Mr. Foster went first, gingerly. The next moment he quickened his pace considerably, for a heavy foot, accustomed to kicking a football at the psychological moment, had caught him just below the small of the back and urged him ungently forward. As he fell on all fours on a damp floor, the door slammed behind him.
Chapter XV.
Various People Get Busy
Colonel Ratcliffe straightened himself up from the last footprint with a sigh of relief; he was no longer as young as he had been, and continuous stooping is a little arduous for a frame, however dapper, that is beginning to stiffen. He threw a thoughtful glance round and his eye kindled.
“Not a word about this to anybody, mind, Cottingham,” he remarked now to the Inspector at his side. “No, sir,” said the crestfallen Inspector. The Colonel had been careful not to rub things in too much, but Inspector Cottingham was a disillusioned man. The revenge for which he was thirsting would have surprised the intimates of this hitherto genial policeman; it was nothing less than that the authors of his ignominy should be hanged, drawn, and quartered, and that Inspector Cottingham might be granted official permission to dance on their graves.
“We’ve got to decide what we’re going to do about ft first,” continued the Colonel. “The blighter! Gad, I should never have thought he’d got it in him.”
“Neither should I, sir,” agreed the Inspector mournfully.
“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, by Jove! And there was that newspaper feller with the whole story under his eyes, if only he’d had the gumption to read it. You know, Cottingham, I seriously suspected those two at first, Doyle and Nesbitt; I did really. Until we found that bit of paper at the cross-roads, in fact. I was certain we were on a wild-goose chase over that; thought it was just a faked-up tale. And I admit that not for one moment did I expect that blood to be anything but chicken’s.”
“Yes, sir; we were all taken in at one time,” said the Inspector, neatly including his chief in the general obtuseness. “And if I hadn’t traced the ownership of that bit of paper,” he added carefully, “we’d all be in the dark still.”
“That’s right, Cottingham,” said the Colonel, ever generous. Far too generous, for instance, than to refer to a certain handkerchief whose damning initials had first put them on their present tack. “You did very well there; very well indeed. You know, now one comes to think of it, I can’t imagine why we ever paid any serious attention to the man’s story at all. Far too wild. Crown Prince, indeed! And never even arranging a sound alibi for his movements that evening. Why, the thing was obviously a hoax on the face of it, if we’d only had our wits about us.” The way the Colonel used the first person plural instead of the second was kindness itself.
“But what about the couple Graves saw?” asked the Inspector, shifting the conversation away from this awkward topic. “And the corpse, for the matter of that? In that case there must have been three others in it beside Mr. Foster.”