face with one of
those rare crimes where the solution has to be unravelled from a tangle
of false circumstances, which, by their seeming plausibility, make the
task of reaching the truth one of peculiar difficulty. As Colwyn sat
motionless, with his chin resting on his hand, brooding over the sullen
secretive surface of this dark mystery, the feeling grew upon him that
the murder had been preconceived with the utmost cunning and caution,
and that the facts so far brought to light, including his own
discoveries, did not penetrate to the real design.

The one conviction in his mind at that moment was that the man he and
Merrington had interviewed on the prev