“Well, I mustn’t detain you,” she said. “Be sure to let me know if you discover anything else that’s interesting.”
As she moved across the lawn she glanced over her shoulder and smiled encouragingly; but if Freddie had been a thought-reader he would hardly have felt flattered.
“What a malicious little reptile,” she reflected. “He makes me feel shivery. Luckily he’s not likely to do any real harm. Nobody will pay any attention to him.”
Chapter VIII
Conway Westenhanger had no very high opinion of his own ability to unravel the Talisman mystery, and the more he thought over the subject the less could he see any simple solution. One point, however, seemed beyond dispute: the method of elimination, as handled by Freddie Stickney, had been given a trial and had led to absolutely nothing whatever. The net result of Freddie’s efforts was that everybody had been made to feel uncomfortable, while not a single gleam of light had been thrown upon the problem. And yet, given the conditions of the case, the elimination method seemed to promise results. If the servants were put on one side, and if no thief had got into the house in the darkness, then only thirteen persons remained who had any possible means of access to the Corinthian’s Room that night. One of them must be responsible for the vanishing of the Talisman. That seemed an inevitable conclusion.
But here his train of thought was crossed by another. He could not quite dismiss from his mind the impression made upon him by the way in which old Rollo Dangerfield had taken his loss.
“The thing’s worth at least £50,000,” Westenhanger reflected. “The Dangerfields may be well enough off, but a loss on that scale is something more than a flea-bite. And yet he doesn’t seem disturbed in the slightest. One could bet that he really believes the Talisman will turn up again in a few days. If it isn’t cold confidence, then it’s the best acting I ever saw. I could almost take my oath that he meant what he said.”
He turned the matter over and over in his mind for a time; but although a number of suggestions offered themselves, none of them seemed satisfying.
“It may be a case of rank superstition, but I don’t read him so myself. Who believes in that sort of stuff nowadays? It can’t be that. Of course, he side-tracked all the talk about the Dangerfield Secret. He’s probably half-ashamed of that business—likely it’s some old ritual about informing the heir that in 1033 or so the head of the Dangerfields sold his soul to the Devil. The Dangerfield Secret has nothing to do with the case anyway.”
But Westenhanger was wrong on that point, as he was to discover at no distant date. However, dismissing that line of thought, he sought for other possible explanations of the mystery.