that night before Arthur Dean returned from an
errand on which he had been sent. In his arms was a bulky brown-paper
parcel.

He opened it in the privacy of his employer's sitting-room, and
remembering the advice given him that morning as to the way to present a
business report, pointed silently to a small slit in the side of the
fur-lined coat, where it would cover a man's ribs. On the inner lining
of the coat there was a dark stain around the slit, though the immersion
in the river had of course washed away any definite blood-clot.

Lars Larssen nodded appreciation of the young fellow's method of going
straight to the heart of the subject. "Good!" said he. "Now for
details."

"I carried out your orders exactly, sir. Took a cab to Neuilly,
dismissed it, put on the pair of workman's boots when I was in the
darkness of the river bank, and found the coat and stick just where
Martin and I had hidden them in the bushes. The trees make it quite dark
along that part of the Seine, and I am certain no one saw me taking them
and wrapping them in my brown paper. The coat was nearly dry."

"Did you find the stick broken?"

"No. I broke it in two so that it could be wrapped in the same parcel as
the coat."

"Did you examine footprints?"

"Yes. The only ones around the bushes were Martin's and mine made this
morning, and the prints of the man who first discovered them. Of course
my own prints this time were made by the boots you told me to buy and
put on."

"What next?"

"I went along the river bank for a couple of miles with my parcel until
I came to some other suburb, and then I caught a cab to the Arc de
Triomphe, and there I took another cab to here."

"The workman's boots?"

"After I changed back to my ordinary boots, I threw them in the river,
as you told me to."

"They sank?"

"Yes, sir."

"Anything else?"

"Nothing else worth reporting, I think.... Do you recognize this coat
and stick as belonging to Mr Matheson, sir?"

Lars Larssen nodded non-committally, and ordered the young fellow to get
a trunk telephone call through to Sir Francis Letchmere at Monte Carlo.
Dean had already found out that he was staying at the Hotel des
Hesperides.

But when the telephone connexion had been made, it was Olive who
answered from the other end of the wire:--

"This is Mrs Matheson. Who is speaking?"

"Mr Larssen. I want Sir Francis Letchmere."

"He's out just now. Shall I take your message?"

"Have you heard