He was now once more in his element, trying to obtain something remotely approaching a connected story from the two chief witnesses. He was an optimistic man, and he had no doubt that somebody must have seen the murder committed once more.
Guy’s story he had heard already. That was simplicity itself. Guy had been summoned away immediately after dinner by a note purporting to come from an old friend of his who had just taken a house a few miles away. He had gone off at once in the car with his wife, and after spending nearly three hours in trying to find the house had come to the conclusion that the address did not exist at all. He had thereupon returned. In the course of his journeying the note had most unfortunately been thrown away in disgust. Mrs. Nesbitt had corroborated these particulars and then retired, somewhat hurriedly (but that was hardly surprising), to bed. Cynthia, in fact, had chosen the path of prudence rather than bravado. Otherwise there would have now been three ditherers in the drawing-room instead of two. Cynthia was very decidedly alarmed—and she was a poor liar.
“Be quiet, you, Graves!” bellowed Inspector Cottingham, rounding suddenly with portentous authority upon his underling. “I’ve heard what you’ve got to say, and the less you talk about it the better; it don’t do you much credit, when all’s said and done. And how on earth do you expect me to understand what this gentleman’s trying to tell me, if you will keep on about that blessed cupboard? I’m sick and tired of that cupboard.” Inspector Cottingham was also a little jealous of that cupboard, but he could hardly tell a subordinate that. The cupboard, Inspector Cottingham could not help feeling, was the place where somebody ought to have contrived that he himself should have been the whole time, if the game had been played according to its proper rules.
“Now, sir, if you please,” he added, turning back to Mr. Foster. “The whole story right through, please, in your own words.”
Mr. Foster, who in any case had nobody else’s words in which to tell his story, complied with alacrity. He was a tubby, rather red little man, and at the moment he looked as if he were suffering from an acute attack of apoplexy. His slightly prominent, pale-blue eyes stood out farther than ever, his wide loose-lipped mouth gaped with the unspoken words seeking egress, his sanguine countenance was mottled with earnest perspiration. He swept himself along in the flood-tide of his own speech.
Guy listened with puckish delight concealed beneath the grave countenance proper to the occasion. His acquaintance with Mr. Foster had not been long, but it had been very intense. Acquaintance with Mr. Foster was like that. He pervaded as well as clung. One may dismiss limpets with an airy gesture, one may disregard the crab affixed to one’s toe, one may smile in an atmosphere of poison-gas; but one was still unfitted to cope with Mr. Reginald Foster. And the desolating, the heartrending, the utterly unforgivable thing was that Mr. Reginald Foster meant so well. Give us malice, surround us with backbiters, fill our house with blackguards; but Heaven defend us from the well-meaning bore.
Mr. Foster spluttered on. He had a good story to tell, and he was making the most of it.
“Crown Prince, eh?” interrupted the Inspector, now thoroughly genial again. “Crown Prince?”
Mr. Foster nodded importantly. “That’s what she said, Inspector, yes. Crown Prince.” The words slid smoothly off his tongue, like salad oil off the poised tablespoon.
“Perhaps you misunderstood her, Foster,” put in Guy, who was not feeling any too happy about the Crown Prince; he felt that to drag in Royalty was really overdoing it a little.