we learned late on the following day that henning had not appeared at the office. from that we assumed that he must have met his confederate in the evening, and, finding that he had not received the message sent, conceived that something was wrong, and made himself safe. the confederate, hunt, however, made his appearance early next morning, but escaped.
what happened is best told in plummer’s words when he called on hewitt in the afternoon.
“i went round this morning,” he said, “as i said i would last night. i took a good man with me, and we got the dummy bonds that had been put in bell’s box and popped ’em in the ventilator, where the real ones had been hidden. you see, we’d got nothing legal against catherton hunt as yet, but if we could only grab him with those dummy bonds on him it might help, with the other evidence we could scrape up (and especially if we could take henning), to sustain a charge of conspiracy to steal. well, he came so quick he was on us before we were quite ready. we’d got the dummies in their place, and i was in front of the door telling my man the likeliest corner to wait in, when suddenly up pops the lift right in front of me, with a gentleman in it — clean-shaven. i looked at him and he looked at me. i had a sort of distant notion that i might have seen him before, and it’s pretty certain he had something more than a distant notion about me. ‘down again,’ he says to the lift man, before the gate was swung, ‘i’ve forgotten something!’ and down the lift went. you’ll understand i had no idea he was the man we wanted; but as the lift went down and my eyes were on the man’s face, i saw who he was! when he stood straight before me i had no more than a vague notion that i’d seen him somewhere before. but down the lift went, and in the flash of time when he’d nearly disappeared, and the bottom part of his face was hidden by the sill of the lift opening — the part of his face where his beard had been when we met him last — i saw it was myatt!”
“myatt? good heavens!”
“everard myatt, mr. hewitt, the man that murdered mr. jacob mason! everard myatt, for a thousand, with his beard shaved! and we’ve lost him again! what could we do? we shouted and ran downstairs, and that was all. he’d gone, of course. and when we asked the hall porter he told us that mr. catherton hunt had just come down the lift and hurried out!”
