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Luke sighed gustily. “He can’t remember when the ring came in. He only put it in the window a couple of days before the niece spotted it. He was turning out the drawer in which he keeps the junk he buys over the counter and found it under the bit of newspaper he’d used as a lining last time he cleaned up. He says it must have come in with a parcel of second-hand stuff but he can’t recall it. The odd thing is that the date on the piece of newspaper is just a couple of weeks after uncle and auntie left home. It proves nothing, but it’s curious.”
    He took the ring and dropping it back in its box placed the package on top of the glove. Mr. Campion saw where the manœuvre was leading and decided to be obliging.
    “What about the last flag,” he enquired. “The one in the middle of the green.”
    Luke laughed as he caught his eye.
    “Well, its a good trick,” he said and, returning to the drawer once more, produced a large lizard-skin letter-case of very good quality. He did not pass it over at once but sat turning it inside out and back again, showing a torn strap on one of the inner pockets. “In April this year a kid picked this up from the grass in Garden Green,” he said presently. “After kicking it about for a bit he gave it to a bobby and it turned out to be just the thing the Kent police were looking for. It belonged to a car salesman whose body had been found in his coupé at the bottom of a chalk pit on the Folkestone-London road. Skidmarks on the surface suggested that he’d been forced off the road by another car, so no one was very surprised when it was discovered that he’d been carrying all of seven hundred pounds on him when he set out from the coast. When he was found he had a pocketful of loose change but no note-case of any kind although his other papers were intact. His family identified this. It’s a distinctive wallet and his wife remembered the torn strap.” He let his mouth widen into a ferocious grin and dropped the leather folder on to the glove and the ring. Its weight turned the scales and the brass tray clattered gently as it hit the polished wood of the desk. “There you are,” he said; “it doesn’t mean much but how good it looks?”
    Mr. Campion rose and walked over to the wall to have a closer look at the chart.
    “You haven’t a scrap of evidence of any kind, have you?” he murmured absently. “You’d be more convincing with a crystal ball. I don’t know Garden Green. What is it like?”
    “Sad,” Luke drooped, impersonating a willow perhaps. “Used to be a graveyard. The church came down in the blitz and the Council had the ground levelled and the stones set round the boundary wall. A hoarding separates it from the Barrow Road and round the back there are the usual little houses—beautiful porches, horrible plumbing. Mostly they’re let out in rooms but there are some in private hands still. It’s quiet. Not a slum. This chap I have in mind doesn’t
live
there, you know.”
    There was something so convinced and familiar in his tone that Mr. Campion was startled. The Superintendent was speaking of someone as real to him as the friend before him. Luke saw the expression in the pale eyes and laughed.
    “I’ve got him under my skin good and proper haven’t I? I worry about him you know. He didn’t make anything out of the Church Row shooting so I figure he had to catch up on auntie and uncle. He got a few hundred quid from them but not enough to square the moneylender who must have been pressing. So he attended to that little problem; but he didn’t actually touch much cash, if any, in Deban Street and therefore, a couple of months later, he gave his mind to the car salesman. I don’t know how long that drop of lolly would last him because I don’t know what his debts were, you see.”
    “This is pure fiction,” said Mr. Campion reproachfully. “It’s fascinating but it doesn’t touch the ground. Why watch Garden Green if he doesn’t live