Three weeks later I received this letter from my cousin:

“My dear Roger,

“As I promised I am sending you a chit to tell you the result of our enquiry into the Ransay mystery. Of course you will understand that this is strictly for your own eye and mustn’t be talked about.

“Well, I wanted to leave no stone unturned to get at the bottom of the affair so we got up a pukka detective from London, a man named Bolton, said to be a first class fellow at the job. He spent a solid week in the island and seems to have poked his nose into pretty nearly every house and spoken to pretty nearly every inhabitant from the laird down. Taking a tip from your tale he posed as a cattle dealer (which is precisely what he looks like) and of course he never let on that he knew of your existence⁠—or mine either.

“The result of his enquiries is, firstly⁠—nothing proved against anybody and no evidence of anything fishy going on in the place. This last point confirms my own experience, for, as I told you, I haven’t yet been able to associate this particular island with any of the suspicious ongoings which undoubtedly are happening.

“Secondly, your friend O’Brien turns out to be a gentleman with a failing for liquor who was sent up by his relations in Ireland about six months ago to live under Dr. Rendall’s charge, there being no pubs in Ransay⁠—and many in the island he came from. I find that it is by no means unusual to send thirsty souls to publess isles, and beyond the fact that O’Brien came up very ‘convanient’ for this war and is pretty free with his tongue on the subject of England’s sins and shortcomings, there is really nothing positive against the man. However we are running no risks, and as we are God and Destiny rolled into one in these islands, we gave Mr. O’Brien his marching orders and by this time he has presumably either secured a drink at last or his friends have shut him up in some teetotal paradise a little further from the scene of war.

“Bolton’s opinion is that O’Brien was without doubt the man who fired at you, looking to the type of gentleman he is, and the fact that you ran into him immediately afterwards, and especially the fact that he actually does possess an old rook rifle. He thinks he may have done it out of sheer Irish deviltry, you offering so convenient a target, just as they pot landlords in his own happy country. A man can hardly have drunk as heavily as he must have done without upsetting his brain a bit, and this theory seems to me not at all unlikely.

“Bolton thinks it hardly conceivable that O’B. can have had any deliberate idea of getting rid of you, since it is certain that he wasn’t the man in oilskins you met the night you landed⁠—or rather, dropped. He can’t have been because he doesn’t know a word of German. We ought to have thought of that clue ourselves. Bolton was on to it at once and points out that it puts out of court the whole inhabitants of the island except Miss Rendall who has a pretty good schoolgirl’s knowledge of German, and her father who has been abroad a lot and knows a bit of the language. And apart from all other considerations, the man in oilskins can’t have been either of them owing to their height. Miss R. is too short and Mr. R. too tall.

“Assuming therefore that you weren’t a bit lightheaded or anything of that kind (which, I am bound to say, Bolton thinks quite a likely explanation), the man you met must have landed from a submarine and gone away again in her. Bolton feels positive on this point, and I must say I agree with him.

“The only remaining difficulty is the attack on the shore. Here Bolton takes exactly the same line as I did when I questioned you. He thinks that as you didn’t actually see anybody, and as what you think you saw and heard are so vague and indefinite and so difficult to fit into any known method of murder, one can’t really draw any conclusions, and he quotes various cases he has known of people who fancied they were struck or seized or fired at in the dark, when actually there was some other explanation.

“By the way, as to the old gentleman with tinted spectacles who asked for a match, Bolton made enquiries of a number of people about the old men in the island, and he even took the trouble to interview them all. None have tinted spectacles and all deny having spoken with you. I am afraid that this discovery made him a bit sceptical about some of the other incidents. However he went into the whole thing very carefully indeed and I think we can all feel satisfied that with the departure of Mr. O’Brien the possibility of trouble within the island has been eliminated. Of course the Lord only knows who may not land in the place by night, and they may quite possibly have squared one or two of the natives to show a light, or to keep their eyes shut, or help them in one way or another. But that’s rather a different story.

“I am sorry I have nothing better to satisfy your dramatic soul, but hang it, a fellow who flies from the middle of the North Sea in a balloon and then drops through a fog and hits an island a few miles square, and afterwards gets mistaken for a spy, and shot at and finally arrested, oughtn’t to complain!

“Good luck to you. Keep out of balloons and don’t part with that revolver.

And there for the present⁠—and perhaps forever⁠—the story ends. I sat down straight off and began to write out this full, true, and particular account of the whole adventure, partly to keep my memory of everything fresh, and partly because it strikes me as not half a bad yarn in itself. Now that I have finished the job I must say that whether or no it will convince anybody else, it makes me feel more certain than ever that more has been going on in that island than met Mr. Bolton’s eye.

Professional detectives are no doubt very useful men at jobs they are accustomed to and when pitted against the ordinary criminal. But these war problems are quite new, and utterly different even from the German secret service machinations in time of peace. And the men they are opposed to are very extraordinary criminals indeed; they are a highly trained, scientific force, as much a wing of the German fighting forces as their air service or their submarines.

What chance has a man who looks like a cattle-dealer against these experts, especially when he is only in action for a week and starts with the assumption that the few invaluable facts given him are mostly works of imagination? Possibly he may have fluked upon the remedy by removing O’Brien, and if the island of Ransay gives no more trouble for the rest of this war, it will certainly look as though he had. But in that case he will have been uncommon lucky, because he seems to me to have overlooked or dismissed practically everything significant.

Take, for instance, the actual words used by my oilskinned friend. They most distinctly implied that he was living on shore. Take the incident of the blind, which may perhaps have been, as John Whiteclett says, an everyday accident, but which certainly happened in the house where the one man they do suspect was living, and would certainly involve the doctor if it were not a mere accident. Look at my security while I was humbugging them by my suspicious conduct, and then the unscrupulous and quickly repeated attempts to get rid of me after two things had happened⁠—my dropping of my accent at the Rendalls and the discovery of the parachute. Take that night on the shore when Miss Rendall escorted me armed with a pistol and her father joined her at the very place and the very time when the attack was made on me. As to its being an imaginary attack, my last doubts dissipated when I was fired at next day.

Then as to the idea of Mr. O’Brien trying to shoot duck, or suddenly being inspired by high-spirited homicidal mania, I simply decline to accept such absurd interpretations. I am not in the least sure it was he, to begin with. I feel convinced that more than one man is in it, and which conspirator took which part, who can say on the little evidence one has?

Again, take Mr. Bolton’s brilliant idea of enquiring who could speak German. How did he enquire? Probably asked them! Is he a German scholar himself? The odds are a thousand to one against it. Or take the mysterious old man with the tinted spectacles. His appearance by that roadside and subsequent disappearance into space is one of the oddest features of the case. I have no doubt at all now that the wax match enquiry was the beginning of a series of questions and answers which would have proved me a fellow conspirator if I had only known them. They probably became doubly suspicious of me from that moment and only waited to make quite sure before going all out to kill me. And yet, Bolton by coolly assuming I was a liar or a dreamer missed the entire significance of the incident.

But when it comes to asking myself honestly which people precisely I suspect, and how I propose to separate the incidents which (I freely admit) are perfectly consistent with the theory that I was genuinely suspected myself, from the incidents which cannot be explained on those grounds, and work out a watertight case against anybody in particular, I must confess that I am fairly beaten. I know that I don’t want to suspect that girl, though she did treat me like a member of a lower race and scored off me badly at the end; and I do want to suspect O’Brien. By the way, was he a real drunkard? I rather begin to wonder.

And that is the very unsatisfactory end of the matter so far.