Jenny's eyes opened. "Who on earth ever said it was?"
"Still miss, one or two people seem to have got the idea." His eye swung towards Martin. "What about you, sir?"
"It did occur to me, yes. But not very seriously."
"Oh, ah. And that's right Yesterday evening at the police-station, we got a message from London. From a supply-firm that keeps records as far back as the Flood, it'ud seem. Dr. Pierre Laurier, the old one who's dead, bought the skeleton as an anatomical specimen in 1912.
"Also last night, before he went to join you on the (hurrum!) ghost-hunt, Sir Henry and I talked with ‘young' Dr. Hugh Laurier, who's forty-eight years old. Lives just outside the town-limits of Brayle."
This was after the Ben-Hur chariot-race, I gather?" Martin asked.
Masters frowned at him slightly, and addressed Jenny..
"Dr. Hugh, miss, told us all about it. When it became (hurrum!) — well, what you might call not fashionable to have skeletons hanging about in doctors' offices, his father put it away in a cupboard. It wasn't till shortly before his death in 1936, when he was old and maybe a bit fanciful, that this Pierre Laurier… was he French, miss?"
"Yes. His name was formerly De Laurier. That means," Jenny spoke wearily, "he was a nobleman, and Grandmother simply— Never mind. And the Fleets! He was supposed to have a hopeless passion for Aunt Cicely."
Masters made a broad wave of the hand.