Bobby is lured away with a job offer in South America

The offer from Henriquez and Dallo in Buenos Aires was an apparently extraordinary job opportunity that Bobby Jones refused, but its timing made it a revealing part of the danger surrounding his investigation. Sent shortly after Bobby passed on the dying man's question to The Caymans, it seemed to Frankie Derwent and Bobby less like an independent career offer than a bid to get him out of the way. Its failure did not end the threat: Bobby later connected it to an attempt to poison him with morphia.

The offer and its terms

On the Wednesday after Bobby had told his father he planned to go to town the following Monday week to take up a job, another letter arrived. Written in a foreign, slanting hand, it came from Henriquez and Dallo, a firm in Buenos Aires, and offered him a position at a salary of a thousand a year. The letter said that an ex-naval man was preferred, suggested that someone unnamed had recommended Bobby, and demanded an immediate answer. He would have to be ready to leave for Buenos Aires within a week.

The scale and urgency of the proposal startled Bobby. He reread the letter, initially finding its promise almost impossible to believe. When he told Rev. Thomas Jones that someone had offered him a thousand a year, his father's immediate surprise displaced the lecture he had been beginning. Yet the offer did not stand alone: Bobby had already committed himself to Badger Beadon and a garage project, a plan Rev. Thomas Jones regarded as foolish and financially risky. His opposition to Badger and his doubts about the venture set up the choice the letter appeared to offer: a lucrative new life abroad, or a promise Bobby felt he could not break.

Why Bobby refused

Rev. Thomas Jones dismissed Bobby's arrangement with Badger as an immature commitment and urged him to abandon it. Bobby defended Badger as unlucky rather than idle, recalling his work raising chickens, and repeated that Badger was counting on him. The disagreement ended with Rev. Thomas Jones leaving the room in anger. Bobby then sat down and wrote to Henriquez and Dallo, rejecting the offer.

The refusal cost Bobby something tangible. He recognized that a salary of a thousand a year was a chance unlikely to recur, and sighed over what he was giving up. But he could see no alternative to keeping his word to Badger. That choice is important to the offer's place in the story: the attempt to draw Bobby away did not succeed through its financial appeal, because his loyalty to a friend outweighed the prospect of advancement. It also meant that refusing the job could not, by itself, explain the danger that followed.

The timing becomes suspicious

Frankie Derwent linked the letter to an earlier disclosure. Bobby had written to The Caymans on the evening of the Marchbolt cliff death, reporting the dying man's question, Why didn't they ask Evans?, while suggesting that it might be unimportant. Amelia Cayman replied politely, agreeing that the words seemed to have no significance and thanking him for taking the trouble to write. Two days later, Bobby received the Buenos Aires offer. The sequence transformed a strange piece of correspondence into a possible response to what Bobby had told The Caymans.

Frankie then set the offer beside the next development: after Bobby turned it down, people followed him and an opportunity was taken to put a large quantity of morphia into his beer. She treated the two attempts as parts of one design—to send Bobby far away if he could be induced to go, and to incapacitate him when he remained. Bobby accepted this reconstruction conditionally, reasoning that if Frankie was right, The Caymans had to be involved. Their suspicion grew from the surrounding problem of the corpse's identity: they believed that a photograph had been switched and that Amelia Cayman had identified the dead man as her brother, although the identification did not convince them. These were investigative deductions, not proof that the firm itself had knowingly participated in the scheme.

A clue in a larger pattern

The offer's significance lies in the way its ordinary form—a salary, a recommendation, a prompt start date—conceals a possible effort to interrupt an inquiry. Bobby had questioned whether an alleged killer would have waited until after the inquest to act against him, since Bobby might have challenged the photograph identification sooner. The later offer sharpened that question: his failure to leave for South America and the subsequent poisoning suggested that the danger persisted after the apparent opportunity to remove him had passed. Neither the letter's unnamed recommender nor its authorship established who arranged the threat, so the timing supplied suspicion rather than a conclusive answer.

As the investigation continued, the cryptic question acquired a concrete connection. Bobby eventually discovered that the parlourmaid in Mrs Templeton's house was named Evans; the question of why she had not been asked to witness John Savage's will became conspicuous to him and Frankie. That later discovery makes the earlier letter more than a convenient coincidence in retrospect: Bobby had repeated a clue whose meaning he did not understand, and the events that followed made it seem dangerous to the people who did. The Buenos Aires job therefore marks the first clear attempt to draw him away from the case, while the refusal and the poisoning reveal how quickly the threat shifted from persuasion to force.