“Graves!” snorted the Colonel. “Graves wouldn’t see a body if it came walking along the tow-path towards him.”
The Inspector smiled politely at his superior’s humour. “Now, in the Garfield case, sir,” he remarked chattily, “what they——”
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it!” said the Colonel hastily. The roseate hues had quite faded from the Colonel’s horizon by this time. In a really rosy world a murder is invariably accompanied by its appropriate body; murders without bodies attached would be very rare indeed. “The whole tale sounds fishy to me. Sounds just like a situation in a cheap thriller.”
“Well, fancy that, sir!” beamed the Inspector, much struck by this example of powerful minds working in unison. “That’s just what I said last night.”
“And where’s that body?” barked the Colonel, with sudden wrath, as if he expected his companion to produce it instead of a rabbit out of his helmet. “We can’t do anything without that. We can’t even establish the fact of murder at all.”
“Well, we can’t do much without a body,” the Inspector went so far as to admit, “and that’s a fact.”
The Colonel relapsed for a moment or two into moody silence.
“If you ask me, Cottingham,” he said, a little explosively, “I believe the whole thing’s a mare’s nest. I don’t believe there is a body. I don’t believe there was even a murder. I believe Graves has been seeing visions.”
“Oh, come, sir,” chided the Inspector, who had no intention of being robbed of his murder in this high-handed manner. “Graves doesn’t drink as much as that, he doesn’t. Besides, he heard the shot and he examined the body. The man was dead right enough, Graves says. Tall, big chap, he was, one of them foreigners; Frenchy or German or something. Big black beard, he’d got, Graves said, and wearing——”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted the Colonel testily. “I know perfectly well what Graves said, and in my opinion he imagined the whole thing. May have seen something, perhaps, and imagined the rest. Apparently handcuffed two people together, if one can believe a single word he says (probably two quite innocent people, if I know Graves), and——”