“All right,” said Parker, “stop talking. I believe you.”
He went on to detail the medical evidence.
“By the way,” said Lord Peter, “to skip across for a moment to the other case, has it occurred to you that perhaps Levy was going out to see Freke on Monday night?”
“He was; he did,” said Parker, rather unexpectedly, and proceeded to recount his interview with the nerve-specialist.
“Humph!” said Lord Peter. “I say, Parker, these are funny cases, ain’t they? Every line of inquiry seems to peter out. It’s awfully exciting up to a point, you know, and then nothing comes of it. It’s like rivers getting lost in the sand.”
“Yes,” said Parker. “And there’s another one I lost this morning.”
“Oh, I was pumping Levy’s secretary about his business. I couldn’t get much that seemed important except further details about the Argentine and so on. Then I thought I’d just ask round in the City about those Peruvian Oil shares, but Levy hadn’t even heard of them so far as I could make out. I routed out the brokers, and found a lot of mystery and concealment, as one always does, you know, when somebody’s been rigging the market, and at last I found one name at the back of it. But it wasn’t Levy’s.”
“Oddly enough, Freke’s. It seems mysterious. He bought a lot of shares last week, in a secret kind of way, a few of them in his own name, and then quietly sold ’em out on Tuesday at a small profit—a few hundreds, not worth going to all that trouble about, you wouldn’t think.”
“Shouldn’t have thought he ever went in for that kind of gamble.”
“He doesn’t as a rule. That’s the funny part of it.”
“Well, you never know,” said Lord Peter; “people do these things just to prove to themselves or somebody else that they could make a fortune that way if they liked. I’ve done it myself in a small way.”
“I say, old man,” he said suddenly, as Parker was letting him out, “does it occur to you that Freke’s story doesn’t fit in awfully well with what Anderson said about the old boy having been so jolly at dinner on Monday night? Would you be, if you thought you’d got anything of that sort?”
“No, I shouldn’t,” said Parker; “but,” he added with his habitual caution, “some men will jest in the dentist’s waiting-room. You, for one.”