A dangerous prisoner has escaped from Dartmoor, and the police are certain he will return to where he stashed the stolen jewels whose whereabouts remain maddeningly obscure. When Inspector Muirhead comes to Philip Trent's rooms, he brings not evidence but an enigma: a letter whose phrasing seems deliberately cryptic, as though its author were speaking in code.

First published in The Strand Magazine, March 1914.

Collected in Trent Intervenes (1938).

E. C. Bentley (1875–1956), journalist, satirist, and inventor of the clerihew.

Best known for Trent’s Last Case (1913) and the Philip Trent stories.

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