“Do you mind,” he asked, “if I come, too, and Bransome?”
“Why, of course not,” the Duke replied. “We shall be delighted. We have seventy bedrooms, and only half a dozen or so of us. But tell me—is this young man as important as all that?”
“We shall have to have a serious talk,” the Prime Minister said, “in a few days’ time. I don’t think that even you grasp the exact position of affairs as they stand today. Just now I am bothered to death about other things. Heseltine has just been in from the Home Office. He is simply inundated with correspondence from America about those two murders.”
The Duke nodded.
“It’s an odd thing,” he remarked, “that they should both have been Americans.”
“Heseltine thinks there’s something behind this correspondence,” the Prime Minister said slowly. “Washington was very secretive about the man Fynes’ identity. I found that out from Scotland Yard. Do you know, I’m half inclined to think, although I can’t get a word out of Harvey, that this man Fynes—”
The Prime Minister hesitated.
“Well?” the Duke asked a little impatiently.
“I don’t want to go too far,” his chief said. “I am making some fresh inquiries, and I am hoping to get at the bottom of the matter very shortly. One thing is very certain, though, and that is that no two murders have ever been committed in this city with more cold-blooded deliberation, and with more of what I should call diabolical cleverness. Take the affair of poor young Vanderpole, for instance. The person who entered his taxi and killed him must have done so while the vehicle was standing in the middle of the road at one of the three blocks. Not only that, but he must have been a friend, or some one posing as a friend—some one, at any rate, of his own order. Vanderpole was over six feet high, and as muscular as a young bull. He could have thrown any one out into the street who had attempted to assault him openly.”
“It is the most remarkable case I ever heard of in my life,” the Duke admitted, helping himself to a cigarette from a box which he had just discovered.