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no presumption for Davenant or against him. And I want you to help me to go through all the evidence we collected, and see if we can't make sense out of it somehow. Because we haven't done that yet, Davenant or no Davenant."

"You mean you want to do some thinking aloud, while I sit opposite you and say 'My dear Reeves! How on earth⁠ . . . ' from time to time? All right; start away."

"Well, look here, what was the most incongruous thing we found, when we examined Brotherhood's body?"

"You mean me to say the two watches. To my mind it's the fact of his having a ticket. Because he surely had a season?"

"He did. I went and asked specially at the booking-office. But of course he might have left his at home by mistake."

"Yes, but that won't really do. Because on a line like this, surely, the porters know most of the season-ticket holders by heart? And the odds are that if he'd said, 'I've left my season at home,' the porter would have touched his cap and said, 'Right you are, sir.' Now, knowing that possibility, that all-but-certainty, was Brotherhood fool enough to go and book before he left London? As far as I remember, the tickets on this line aren't examined till you change or till you go out of the station."

"You're right. There's something that looks devilish wrong about that. Well, how did the ticket get there, then?"