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!"