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Harborough had again been brought up before the Highmarket magistrates, had stubbornly refused to give any definite information about his exact doings on the night of Kitely's murder, and had been duly committed for trial on the capital charge. On the same day the coroner, after holding an inquest extending over two sittings, had similarly committed him.
And as he sat there, staring at the red embers of the office fire, he remembered that there were no two men in the whole town who were more trusted and respected than he and his partner his partner in success ... and in crime. But that was not all. Both men had married within a few years of their coming to Highmarket.
Carfax here pulled out a memorandum book from his pocket, and having fitted on his spectacles glanced at a page or two within it. "Now," he presently continued, "Wraythwaite being naturally deeply interested in the Kitely case, he procured the local newspapers Norcaster and Highmarket papers, you know so that he could read all about it.
"My reason," answered Cotherstone, with a grim smile, "is to show Highmarket folk that they aren't so clever as they think. For the probability is that Kitely was killed by that woman, or her nephew, or both." "I'm going up there with a couple of my best men, any way," said the superintendent. "There's no time to lose if they're clearing out tomorrow." "I'll come with you," said Cotherstone.
They separated, disappeared, met again in the far North, in a sparsely-populated, lonely country of hill and dale, led there by an advertisement which they had seen in a local newspaper, met with by sheer chance in a Liverpool hotel. There was an old-established business to sell as a going concern, in the dale town of Highmarket: the two ex-convicts bought it.
"I don't know what we should have done if it hadn't been for you!" said Avice. "But we shan't forget. My father is a strange man, Mr. Brereton, but he's not the sort of man he's believed to be by these Highmarket people and he's grateful to you as you'll see." "But I must do something to merit his gratitude first, you know," replied Brereton. "Come! I've done next to nothing as yet.
But Cotherstone had no intention of going to his office. He left his house with a fixed determination. He would know once and for all what Highmarket felt towards and about him. He was not the man to live under suspicion and averted looks, and if he was to be treated as a suspect and a pariah he would know at once.
The whole population will be turned into amateur detectives. Now let's draft the exact wording, and then we'll see the printer." Next day the bill-poster placarded Highmarket with the reward bills, and distributed them broadcast in shops and offices, and one of the first persons to lay hands on one was Mallalieu & Cotherstone's clerk, Herbert Stoner.
And now the problem narrowed to one most serious and crucial point were the Mallows and Chidforth of these references the Mallalieu and Cotherstone of Highmarket. Speculating on this possibility, Brereton after his solitary dinner went into Bent's smoking-room, and throwing himself into a chair before the fire, lighted his pipe and proceeded to think things out.
After munching his sandwich and drinking his ale at the Highmarket Arms, Mallalieu had gone away to Hobwick Quarry and taken a careful look round. Just as he had expected, he found a policeman or two and a few gaping townsfolk there. He made no concealment of his own curiosity; he had come up, he said, to see what there was to be seen at the place where his clerk had come to this sad end.
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