"There seems to be something behind all this," Flamborough admitted, passing his hand over his hair as though to stimulate his brain by the action, "but I can’t just fit it all together as you seem to have done, sir. You can say what you like, but that handwriting’s genuine; the paper’s not been tampered with; and I can’t see anything wrong with it."
Sir Clinton took pity on the inspector’s obvious anxiety.
"Look at the phrasing of the whole document, Inspector. If you cared to do so, you could split it up into a set of phrases something after this style: ‘that things cannot go on any longer in this way. . . . The plan we talked over last seems the best. . . . When I have given . . . Hassendean . . . hints . . . about the . . . use of . . . hyoscine . . . he will probably see for himself how . . . to get what he wants. . . . After that, it merely means . . . watching them . . . and I am sure that . . . we shall soon have . . . her . . . out of our way. . . . It will be very easy . . . to make it seem . . . intentional . . . on their part . . . and no one is likely . . . to look further than that.’ Now, Inspector, if you met any one of these phrases by itself, would you infer from it inevitably that a murder was being planned? ‘Things cannot go on any longer in this way.’ If you consider how Mrs. Silverdale was behaving with young Hassendean, it’s not astonishing to find a phrase like that in a letter from Silverdale to the girl he was in love with. ‘The plan we talked over last seems the best.’ It might have been a day’s outing together that he was talking about for all one can tell. ‘He will probably see for himself how my wife is playing with him.’ And so forth."
"Yes, that’s all very well," Flamborough put in, "but what about the word ‘hyoscine?’ That’s unusual in love-letters."
"Miss Deepcar was working on hyoscine under Silverdale’s directions, remember. It’s quite possible that he might have mentioned it incidentally."
"Now I think I see what you mean, sir. You think that this document that Mr. Justice has sent us is a patchwork—bits cut out of a lot of different letters and stuck together and then photographed?"
"I’m suggesting it as a possibility, Inspector. See how it fits the facts. Here are a set of phrases, each one innocuous in itself, but with a cumulative effect of suggestion when you string them together as in this document. If the thing is a patchwork, then a number of real letters must have been used in order to get fragments which would suit. So Mr. Justice took a fair selection of epistles with him when he raided Miss Deepcar’s house. Further, in snipping out a sentence here and there from these letters, he sometimes had to include a phrase running on from one line to another in the original letter; but when he came to paste his fragments together, the original hiatus at the end of a line got transferred to the middle of a line in the final arrangement made to fit the page of the faked letter. That’s what struck me to begin with. For example, suppose that in the original letter you had the phrase: ‘he will probably see for himself how’; and the original line ended with ‘probably.’ That word might be a bit cramped at the end of the line. But in reconstructing the thing, ‘probably’ got into the middle of the line, and so you get this apparently meaningless cramping of the word when there was space enough for it to be written uncramped under normal conditions. Just the same with the other cases you spotted for yourself. They represent the ends of lines in the original letters, although they all occur in the middle of lines in the fake production."
"That sounds just as plausible as you like, sir. But you’ve got the knack of making things sound plausible. You’re not pulling my leg, are you?" the Inspector demanded suspiciously. "Besides, what about there being no sign of the paper having been tampered with?"
