The detective was silent for awhile, and bit savagely at his cigar.
"He was not a wealthy man, then," I remarked.
"No," replied Forrest. "There was no trace of his owning any property anywhere, and his expenditure on the gas plant and on his motors—we found that the various parts had been made to specification at a variety of works in England and abroad—had eaten heavily into his capital, so that at the time of the commencement of his career he must have been very nearly penniless. Whether he built the motor with the idea of utilizing it for the purpose he ultimately put it to, of course I cannot say, but I have a shrewd suspicion that he really did design it for the purpose, since from what I have learned of him the predatory instinct must have been pretty strongly developed in him."
The detective paused for a minute, and, flicking the ash off his cigar, gazed meditatively into the fire.
"You shall judge for yourselves," he continued. "Unfortunately, I cannot begin right at the beginning, for I do not know where he was born, nor who his parents were. I can only guess at these facts from the knowledge that, as a boy, he was at school in the south of England, and that then his name was Ram Krishna Roy."
"What?" I asked, in amazement. "A Hindu?"
"An Eurasian, I should fancy," replied Forrest. "He had been sent to school in England by one of those petty Indian princes, who still exercise sovereignty under British suzerainty."
"How did you discover that?" asked Evie.
"It was like this, Mrs. Sutgrove," replied Forrest. "Amongst the papers I spoke about as being in the old portmanteau, were a number of letters written in characters I could not understand. I could see they were oriental, and that was as much as I could make of them, so I took them to a noted oriental scholar who translated them for me. The language was Urdu, and the writer was a munshi, who was obviously communicating with an old pupil. There were so many references to scenes with which the person to whom the letters were addressed, as well as the writer, was familiar, that it was quite clear that the former must have been brought up amidst purely native surroundings. There were one or two more obscure allusions which led me to conclude that the boy's mother must have been a white woman, and from what we saw of him there can be no doubt but that he was white on one side."
"Nobody would have taken him to be aught but an Englishman," murmured Evie.