somewhere in the background--the murderer?

Chisholm and I had no great difficulty--indeed, we had nothing that you
might call a difficulty--in finding out something about the murdered man
at Peebles. We had the half-ticket with us, and we soon got hold of the
booking-clerk who had issued it on the previous afternoon. He remembered
the looks of the man to whom he had sold it, and described him to us well
enough. Moreover, he found us a ticket-collector who remembered that same
man arriving in Peebles two days before, and giving up a ticket from
Glasgow. He had a reason for remembering him, for the man had asked him
to recommend him to a good hotel, and had given him a two-shilling piece
for his trouble. So far, then, we had plain sailing, and it continued
plain and easy during the short time we stayed in Peebles. And it came to
this: the man we were asking about came to the town early in the
afternoon of the day before the murder; he put himself up at the best
hotel in the place; he was in and out of it all the afternoon and
evening; he stayed there until the middle of the afternoon of the next
day, when he paid his bill and left. And there was the name he had
written in the register book--Mr. John Phillips, Glasgow.

Chisholm drew me out of the hotel where we had heard all this and pulled
the scrap of bill-head from his pocket-book.

"Now that we've got the name to go on," said he, "we'll send a wire to
this address in Dundee asking if anything's known there of Mr. John
Phillips. And we'll have the reply sent to Berwick--it'll be waiting us
when we get back this morning."

The name and address in Dundee was of one Gavin Smeaton, Agent, 131A Bank
Street. And the question which Chisholm sent him over the wire was plain