to do occasional odd jobs about the
Foreign Office, such as engrossing documents and the like, by which he
earned from eighteenpence to half-a-crown an hour, according to the
style of penmanship required, and he was well known in the criminal
courts as an expert on handwriting in forgery cases.

He brought his work to Logotheti, who at once asked for the long entry
concerning the night of the explosion. The expert turned to it and
read it aloud. It was a statement of the circumstances to which Feist
was prepared to swear, and which have been summed up in a previous
chapter. Van Torp was not mentioned by name in the diary, but was
referred to as 'he'; the other entries in the journal, however, fully
proved that Van Torp was meant, even if Logotheti had felt any doubt
of it.

The expert informed him, however, that the entry was not the original
one, which had apparently been much shorter, and had been obliterated
in the ordinary way with a solution of chloride of lime. Here and
there very pale traces of the previous writing were faintly visible,
but there was not enough to give the sense of what was gone. This
proved that the ink had not been long dry when it had been removed,
as the expert explained. It was very hard to destroy old writing so
completely that neither heat nor chemicals would bring it out again.
Therefore Feist must have decided to change the entry soon after he
had made it, and probably on the next day. The expert had not found
any other page which had been similarly treated. The shabby little man
looked at Logotheti, and Logotheti looked at him, and both nodded; and
the Greek paid him generously for his work.

It was clear that Feist had meant to aid his own memory, and had
rather clumsily tampered with his diary in order to make it agree with
the evidence he intended to give, rather than meaning to produce the
notes in court. What Logotheti meant to find out was what the man
himself really knew and what he had first written down; that, and some
other things. In conversation, Logotheti had asked him to describe the
panic at the theatre, and Cordova's singing in the dark, but Feist's
answers had been anything but interesting.

'You can't remember much about that kind of thing,' he had said in his
drawling way, 'because there isn't much to remember. There was a crash
and the lights went out, and people fought their way to the doors in
the dark till there was a general squash; then Madame Cordova began