Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

“He wasn’t anywhere,” returned the girl, lifting her shoulders. “There was only one other room, a big private office overlooking Piccadilly on the fourth floor. He wasn’t hiding anywhere, because I looked. And there’s no way out of any of the offices except through the door to the main corridor, where I’d been standing. Frankie wasn’t there. But his clothes were.”

“What?” demanded Colonel March.

“His clothes. The suit he’d been wearing: with his watch, and notecase, and papers, and key-ring, and the fountain-pen I gave him for his birthday. They were hanging up in a locker in the cloakroom. Clothes, but no Frankie. And he hasn’t been seen since. Now do you wonder why I’m here?”

Hitherto Colonel March had been listening with an indulgent air. Now his sandy eyebrows drew together.

“Let me understand this,” he said in a sharp and rather sinister voice. “You mean he literally disappeared?”

“Yes!”

“He couldn’t, for instance, have slipped out while you were examining the various offices?”

“Without his clothes?” asked Patricia unanswerably.

There was a silence.

“Frankie!” she almost wailed. “Of all people, Frankie! Of course I suppose he could have sneaked out. For that matter, he could have climbed out of a window and down the face of the building into Piccadilly. But in his underwear? Frankie?”

“Suppose he had another suit of clothes there?”

“Why?” asked Patricia, again unanswerably.

It is not often that Colonel March finds himself stumped, definitely left flat and up against it. This appeared to be one of the times.

“And what have you done since?”

“What could I do? He’s not at his flat here, or at his place in the country. Not one of his friends, including his private secretary, seems to know where he is. I even tackled that dreadful Labour man he seems to have been so thick with recently; and I thought for a second he was going to burst out laughing. But even he swore he didn’t know where Frankie was.”

“H’m,” said Colonel March.

“We can’t make this public, you see. That would be dreadful. And so you’re our last hope. Haven’t you got any theory?”

“Oh, theories!” said Colonel March, waving a big arm irritably. “I can think of half a dozen theories. But they don’t explain the main difficulty. Suppose any lurid theory you like. Suppose the mysterious William and Wilhelmina Wilson have murdered him and hidden his body. Suppose there is a sinister political conspiracy against him. Suppose Francis Hale has disguised himself and is masquerading as the distinguished-looking old gentleman with the white hair...”

Patricia sat up straight.

“A supposition,” said the colonel grimly, “about as likely as any idea that he went walking about the streets in his underwear. But I repeat: suppose anything you like! It still won’t explain what puzzles me most.”

“Which is?”

“The profession of William and Wilhelmina Wilson,” answered Colonel March. “Any ideas, Roberts?”

Inspector Roberts, shutting up his notebook, ruminated on this.

“Well, sir—” he began hesitantly.

“Yes, yes; go on!”

“Well, sir, the point seems to be this. Either Mr. Hale disappeared of his own free will, or else he didn’t. It looks to me as though he didn’t.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“The personal effects,” said Roberts. “The watch and the notecase and the rest of it. If you were going to do a bunk somewhere, wouldn’t those be the very things you’d take with you? It isn’t as though he were trying to stage a fake suicide, or anything like that. One minute he’s comfortably in that office, with the young lady in his lap” — Roberts coughed, and looked swiftly away from their guest — “and the next he’s gone. That’s the part I don’t like.”

Colonel March grunted.

“And yet,” pursued Roberts, “if that pair have managed to make away with him, I can’t for the life of me see how or why. It’s like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.”

He broke off, for a curious expression crossed Colonel March’s face: it was as though he had been hit across the back of the head with a club.

“Good lord!” he muttered, in a hollow voice like a ghost. “I wonder if that could be it?”

“If it could be what?” demanded Lady Patricia.

“The name,” argued Colonel March, half to himself, “might be a coincidence. On the other hand, it might be most infernally apt: the seal of Wilson.” He turned to Lady Patricia. “Tell me. Can Francis Hale hold his liquor?”

She stared back at him.

“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about!”

“Yes, you do.” The colonel was irritable. “You told me a while ago that Hale, in one of his fits of being fed up — ahem! — in one of his more erratic moments, got tight at a Corporation banquet. What did he drink?”

His visitor set her jaw.

“Everything,” she said. “Beginning with cocktails and going all the way through to brandy. He simply sloshed it down. My father was frantic.”

“And how did it affect him? Hale, I mean?”