ious afternoon had some connection
with the mystery, and that an investigation of Nepcote's actions was the
first step towards the solution of the murder. Colwyn based that belief
on the apparently detached facts of the revolver, the patch of khaki he
had found in the woods near the moat-house, and the accident which
disclosed that Nepcote was carrying the address of a Hatton Garden
jeweller in his pocket-book. These things, taken apart, had perhaps but
slight significance, but, considered as links in a chain of events which
started in Philip Heredith's statement that he had first met his wife at
a friend's house where Nepcote was also a guest, and finishing with the
knowledge that Nepcote had not returned to France on the night of the
murder, they assumed a significance which at least warranted the closest
investigation.

Colwyn was not affected by the fact that Superintendent Merrington
looked at the case from an entirely different point of view. He did not
want the help of Scotland Yard in solving the crime. He had too much
contempt for the official mind in any capacity to think that assistance
from such a source could be of value to him. He always preferred to work
alone and unaided. It was the Anglo-Saxon instinct of fair play which
had prompted him to tell Merrington about the missing necklace, so that
there might be no unfair advantage between them. Merrington had received
the information with the imperviable dogmatism of the official mind,
strong in the belief in its own infallibility, resentful of advice or
suggestion as an attempt to weaken its dignity. It seemed to Colwyn that
not only had Merrington's ruffled dignity led his judgment astray in an
attempt to fit the discovery of the missing necklace into his own theory
of the case, but it had caused him to commit a grave mistake in putting
Nepcote on his guard at a moment when the utmost circumspection of
investigation was necessary.

To Colwyn, at all events, the discovery of the missing necklace was of
the utmost importance because it substituted another motive for the
murder, and a motive which carried with it the additional complication
that the thief had some motive in trying to keep its disappearance
secret as long as possible by locking the jewel-case after the jewels
had been abstracted. If Hazel Rath had not stolen the necklace, the
whole of the facts took on new values. It was quite true that the
mystery of Hazel Rath's actions on the night of the