`How do you account for this?' The Assistant Commissioner nodded at the cloth rag lying before him on the table.

`I don't account for it at all, sir. It's simply unaccountable. It can't be explained by what I know.' The Chief Inspector made those admissions with the frankness of a man whose reputation is established as if on a rock. `At any rate not at this present moment. I think that the man who had most to do with it will turn out to be Michaelis.'

`You do?' `Yes, sir; because I can answer for all the others.'

`What about that other man supposed to have escaped from the park?'

`I should think he's far away by this time,' opined the Chief Inspector.

The Assistant Commissioner looked hard at him, and rose suddenly, as though having made up his mind to some course of action. As a matter of fact, he had that very moment succumbed to a fascinating temptation. The Chief Inspector heard himself dismissed with instructions to meet his superior early next morning for further consultation upon the case. He listened with an impenetrable face, and walked out of the room with measured steps.

Whatever might have been the plans of the Assistant Commissioner they had nothing to do with that desk work, which was the bane of his existence because of its confined nature and apparent lack of reality. It could not have had, or else the general air of alacrity that came upon the Assistant Commissioner would have been inexplicable. As soon as he was left alone he looked for his hat impulsively, and put it on his head. Having done that, he sat down again to reconsider the whole matter. But as his mind was already made up, this did not take long. And before Chief Inspector Heat had gone very far on the way home, he also left the building.


  By PanEris using Melati.

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