"Of course not, but he seems to have thought you were."
"But why?—I mean, when I first spoke to him, I just said, 'Mr. Oliver, I think?' And he said, 'You are mistaken.' And I said, 'Surely not. My name's Fentiman, and you knew my grandfather, old General Fentiman.' And he said he hadn't the pleasure. So I explained that we wanted to know where the old boy had spent the night before he died, and he looked at me as if I was a lunatic. That annoyed me, and I said I knew he was Oliver, and then he complained to the guard. And when I saw him just trying to hop off like that, without giving us any help, and when I thought about that half-million, it made me so mad I just collared him. 'Oh, no, you don't,' I said—and that was how the fun began, don't you see."
"I see perfectly," said Wimsey. "But don't you see, that if he really is Oliver and has gone off in that elaborate manner, with false passports and everything, he must have something important to conceal."
Fentiman's jaw dropped.
"You don't mean—you don't mean there's anything funny about the death? Oh! surely not."
"There must be something funny about Oliver, anyway, mustn't there? On your own showing?"
"Well, if you look at it that way, I suppose there must. I tell you what, he's probably got into some bother or other and is clearing out. Debt, or a woman, or something. Of course that must be it. And I was beastly inconvenient popping up like that. So he pushed me off. I see it all now. Well, in that case, we'd better let him rip. We can't get him back, and I daresay he won't be able to tell us anything after all."
"That's possible, of course. But when you bear in mind that he seems to have disappeared from Gatti's, where you used to see him, almost immediately after the General's death, doesn't it look rather as though he was afraid of being connected up with that particular incident?"
Fentiman wriggled uncomfortably.
"Oh, but, hang it all! What could he have to do with the old man's death?"