There was no possible doubt as to Kitely's murder: from what Brereton had heard that afternoon there seemed to be just as little doubt that Stoner had also been murdered.

He had heard what the local medical men had to say--one and all agreed that though the clerk had received injuries in his fall which would produce almost instantaneous death he had received a mortal blow before he fell.
Who struck that blow?
Everything seemed to point to the fact that the man who struck it was the man who strangled Kitely--a man of great muscular power.
Glancing around the room as he sat in a big easy chair, his hands behind his head, Brereton's eyes fell suddenly on Kitely's legacy to Windle Bent.

The queer-looking old volume which, because of its black calf binding and brass clasp, might easily have been taken for a prayer-book, lay just where Bent had set it down on his desk when Christopher Pett formally handed it over--so far as Brereton knew Bent up to now had never even opened it.

And it was with no particular motive that Brereton now reached out and picked it up, and unsnapping the clasp began idly to turn over the leaves on which the old detective had pasted cuttings from newspapers and made entries in his crabbed handwriting.

Brereton believed that he was idly handling what Pett had jocosely described the book to be--a mere scrap-book.