The Phantom looked puzzled. “You never saw Miss Hardwick, and you have talked with her only over the telephone,” he murmured. “That being the case, I wonder why Pinto asked me, while we were in the storeroom this morning, if I knew what had become of Miss Hardwick.”
“Rumor has it that a romantic attachment exists between Miss Hardwick and the Gray Phantom. Pinto must have heard something about it.”
“But at the time he put the question he had not the faintest idea that I was the Gray Phantom. He still thought I was Thomas Granger. It was my way of responding to the question that aroused his suspicions. Now, he must have had some reason for supposing that Thomas Granger knew something of what had happened to Miss Hardwick.”
Granger considered. “Miss Hardwick may have told him about consulting me. But I think it just as likely that Pinto was playing a bit of clever strategy—that he had already suspected your identity and sprung that question about Miss Hardwick in the hope that you would betray yourself.”
“Perhaps.” The reporter’s theory seemed so natural that the Phantom wondered why it had not occurred to him before. “If that was his purpose, the trick worked beautifully. Tell me, was it before or after the murder of Gage that the Duke’s men came to you with the kidnaping proposition?”
Granger stared hard for an instant; then a glint of admiration appeared in his eyes. “Gray Phantom, you ought to have been a detective. That’s as neat a piece of mental acrobatics as I’ve seen in many a day. The proposal came to me a few days before Gage was murdered.”
“But the two plots might have been hatched simultaneously?”
“They might. I see what you are driving at. You think the two plots were related to a single object. Perhaps you are right.”
“Granger, you don’t think I murdered Gage?”
“No,” after a long pause; “but neither can I tell you who did. You, of course, are going on the presumption that Pinto is the culprit.”