"Now I ask you," said Bowers in a cooler tone.
"Here! You think your governor — or Keppel — was up to some funny business?"
The other evidently saw that he had gone too far. "Not my governor," he declared with quiet earnestness. "That I'll swear to. You know that: anybody at your police station knows that. He was much too anxious to keep on the good side of the slops. He's a foreigner, d'jersee? He's registered at the police station, but he's always been in a stew and sweat for fear they'll make him leave the country at the end of six months or nine months or whatever it is. Not him! Why, I could tell you-"
"You could tell me what?"
I became aware that I had either altered my voice or overstressed by curiosity as a policeman. There was a subtle change in the atmosphere of the hall. Though he tried to seem casual, Bowers was studying me with his head a little on one side, and in his small quick eyes there was a dawning of what might be suspicion.
"See here, mister," said my little cock-sparrow, and took a step forward, "just 'oo are you, anyhow? Sometimes you talk like a copper, and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you act like a copper, and sometimes you act like-"
Before his mind could jump any farther along that line of thought, something had to be done. "I'll tell you what I am," said the aggressive Law. "I'm a man who means to get on in the world, that's what I am. I mean to be a sergeant before I'm many years older. Understand that, cocky? And, if you want to know it, that's why I've been watching this house for some time."
"Go on!" he said, and fell back.
"We know that there are things in this house that want explaining. We know that three nights out of a week your boss locks himself up in the back parlour, with shutters on the windows. But we've seen an odd kind of light through that window — I've seen it myself. We know he's working on an invention or an experiment of some kind. What is it? It's not only what we want to know; it's what Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office want to know."
"Come off it," said Bowers with pale scepticism, after a pause. But his eyes remained fixed. "Why, I'll tell you straight," he added quietly, "there's nothing in that room. Don't I know it? I tidy up there every day. And there's nothing at all except a lot of books. He don't even keep anything locked; not even his desk. I've looked. If he wants to shut himself up there in the evenings, that's his business, but he don't work at any experiments there. You want to see? I can show you right now."