“Certainly. What excellent nerves you have, Anne. You are capable of taking an intelligent interest in things when most girls would be sniffling and wringing their hands.”
“Why did you take Harry as your secretary instead of giving him up to the police?”
“I wanted those cursed diamonds. Nadina, the little devil, was playing off your Harry against me. Unless I gave her the price she wanted, she threatened to sell them back to him. That was another mistake I made—I thought she’d have them with her that day. But she was too clever for that. Carton, her husband, was dead too—I’d no clue whatsoever as to where the diamonds were hidden. Then I managed to get a copy of a wireless message sent to Nadina by some one on board the Kilmorden—either Carton or Rayburn, I didn’t know which. It was a duplicate of that piece of paper you picked up. ‘Seventeen one twenty two,’ it ran. I took it to be an appointment with Rayburn, and when he was so desperate to get aboard the Kilmorden I was convinced that I was right. So I pretended to swallow his statements, and let him come. I kept a pretty sharp watch upon him and hoped that I should learn more. Then I found Minks trying to play a lone hand and interfering with me. I soon stopped that. He came to heel all right. It was annoying not getting Cabin 17, and it worried me not being able to place you. Were you the innocent young girl you seemed, or were you not? When Rayburn set out to keep the appointment that night, Minks was told off to intercept him. Minks muffed it of course.”
“But why did the wireless message say ‘seventeen’ instead of ‘seventy-one’?”
“I’ve thought that out. Carton must have given that wireless operator his own memorandum to copy off on to a form, and he never read the copy through. The operator made the same mistake we all did, and read it as 17.1.22 instead of 1.71.22. The thing I don’t know is how Minks got on to Cabin 17. It must have been sheer instinct.”
“And the dispatch to General Smuts? Who tampered with that?”
“My dear Anne, you don’t suppose I was going to have a lot of my plans given away, without making an effort to save them? With an escaped murderer as a secretary, I had no hesitation whatever in substituting blanks. Nobody would think of suspecting poor old Pedler.”
“What about Colonel Race?”
“Yes, that was a nasty jar. When Pagett told me he was a Secret Service fellow, I had an unpleasant feeling down the spine. I remembered that he’d been nosing around Nadina in Paris during the War—and I had a horrible suspicion that he was out after me! I don’t like the way he’s stuck to me ever since. He’s one of those strong, silent men who have always got something up their sleeve.”
A whistle sounded. Sir Eustace picked up the tube, listened for a minute or two, then answered: