The magistrate, thinking of those summer holidays, began to be really vexed; so did Mr. Parker, who soon learned the result of these enquiries and regretted that his mourning retirement prevented him from issuing forth and telling everybody what he thought of this new disgraceful scandal.  His English blood revolted at the idea of a harmless tourist, a prominent member of the Alpha and Omega Club, being callously murdered.  Would these people never get civilized?  He was glad to hear, at all events, that the judge was doing something.

Signor Malipizzo was doing a good deal.  He meant to sift the thing to the bottom.  His energy, hitherto simulated, was now set genuinely at work to discover indications of the murderer—­indications of his missing friend.  But Nepenthe is not a good place for finding corpses.  The island is full of fathomless rents and fissures.  A good many foreigners, especially such as were known to carry loose gold in their pockets, had been suspected of falling into them without leaving a trace behind.  Yet a thorough search was instituted, for he knew that criminals were not always as clever as they thought themselves; some insignificant relic might turn up—­a shred of clothing or so forth.  Such things were occasionally picked up on Nepenthe; nobody knew to whom they belonged.  The Cave of Mercury, on being searched, yielded nothing but a trouser button, apparently of English manufacture.  Enquiries were also made as to when the ill-starred gentleman had last been seen, and where.  Finally, the judge drew up a list, a fairly long list, of all the suspicious characters on the place with a view to placing them under lock and key, in expectation of further developments.  Such was the customary procedure; one must assume the worst.  If innocent, they might of course regain their liberty in a year or two.

It stands to reason that a good many people had noticed Muhlen on the morning of his disappearance.  One cannot walk about Nepenthe at that hour of the day without being seen, and Muhlen was sufficiently conspicuous.  But everyone knew what was in store for him if he admitted such a fact, to wit, an application of paragraph 43 of the 92nd section of the Code of Criminal Procedure, according to which any and every witness of this kind is liable to be segregated from his family and kept under arrest for an indefinite length of time, pending the instruction of a trial which might take half a century.  Nobody, therefore, was fool enough to admit having encountered him—­nobody save a half-witted youth who fatuously confided to a policeman that the had met the gentleman somewhere in the neighbourhood of the bibliographer’s villa about the hour of midday.  Under ordinary circumstances Signor Malipizzo would have been delighted to lay sacrilegious hands on Mr. Eames, whose Olympic aloofness had always annoyed him and against whom a case could now be got up, on the strength of these indications.  Somewhere in the neighbourhood of the villa—­that was quite sufficient to warrant an arrest.