“My friend the inspector—no, no more, thank you, Mother—is determined to prove that the intrusive person in Thipps’s bath is Sir Reuben Levy, who disappeared mysteriously from his house last night. His line of reasoning is: We’ve lost a middle-aged gentleman without any clothes on in Park Lane; we’ve found a middle-aged gentleman without any clothes on in Battersea. Therefore they’re one and the same person, Q.E.D., and put little Thipps in quod.”
“You’re very elliptical, dear,” said the Duchess, mildly. “Why should Mr. Thipps be arrested even if they are the same?”
“Sugg must arrest somebody,” said Lord Peter, “but there is one odd little bit of evidence come out which goes a long way to support Sugg’s theory, only that I know it to be no go by the evidence of my own eyes. Last night at about 9.15 a young woman was strollin’ up the Battersea Park Road for purposes best known to herself, when she saw a gentleman in a fur coat and top-hat saunterin’ along under an umbrella, lookin’ at the names of all the streets. He looked a bit out of place, so, not bein’ a shy girl, you see, she walked up to him, and said: ‘Good-evening.’ ‘Can you tell me, please,’ says the mysterious stranger, ‘whether this street leads into Prince of Wales Road?’ She said it did, and further asked him in a jocular manner what he was doing with himself and all the rest of it, only she wasn’t altogether so explicit about that part of the conversation, because she was unburdenin’ her heart to Sugg, d’you see, and he’s paid by a grateful country to have very pure, high-minded ideals, what? Anyway, the old boy said he couldn’t attend to her just then as he had an appointment. ‘I’ve got to go and see a man, my dear,’ was how she said he put it, and he walked on up Alexandra Avenue towards Prince of Wales Road. She was starin’ after him, still rather surprised, when she was joined by a friend of hers, who said: ‘It’s no good wasting your time with him—that’s Levy—I knew him when I lived in the West End, and the girls used to call him Peagreen Incorruptible’—friend’s name suppressed, owing to implications of story, but girl vouches for what was said. She thought no more about it till the milkman brought news this morning of the excitement at Queen Caroline Mansions; then she went round, though not likin’ the police as a rule, and asked the man there whether the dead gentleman had a beard and glasses. Told he had glasses but no beard, she incautiously said: ‘Oh, then, it isn’t him,’ and the man said: ‘Isn’t who?’ and collared her. That’s her story. Sugg’s delighted, of course, and quodded Thipps on the strength of it.”