What's his name?"

    "It isn't a he, It's a she," smiled Hason. "Miss Diana Ward, who's been with me for about six months and is really the smartest and most reliable girl I've ever had working with me."

    "Oh, a female secretary!" said Larry gloomily, then brightened. "What you say goes, John; and even this paragon of virtue doesn't worry me. I suppose she's got a voice like a file and chews gum?"

    "She is rather unprepossessing, but looks aren't everything," said Sir John dryly. "Now sit down, old man; I want to talk to you. It is about this Stuart case," he began, offering his cigarette box to the other. "We only discovered yesterday that Stuart was a very rich man. He has been living in this country for nine months at a boardinghouse in Nottingham Place, Marylebone. He was a mysterious individual, who went nowhere, had very few friends, and was extraordinarily reticent. It was known, of course, that he had money, and his bankers in London, who revealed his identity when they discovered he was dead, were in his secret; that is to say, his secret so far as his identity is concerned."

    "When you say he went nowhere, what do you mean? Did he stay in the boarding-house all the time?"

    "I'm coming to that," said Sir John. "He did go somewhere, but why, nobody knows. Every afternoon it was his practice to take a motor drive, and invariably he went to the same place—to a little village in Kent, about twenty-five miles out. He left the motor-car at one end of the village, walked through the place, and was gone for a couple of hours. We have made inquiries and we have discovered this, that he spent quite a lot of time in the church, an old Saxon edifice the foundations of which were laid a thousand years ago. Regularly as the clock he'd return after two hours' absence, get into the car, which was hired, and be driven back to Nottingham Place."

    "What was the name of the village?"

    "Beverley Manor," said the Chief Commissioner. "Well, to resume. On Wednesday night, departing from his usual practice, he accepted the invitation of a Dr Stephen Judd to go to the first night of a new show at the Macready Theatre. Dr Stephen Judd is the managing director of the Greenwich Insurance Company, a small affair and quite a family concern, but having a pretty good name in the City. Mr Judd is a genial person who dabbles in art and has a very beautiful house at Chelsea. Judd had a box for the first night of the show—which is a perfectly rotten one, judging by the newspaper notices—Box A. Stuart came, and, according to Judd, was very restless. In the interval between the second and third acts he slipped out of the theatre, unobserved, and did not come back, and was not seen again until we found his body on the Thames Embankment."

    "What sort of a night was it?" asked Larry.

    "Bright in the early part, but rather misty and inclined to be foggy later," said Sir John. "In fact, the constable who was patrolling that particular beat where the body was found reported that it was very thick between half-past three and half-past four."

    Larry nodded. "Is there any possibility of his having mistaken his way in the fog and fallen into the water?" he asked.

    "None whatever," replied Sir John emphatically. "Between the hour he disappeared and half-past two in the morning the Embankment was entirely clear of fog, and he was not seen. It was a very bright night until that hour."

    "And here is another curious circumstance," the Commissioner went on. "When he was discovered, he was lying on the steps with his legs in the water, his body being clear—and," he added slowly, "the tide was still rising."

    Larry looked at him in astonishment.

    "Do you mean to say that he hadn't been deposited there by the falling tide?" he asked incredulously. "How could he be there, with his legs in the water, when the tide was low, as it must have been, when he came upon the steps?"

    "That is my contention," nodded Sir John. "Unless he was drowned immediately he left the theatre when the tide was high and was falling, it seems almost impossible that he could have been left on the steps at daybreak, when the tide was rising."

    Larry rubbed his chin. "That's queer," he said.