"A few questions," the other murmured. "See here, Grimm," he went on, with a sudden change of tone, "you've been absent from town for exactly nine days, until yesterday morning. Just where have you spent those nine days?"
Harvey Grimm moved to the sideboard and helped himself to a cigarette from an open box.
"Well," he observed, "I'm hanged if I can see that that's anybody's business except my own."
"I will admit, sir," Brodie proceeded, "that there is, at the present moment, not the slightest necessity why you should answer that question—it is, in fact, a matter slightly removed from the immediate object of our visit this morning—and yet it is a question which I am going to press upon you, and which, should you feel so disposed, Mr. Grimm, you might possibly answer with great benefit to yourself. The long and short of it is this. Is it worth your while to put yourself right with the authorities and with me, or isn't it? I tell you, as man to man, I have a theory of my own about you and your disappearances."
"I should have thought," Harvey Grimm remarked, after a brief pause, "that Inspector Ditchwater, having made himself so free with my apartments, would have been in a position to have told you everything himself. However, come this way."
He led them into the bedroom. A portmanteau, not wholly unpacked, was open upon the stand.
"My portmanteau," he pointed out, "which, as you have doubtless already ascertained from the hall-porter, came back with me the night before last. There's the label."
Mr. Brodie turned it over and examined it.
"Exford," he murmured.
"Just so," Harvey Grimm assented. "Now what about those two sets of fishing-rods there?"