“In here,” he invited, and when French and the constable had taken the two chairs the room contained, he briskly repeated: “Yes, sir?”
At this hint not to waste valuable time, French promptly introduced himself and propounded his question. Mr. Hackworth looked impressed.
“You don’t tell me that gent was a wrong ’un?” he said anxiously, then another idea seeming to strike him, he continued: “Of course it don’t matter to me in a way, for I’ve got the car. I’ll tell you about it.”
French produced his photograph of Blessington.
“Tell me first if that’s the man,” he suggested.
Mr. Hackworth pushed the card up to the electric bulb. “It’s him,” he declared. “It’s him and no mistake. He walked in here yesterday—no, the day before—about eleven and asked to see the boss. ‘I’ve got a car,’ he said when I went forward, ‘and there’s something wrong with the engine. Sometimes it goes all right and sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe,’ he said, ‘you’ll start it up and it’ll run a mile or two well enough, then it begins to miss, and the speed drops perhaps to eight or ten miles. I don’t know what’s wrong.’
“ ‘What about your petrol feed?’ I said. ‘Sounds like your carburetor, or maybe your strainer or one of your pipes choked.’
“ ‘I thought it might be that,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t find anything wrong. However, I want you to look over it, that is, if you can lend me a car while you’re doing it.’
“Well, sir, I needn’t go into all the details, and to make a long story short, I agreed to overhaul the car and to lend him an old Napier while I was at it. He went away, and same day about two or before it he came back with his car, a yellow Armstrong Siddeley. It seemed to be all right then, but he said that that was just the trouble—it might be all right now and it would be all wrong within a minute’s time. So I gave him the Napier—it was a done machine, worth very little, but would go all right, you understand. He asked me how long I would take, and I said I’d have it for him next day, that was yesterday. He had three or four suitcases with him and he transferred these across. Then he got into the Napier and drove away, and that was the last I saw of him.”
“And what was wrong with his own car?”