“Good gracious! This puts rather a different complexion on things. Who are they, then?”
“The man’s name is Priestley.” If Guy and Mr. Doyle started violently, apparently the Superintendent did not notice. “Priestley. He’s got a flat in Half Moon Street. Well-to-do bachelor, with quiet tastes. Last man in the world to do anything of this sort, we’ve satisfied ourselves on that point all right. The girl’s his cousin. As a matter of fact he employs her, out of charity, no doubt, as his secretary. Perfectly respectable, both of them.”
This time Guy and Mr. Doyle did exchange glances. It was beyond the powers of human self-restraint not to do so. Each read in the other’s eye bewilderment charged with faint alarm. “What in the deuce is happening?” eye asked eye, and received no answer.
“You haven’t found the Crown Prince’s body yet, I suppose?” the Colonel ventured, as the Superintendent gazed moodily out through the French windows towards the river.
“We have, though,” the man from Scotland Yard replied grimly. “Just as we expected, on a boat passing Greenwich.”
“Bound for Bosnogovina?”
“Exactly. We thought they’d want to show it to the people, to prove he really was dead; and that’s just what happened.”
“Ah!”
Again Guy and Mr. Doyle exchanged glances. This time the glances said to each other: “Have they gone mad, or have we?”
There was a very intense silence.