Twenty-one
Detective Inspector¹ Hardcastle looked at the calendar on his desk. 20th September. Just over tendays. They hadn’t been able to make as much progress as he would have liked because they wereheld up with that initial difficulty: the identification of a dead body. It had taken longer than hewould have thought possible. All the leads seemed to have petered out, failed. The laboratoryexamination of the clothes had brought in nothing particularly helpful. The clothes themselves hadyielded no clues. They were good quality clothes, export quality, not new but well cared for.
Dentists had not helped, nor laundries, nor cleaners. The dead man remained a “mystery man!”
And yet, Hardcastle felt, he was not really a “mystery man.” There was nothing spectacular ordramatic about him. He was just a man whom nobody had been able to come forward andrecognize. That was the pattern of it, he was sure. Hardcastle sighed as he thought of the telephonecalls and letters that had necessarily poured in after the publication in the public press of thephotograph with the caption² below it: DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN? Astonishing the amount ofpeople who thought they did know this man. Daughters who wrote in a hopeful vein³ of fathersfrom whom they’d been estranged⁴ for years. An old woman of ninety was sure that the photographin question was her son who had left home thirty years ago. Innumerable wives had been sure thatit was a missing husband. Sisters had not been quite so anxious to claim brothers. Sisters, perhaps,were less hopeful thinkers. And, of course, there were vast numbers of people who had seen thatvery man in Lincolnshire, Newcastle, Devon, London, on a tube, in a bus, lurking⁵ on a pier,looking sinister⁶ at the corner of a road, trying to hide his face as he came out of the cinema.
Hundreds of leads, the more promising⁷ of them patiently followed up and not yielding anything.
But today, the inspector felt slightly more hopeful. He looked again at the letter on his desk.

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