Inspector Teal arrived at Essenden Towers later, before the servants returned from their ball, and found four blasphemous men in the library. His great regret ever afterwards was that, in spite of the extraordinary circumstance of their discovery and their known reputations, he could never find a substantial charge to bring against them in connection with that night's mystery. It was even more suspicious because the stories they told were perfectly true, and they could not be made to contradict either themselves or one another under the most searching examination. Besides which, there were many scraps of circumstantial evidence to bear them out. And it is not a crime for four gangsters, however notorious, to be the guests of a peer.
This annoyed Teal, because he was unable to find any trace of the principal actors in the mystery. And even a minor scapegoat would have been better than none.
He went down through the wine cellar and found the flooded cave. When the waters had subsided, an extensive search was made with electric torches, but still the extent of the cavern and the source of its strange subterranean tides could not be discovered. And no human eyes ever saw Lord Essenden again.
It was late the following afternoon when a sleepless, but not more than ordinarily sleepy, Chief Inspector Teal returned to Scotland Yard to prepare his report.
"I don't suppose Essenden will ever be seen again," he told the assistant commissioner gloomily.
"He was murdered, of course?"
"Probably he was. But how are we ever going to prove that if we can't produce a body? You know the law as well as I do."
Cullis rasped his chin.
"Waldstein first, then Essenden. There must be a connecting link somewhere."
"Of course there is. Trelawney believes that her father was framed, and she's out to get the men who did it. Her idea is that there was a ring of first-class crooks working in with an accomplice right inside this building. Sir Francis Trelawney was the man they wanted here, though — and they couldn't get him. What was more, he was getting hotter on their trail every day. So he had to go. He was framed, with the help of their police accomplice; and we know the rest. That's her story, and somehow or other she's made the Saint believe it."