Ronny Devereux's letter to Bill

Ronny Devereux's letter to Bill is a posthumous message whose scheduled arrival turns an apparently settled death into a renewed source of danger. Sent under Ronald Devereux’s instructions for delivery two weeks after his sudden death, it leaves Bill Eversleigh visibly shaken and brings the Seven Dials affair back into the foreground. The exchange with Jimmy Thesiger makes the letter’s impact clear while withholding its precise contents.

Origin and delayed delivery

The letter reaches Bill through Ronald Devereux’s executors, not through a friend or an investigator. Ronald had left instructions that, if he died suddenly, a sealed envelope should be sent to Bill exactly a fortnight later. The arrangement gives the message a precise timetable: it is intended to arrive after Ronald can no longer explain it himself, and after the immediate shock of his death has had time to pass.

That delay is part of the letter’s significance. Bill describes its arrival as connected to the Seven Dials business, an affair that has already become difficult for him to make sense of. The correspondence therefore does more than preserve Ronald’s words; its arrival reactivates a danger and a question that had not been resolved. The executors’ role also gives the message a formal chain of delivery, distinguishing it from the improvised stories and suspicions circulating among the living.

Bill’s reaction and the withheld contents

When Jimmy asks what the letter said, Bill does not immediately explain. He turns a strange, uncertain look on Jimmy, accepts a whisky and soda, and remains dazed enough that Jimmy urges him to pull himself together. Bill says he cannot believe what is in the letter. His reaction establishes the message’s force without allowing the reader to inspect it: the letter is consequential, but its words remain outside this exchange.

Jimmy responds with a joking appeal to the habit of believing six impossible things before breakfast. The levity sits uneasily beside Bill’s shock. It does not resolve what has startled him; instead, it emphasizes the gap between Jimmy’s attempt to steady his friend and the seriousness Bill attributes to the message. When Bill begins to tell him more, Jimmy interrupts himself with a request to wait and goes outside. The scene ends before the letter’s contents are disclosed, turning a private act of reading into a fresh point of suspense.

Connection to the investigation

The letter’s importance is tied to the wider Seven Dials inquiry, but it should not be confused with the later story Bill uses to confront Jimmy. Superintendent Battle explains that Bill deliberately went to Jimmy’s rooms with a cooked-up tale: he claimed that papers belonging to Ronald Devereux had come into his hands and might cast suspicion on Jimmy. This was a calculated lure, devised to make Jimmy believe that incriminating material had surfaced and to expose what he would do about it.

The distinction matters. Ronald’s sealed letter is a genuine posthumous communication sent by his executors; the alleged papers in Bill’s later story are part of a police-backed deception. The real letter helps bring Bill and Jimmy back to the Seven Dials business, while the fabricated claim about papers becomes the means by which Bill risks his life to help catch Jimmy. The novel places these two forms of communication beside one another: one is delivered according to a dead man’s instructions, the other invented to provoke a living suspect.

Narrative function

The letter works as a delayed clue and a hinge between uncertainty and action. Its scheduled arrival gives Ronald’s death an afterlife in the plot: even when he cannot speak, an instruction he left behind can still unsettle Bill and reopen the investigation. Yet the scene withholds the message itself, concentrating attention on its recipient’s response and on Jimmy’s abrupt departure rather than on an explanation.

That withholding keeps the letter’s effects distinct from what can be stated about its text. It is linked to the Seven Dials affair, and Bill finds its contents almost impossible to believe; the exchange does not reveal exactly what Ronald wrote. What becomes clear later is that Bill’s intervention against Jimmy is deliberate and dangerous. The letter thus marks the point at which the mystery presses Bill toward action, while the later false claim about Devereux’s papers supplies the trap that Battle says finally helped bring Jimmy down.