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Updated: June 25, 2025
"It's for you," he said. "I think it is Scotland Yard." Tarling put the receiver to his ear. "It is Whiteside," said a voice. "Is that you, Mr. Tarling? We've found the revolver." "Where?" asked Tarling quickly. "In the girl's flat," came the reply. Tarling's face fell. But after all, that was nothing unexpected.
"Master," said the Chinaman, "why should he have been murdered?" Tarling's lips curled in a half smile. "By which I suppose you mean that one question is as difficult to answer as the other," he said. "All right, Ling Chu, that will do." His principal anxiety for the moment was not this, or any other clue which had been offered, but the discovery of Odette Rider's present hiding-place.
There is no doubt," he added carefully, "that Miss Rider had the handling of large sums of money, and she of all people in the business, and particularly in the cashier's department would have been able to rob the firm without the knowledge of either myself or poor Mr. Lyne. This, of course, is confidential." He laid one hand appealingly on Tarling's arm, and that worthy nodded.
A man was standing on the mat and he jumped back at the unexpectedness of Tarling's appearance. The stranger was a cadaverous-looking man, in a brand-new suit of clothes, evidently ready-made, but he still wore on his face the curious yellow tinge which is the special mark of the recently liberated gaol-bird. "Beg pardon," he stammered, "but is this No. 87?"
"Thornton Lyne?" he repeated. "Don't you know?" "Know what?" asked the girl with a frown. "That Thornton Lyne is dead," said Tarling, "and that it is for his murder that a warrant has been issued for your arrest?" She looked at him for a moment with wide, staring eyes. "Dead!" she gasped. "Dead! Thornton Lyne dead! You don't mean that, you don't mean that?" She clutched at Tarling's arm.
"That's the best bit of news I have had in my life," he said huskily. The journey back to London was one the details of which were registered with photographic realism in Tarling's mind for the rest of his life. The girl spoke little, and he himself was content to meditate and turn over in his mind the puzzling circumstances which had surrounded Odette Rider's flight.
There was Tarling's bedroom communicating with his dining and sitting-room. There was a spare-room in which he kept his boxes and trunks it was in this room that the revolver had been put aside and there was the small room occupied by Ling Chu.
Lyne's desk, and making an appointment with him at a certain flat in the Edgware Road, was also signed 'Odette, and," he bent forward, looking at the wire still in the astonished Tarling's hand, "and," he said in triumph, "it was handed in exactly at the same time as that!"
"I am coming now to the most extraordinary fact," he said, "and I would ask you to bear in mind every detail I give you. It is to my interest that the perpetrator of this terrible crime should be brought to justice " Tarling's impatient gesture arrested his platitudes, but Mr. Milburgh was in no way abashed. "When I got back to the mews I found it deserted.
Just wait a moment, till I've paid the cabman by-the-way, I saw your Chink servant and gather you sent him to the Yard on a spoof errand." When he returned, he met Tarling's eye and grinned sympathetically. "I know what's in your mind," he said frankly, "but really the Chief thinks it no more than an extraordinary coincidence. I suppose you made inquiries about your revolver?" Tarling nodded.
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