It would be a truism to declare that human nature is about as complicated a piece of machinery as could be found in the human world.  And yet I do not know why it should be considered so.  All things and all men do not run in grooves.  A man to be a criminal need not be hopelessly bad in every other sense.  I have met murderers who did not possess sufficient nerve to kill a rabbit, burglars who would rob a poor man of all his possessions in the world, and yet would not despoil a little child of a halfpenny.  The fact of the matter is we all have our better points, our own innate knowledge of good and evil.  Hayle had betrayed Kitwater and Codd in the cruellest fashion possible, and by so doing had condemned them to the most fiendish torture the mind of man could conceive.  Yet it was through his one good point, his weakness, if I might so describe it, that I was enabled to come to my first grip with him.

It was between the hours of two and three that I entered the gates of Brompton Cemetery and commenced my examination of the various graves therein contained.  Up one path I wandered and down another in search of the resting-place of the poor crippled sister of whom Gideon Hayle had been so fond.  It was a long time before I found it, but at last I was successful.  To my astonishment the stone was plainly a new one, and the grave was tastefully decorated with flowers.  As a matter of fact it was one of the prettiest in its neighbourhood, and to me this told its own tale.  I went in search of the necessary official and put the case to him.  He informed me that I was correct in my supposition, and that the stone had only lately been erected, and, what was more to the point, he informed me that the gentleman who had given the order for it, had only the week before paid the necessary sum for insuring the decoration of the grave for many years to come.

“I gather from your words, that the gentleman, who must be a relative of the deceased, has been here lately,” I said.

“He was here last Sunday afternoon,” the man replied.  “He is a most kindly and generous gentleman, and must have been very fond of his sister.  The way he stood and looked at that stone the last time he was here was touching to see.  He’d been in foreign parts, sir, and is likely to go out there again, so I gathered from what he said.  It is a pity there are not more like him.”

This was news, indeed, and I pricked up my ears on hearing it.

Having learnt all I was likely to discover, I thanked the man for his kindness and left the cemetery.  If I had done nothing else, I had at least satisfied myself upon one point, and this was the fact that Gideon Hayle had been in London within the week.  Under such circumstances it should not be very difficult to obtain his address.  But I knew from experience that when things seemed to be running most smoothly, they are as much liable to a breakdown as at any other time—­sometimes even more so.  I accordingly hailed a cab and drove back to my office.  Once there I entered up my diary according to custom, wrote a note to Kitwater, informing him that I had discovered that Gideon Hayle had not left London on the previous Sunday, and also that I believed him to have negotiated certain of the stones in London, after which I returned to my hotel to dine.