Edward pictured the scene behind those windows, the evil-living man helplessly waiting for what he must hope would be annihilation. He imagined the men round the bed, men intent on plunder, and who could barely wait until the breath left their royal master's body. He wondered what visions were disturbing the king's last hours, and he thought of the many things he had heard of the monarch's past life.
He remembered the tales of murdered and mutilated natives in the rubber plantations of the tiny colony in West Africa which was under the rule of San Pietro. He thought of Enrico's sisters and brothers, all of whom had put their relative out of their lives—and of the heir, travelling where no one knew. The death couch of the King of San Pietro must be an uneasy one indeed.
The words of Fagin ran through his mind as he watched the windows; how did they go—"as it came on dark, he began to think of all the men he had known who had died.... They rose up in quick succession, that he could hardly count them."—Yes, Enrico's last hours must be very like those spent by the old Jew in his Newgate cell.
Edward shuddered a little and took a sip of cognac. Then he picked up the paper again idly and turned to the home news. There were the usual amusement notes and the statistics of play at the tables in the Casino. He read with little interest how a wealthy Austrian nobleman had had a successive run of seventeen on the black, and how he had been forced to have the assistance of one of the attendants to carry the spoil to the hotel.
He looked in vain for an account of the accident on the Alcador road. Galva's death had been soon forgotten, the readers of El Imparcial de Corbo were no more interested in it than in the suicide two days previously of the young American, a ruined gambler, who had thrown himself into the sea from the rocks east of the bay.
As he rose to pay his bill, voices at a near table arrested him, and he sat down again and lit the stump of his cigar. Two men, of the middle class, were discussing the motor-car fatality. One of them had remarked how Lieutenant Mozara should have known that road better than to have had such an accident. The speaker himself had seen him often start out that way, and he had a sister, the wife of an innkeeper at Alcador, who had told him that the lieutenant seldom missed the bull-fights that took place periodically in the Plaza of that town. Edward, with his eyes glued to the paper he held before him, drank in every word. It seemed to him corroboration of Anna Paluda's doubts. There was only one direct road to Alcador, and it was difficult to imagine for one moment that such an experienced driver as Lieutenant Mozara undoubtedly was would forget the dangerous bend that wound above the Ardentella rapids.
And yet he said to himself that Gaspar Mozara was scarcely the man to take the risk of the fall. He would be running the same danger as Miranda, and yet here he was in Corbo, to the best of Edward's belief, unhurt. The next words from the adjoining table made matters a little clearer. It was the other man who was speaking now.
"——I was on the road when they were getting the wrecked car out of the water. I gave them a hand, and, although the machine was badly smashed, one thing struck me as very curious. The brakes had not been applied—whatever happened, the car had gone through the wall at full speed."
The lieutenant's words of the afternoon returned to the man who was listening behind the newspaper, how he had put on the brakes when he had seen the danger. Edward was now convinced that Mozara was lying, but even then he was no nearer the solution of the mystery. Perhaps, after all, Miranda had been in the car, but Edward would not allow himself to think that.
He felt sure that some sign further than the hat and cloak would have been found. It was barely possible that the girl's body would be so separated from the car as to leave a hat and cloak only. It was all but a certainty that she would have been pinned beneath the wreckage. The dainty motor bonnet, too, tied tightly, as he remembered, beneath the chin—how could that have become detached?