looking up, "in future can you let me see every letter as it is
received? You might also keep careful record of how they are
delivered."

"Certainly, Mr. Sage. Anything that will make you happy."

"Later I may get you to ask the vicar to seal up any subsequent
anonymous letters that reach him without allowing anyone to see the
contents. Do you think he would do that?"

"Without doubt if I ask him," said the inspector, surprise in his
eyes as he looked down upon the cone of baldness beneath him,
realising what a handicap it is to talk to a man who keeps his eyes
averted.

"He must then put the letters in a place where no one can possibly
obtain access to them. One thing more," continued Malcolm Sage,
"will you ask Miss Crayne to write out the full story of the letters
as far as she personally is acquainted with it?"

"Very well, Mr. Sage," said the inspector, with the air of one
humouring a child. "Now I'll be going." He walked towards the door,
then suddenly stopped and turned.

"I suppose you think I'm wrong about the curate?"

"I'll tell you later," was the reply.

"When you find the master-key?" laughed the inspector, as he opened
the door.

"Yes, when I find the master-key," said Malcolm Sage quietly and, as
the door closed behind Inspector Murdy, he continued to finger the
copper ashtray as if that were the master-key.

CHAPTER XIV MALCOLM SAGE PLAYS PATIENCE

I

Malcolm Sage was seated at a small green-covered table playing
solitaire. A velvet smoking-jacket and a pair of wine-coloured
morocco slippers suggested that the day's work was done.

Patience, chess, and the cinema were his unfailing sources of
inspiration when engaged upon a more than usually difficult case. He
had once told Sir James Walton that they clarified his brain and
coordinated his thoughts, the cinema in particular. The fact that in
the surrounding darkness were hundreds of other brains, vital and
active, appeared to stimulate his own imagination.

Puffing steadily at a gigantic meerschaum, he moved the cards with a
deliberation which suggested that his attention rather than his
thoughts was absorbed in the game.

Nearly a month had elapsed since he had agreed to take up the
enquiry into the authorship of the series of anonymous letters with
which Gylston and the neighbourhood had been flooded; yet still the
matter remained a mystery.

A celebrated writer of detective stories had interested himself in
t