In the dining-room was peace. Pulling himself together with an effort, Mr. Priestley took out a cigarette and proceeded to peruse the incredible report in the Sunday Courier. Eight minutes later, the cigarette between his fingers still unlighted, he had read it through three times and still he could hardly believe his eyes.
“Amazing!” he commented aloud, as if to reassure himself that he really did exist and his voice really would work. “I can hardly credit it. ‘R. S. P. Doyle.’ That’s Pat Doyle. How on earth does he come to be mixed up in it?” He referred to the paper again. “‘Happened to be staying in the neighbourhood.’ Extraordinary coincidence. Whole set of extraordinary coincidences for that matter. Well, God bless my soul, what is coming now?”
The entrance of Laura supplied the answer at any rate to his last question. A rehabilitated, dry-eyed, nose-powdered Laura, very different from the moaning creature of ten minutes ago.
She began to apologise for her lack of self-control. “But really,” she added, not without adroitness, “seeing it all in print like that brought it home to me so forcibly. It seemed like a nightmare this morning; now I know it really is true. I ought not to have given way, I know, but I was so frightened. Terribly frightened.” She looked at him with wide eyes. “Oh, Mr. Priestley, what shall I do?” With a superhuman effort she refrained from expressing a preference for Birmingham, and regrets at finding herself in Crewe.
Mr. Priestley removed his pince-nez, polished them vigorously and replaced them. “Don’t you worry about that, my dear,” he told her, with a warmth which belied the paternal turn of phrase. “I shall see to that. You have already placed yourself in my hands. And very proud and gratified I am at the trust you put in me. Indeed, I have the glimmerings of a plan already. But I must ask you to read through this perfectly extraordinary report in the Sunday Courier. Incredible! You’ll see it isn’t at all what you thought at first. Nothing like it. In fact, I—but read it for yourself.” He placed a chair for her by the window and gave her the paper.
Laura read the two columns through. That she was able to do so and at the same time preserve a straight face she reckoned afterwards as perhaps the greatest of her histrionic feats. But apart from mirth, there was interest to help her. Obviously the conspirators had seen their way to improving the situation and, though some of the details were obscure, she had no difficulty in following the main lines. When she came to Mr. Reginald Foster’s story and recognised Dora’s handiwork it was all she could do not to give way again, but the test was successfully passed.
She held the paper up for a few minutes after she had come to the end, in order to give herself a thinking-space. Clearly the others hoped that the report would reach her eyes and expected her to shape her own end of the business accordingly. But what exactly were they trying to effect, and what did they want her to do? For the moment the answers to both these questions eluded her.
She dropped the paper into her lap, with a fitting expression of amazement.
“You see what must have happened?” said Mr. Priestley eagerly, whose brain also had not been inactive during this period. “Your schemes must have conflicted with something else that that scoundrel had on hand. I gather he was mixed up with this criminal gang led by the Man with the Broken Nose. They found his body, which, for some obscure reason of their own, they seem to have removed, and decamped. But why did that poor girl, who seems to be an unwilling accomplice, refer to the dead man as the Crown Prince? I don’t understand that at all.”
Nor, in fact, did Laura. The Crown Prince seemed to her the only flaw in an otherwise perfect case. “Perhaps,” she said, with a flash of inspiration, “perhaps that was the gang’s name for him, in the same way as they call their leader the Man with the Broken Nose.”