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T HREE DAYS LATER, AARON had reached no brilliant conclusions. He had looked further into Mr. Joel Wildsmith, or rather, asked Sergeant Hollis to have an informal look for him, since he didn’t want to put Paul’s complaint through official channels quite yet. Hollis was in the uniformed branch, a solid rugby-playing sort with an unexpected speciality in mediums, palmists, and fortune-tellers.

“Graphology is a new one on me,” he admitted over a pint of Aaron’s buying. “Is there anything to it?”

“I couldn’t say.” According to Aaron’s hasty reading, such luminaries as Disraeli, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Browning had believed in the power of graphology, but they were a pack of writers and not to be relied on for common sense. “I dare say one can draw some impressions from people’s handwriting, but not to the extent this fellow claims.”

“Mumbo-jumbo crystal ball stuff? Or is he the scientific type, and it’s all jargon?”

“Neither. Presents himself as a very plain, straightforward, normal sort of chap.”

“It’s a good trick if you can pull it off,” Hollis said. “Be a particularly good trick for this one: he’s a queer.”

Aaron took that in with a tiny judder of shock he hoped didn’t show. “Is that so? I wouldn’t have thought it.”

“Well, the magistrates certainly thought it. He was picked up for soliciting in a public convenience a couple of years ago. Did two months.”

That explained a certain amount of the attitude. “Hmph. Anything else?”

“Nothing I could find. Unremarkable war. Ambulance division in Flanders, invalided out in ’17. No other complaints against him. If he’s as good a fake as you say, he’s rather come out of nowhere.”

“Is that unusual?”

“The good ones tend to be splashy. You know, make a hit, get a clientele among the smart set, face in the papers, prices up.”

“He’s reached the smart set already,” Aaron said.

“Maybe you’ve caught him early, and we can pluck him before he ripens. What’s your interest? It’s not CID’s usual hunting ground.”

There was perhaps a bit of an edge to that, since the relationship between the uniformed division and CID tended to be prickly. “It’s not official interest at all. The fellow ruined my cousin’s engagement.” Aaron outlined Paul’s predicament. “I went to see what was what, and found him a bit too clever for my liking. But that was in a private capacity, of course, and as you say it’s not my area, so I thought I’d better bring him to your attention.” And that would teach Mr. Wildsmith to playact his Tell the police! scene.

“Fair enough,” Hollis said. “I’ll keep an eye out. How’s life in CID anyway?”

It was about as positive a result as Aaron could have hoped for, except for the news of Wildsmith’s proclivities. If the man knew who Aaron was—and he must, it was the only thing that made sense—and he was queer himself, and he’d come up with that business about self-control...

That didn’t add up to anything that made Aaron happy. His neck twinged.

He went back to see Paul that evening. “I’ve been following up your fellow. The graphologist.”

“I should hope so. I hope you plan to throw the book at him.”

“I need some information first. What exactly did he tell your fiancée ?”

“Oh, a lot of stuff he had no business saying. She lapped it up, of course. Really, Ronnie, women are—”

“What did he tell her?” Aaron repeated.

“Well, I’m not going to tell you,” Paul said, ruffled. “The point is, he wrapped her round his little finger, and that sort—”

“Was it true?”

Paul’s eyes widened. “That’s a damned offensive remark. Just because you’re a bobby, you don’t have to forget your manners.”

“I don’t know what he told her, but it seems to have hit a nerve with you, and it certainly did with your fiancée. So I am asking you, was it true?”

Paul’s mouth tightened mulishly. Aaron tried not to roll his eyes. “I’m not asking for fun. If this man is making up lies, he’s a charlatan, but if he’s digging out secrets and using them, then we’re looking at obtaining money by deception, and we might even have a blackmailer on our hands. So I’m going to ask you again. Was what he said factually accurate?”

“If you must,” Paul muttered.

“And what was it? I don’t care,” Aaron added. “I don’t give a damn: I just want an idea what this fellow is up to.”

“Oh, all right. You’ll keep it to yourself? He told Babs I had another girl.”

“That’s all? Nothing more specific?”

“Since you ask, he told her I’d been with a girl just before I wrote the letter.”

“Been with?” Aaron repeated blankly.

“You know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t,” he added snidely. “Gone to bed with. Like normal men do with girls. Do I have to draw you a picture?”

“He told her that you bedded a woman, and, what, wrote a letter to your fiancée as soon as you’d finished? And you’re saying that’s true?”

“You needn’t be so prissy,” Paul said. “It’s the nineteen twenties, you know. We don’t all have to behave like Victorians any more.”

“Rolling out of one woman’s bed to make plans for your engagement to another woman sounds more Georgian to me,” Aaron said. “If not Tudors—wait. Your engagement party was a costume ball? And you were going as Henry the Eighth?”

“Oh, don’t you start. Babs made a rotten fuss about that when she gave the ring back. Threw it at me, actually.”

Aaron didn’t blame her. “Are you positive Wildsmith made that specific accusation? You’re sure he didn’t say something like You were thinking of other women when you wrote , and you filled in the gaps? A guilty conscience can do that.” Not that Aaron saw much sign of a guilty conscience in Paul, but one never knew.

“Oh, no, Babs had it exactly,” Paul assured him. “She said she gave my letter to this fellow and he told her the writer had just been to bed with someone. Well, that’s why I admitted it. One thing if she’d said Is there someone else , a man can handle that sort of conversation easily enough, but being told precisely what had happened threw me for a loop and I said something stupid like How did you know? Denied it after, of course, but it was too late by then. She didn’t take it well at all. Said it was bad enough that I couldn’t be trusted or what-have-you without some ghastly little oik telling her I’d written my letter with sticky hands.”

“He said that?”

“No, I think that part was Babs.”

Aaron attempted to claw his way back to the conversation he wanted to have. “Are you in the habit of writing letters to one girl after bedding another?”

“Good Lord, Ronnie, you make it sound like a compulsion. We—Babs and I—needed to agree on the costumes rather urgently, that was all.”

“So the only people who could have known you wrote the letter in those circumstances were you, your lady friend—anyone else? Servants? A spare lady in the room?”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic.”

“And did you brag about your conquest? Tell a friend, make a story of it?”

“Good heavens, man, what sort of fellow do you think I am?”

Aaron restrained himself. “Who was the other woman?”

“I’m not telling you that,” Paul said. “Have some decency.”

Wildsmith had been right about Aaron’s self-control to the extent that he didn’t spring on his cousin and throttle him. “For heaven’s sake, man, use your head. If you didn’t tell anyone about this letter, and nobody but this woman saw you write it—”

“Well, but she didn’t either,” Paul said with an air of mild triumph. “She’d already left. Having her hair done, you know, rushed off. And before you ask, I certainly didn’t tell her I was going to write to Babs. It was hardly her affair.”

Further questioning revealed that he’d put the letter in his pocket when he went to the post box rather than carrying it along the street in his hand, and that the lady friend was married to an elderly and very rich man from whom she had no intention of being parted till death did them.

Aaron left his cousin with one very strong conviction, which was that Paul could go to the devil. Other than that, he was bewildered.

If Paul was a reliable witness, and that ‘if’ contained multitudes, Aaron could think of no plausible way Wildsmith could have known about the circumstances in which he’d written his letter. He just got out of bed with another woman wasn’t the sort of thing psychics tossed out as guesses: it was far too specific. But to know it as fact would require the sort of surveillance Special Branch might provide for a Soviet spy.

This didn’t make any sense. None of the explanations he could think of made sense.

Sherlock Holmes said, When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. It was impossible that Wildsmith could actually tell a child murderer or a recently unfaithful fiancé from their handwriting, therefore he must have dug up the information that would allow him to fake it. But surveillance of that quality took men and time and expertise, which was to say money. You might do it to impress a suitably influential client—Aaron had a vague idea that Paul’s ex-fiancée was a Bright Young Person—but the problem was, Wildsmith couldn’t have predicted he’d find anything to make such an outlay worth while. And if he had money to spend and wanted to make an impression on the smart set, why would he live in a miserable room in Pentonville rather than renting something decent, somewhere fashionable?

GK Chesterton had taken issue with the Holmes quotation. He’d said that if you told him the Prime Minister was haunted by a ghost, that was impossible, whereas if you told him that the Prime Minister had slapped Queen Victoria on the back and offered her a cigar, that was merely improbable, but he knew very well which of the two was more likely to be true.

Which was all very well, but Aaron didn’t believe in ghosts. He reminded himself of that several times as he walked home.

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