Hartley came to a standstill before his guest.

“You’ll do that, Coryndon?”

“The case interests me,” said Coryndon, “otherwise, I should not suggest it.”  He paused for a moment and reflected.  “I shall have to make your bungalow my headquarters; that is the simplest plan.  Any absences may be accounted for by shooting trips and that sort of thing.  That part of it is straightforward enough, and I can see the people I want to see.”

“You shall have a free hand to do anything you like,” said Hartley.  “And any help that I can give you.”

Coryndon looked at him for a moment without replying.

“Thank you, Hartley.  Our methods are different, as you know, but when I want you, I will tell you how you can help me.”

He walked across the room to where two tumblers and a decanter of whisky stood on a tray, and, pouring himself out a glass of soda water, sipped it slowly.

“Here are my notes,” said Hartley, in a voice of great relief.  “They will be useful for reference.”

Coryndon folded them up and put them in his pocket.

“Most of what is there is also in my official report.”

Coryndon nodded his head, and, opening the piano, struck a light chord.  After a moment he sat down and played softly, and the air he played came straight from the high rocks that guard the Afghan frontier.  Like a breeze that springs up at evening, the little love-song lilted and whispered under his compelling fingers, and the “Song of the Broken Heart” sang itself in the room of Hartley, Head of the Police.  Where it carried Coryndon no one could guess, but it carried Hartley into a very rose-garden of sentimental fatuity, and when the music stopped he gave a deep grunting sigh of content.

“I’ll get some honest sleep to-night,” he said as they parted, and ten minutes afterwards he was lying under his mosquito-curtains, oblivious to the world.

Coryndon’s servant, Shiraz, was squatting across the door that led into the veranda when his master came in, and he waited for his orders.  He would have sat anywhere for weeks, and had done so, to await the doubtful coming of Coryndon, whose times and seasons no man knew.

When he was gone, Coryndon took out the bulky packet of notes and extracted the piece of rag, which he locked carefully away in a dispatch-box.  He then cleared a little space on the floor, and put the papers lightly over one another.  Setting a match to them, he watched them light up and curl into brittle tinder, and dissolve from that stage into a heap of charred ashes, which he gathered up with a careful hand and put into the soft earth of a fern-box outside his veranda door.  This being done, he sat down and began to think steadily, letting the names drift through his brain, one by one, until they sorted themselves, and he felt for the most useful name to take first.

“Joicey, the Banker, is a man of no importance,” he murmured to himself, and again he said, “Joicey the Banker.”