My cousin, who was standing on the hearthrug, laughed heartily.
"That was only another piece of the rogue's plot," he said. "They must have had a clever head to direct them."
"Yes," I put in, "a clever head with only one eye in it, if I'm not much mistaken."
The inspector gave me a doubtful look; then his eye reverted to the whisky decanter upon which it had been fondly fixed. St. Nivel observed it and pushed the whisky towards him.
"Thank you, my lord," said the police officer, helping himself with a look of intense satisfaction; he did not often get such whisky. "It's a curious thing, however, that this man with one eye should ha' been doing all these pranks right under my nose as it were, and I never even heard of him before."
Being aware of his methods, I was not at all surprised.
Even now, knowing that I was respectably connected, he even suspected me, and regarded me as an impostor with rich relatives.
This story of the finding of the body on Lansdown only confirmed his views of my powers of invention.
"As a matter of fact," observed Lord St. Nivel, "I am only a stranger in these parts, having borrowed a friend's house for a week's shooting; but no doubt you can tell me what this tower is, where my cousin was kept a prisoner, and which my sister and I came across by the merest chance."
"Cruft's Folly," replied the beaming inspector, with his whisky glass in his hand. "Cruft's Folly has stood where it does nearly a hundred years. It was built by some gentleman, I believe, a long while ago, to improve the landscape, just like Sham Castle over yonder."