“Then it’ll be him who axed for ye on the telephone?”
“When?”
“It ’ud be somewheres about a quarter or half past eight. Lizzie tole me after the old leddy kem up to see if you’d taken the car out.”
Medenham’s wits were alert enough now.
“I don’t fully understand,” he said. “What old lady, and why did she come?”
“That’s wot bothered me,” was the reply. “Everybody knew that the young leddy an’ you were on the Wye: ’deed to goodness, some of us thought you were in it. Anyways, it was long after ten when she——”
“You mean Mrs. Devar, I suppose—the older lady of the two who arrived in my car?”
“Yes, that’s her. She wanted to be sure the car wasn’t gone, and nothing would suit her but the key must be brought from the orfis an’ the coach-house door unlocked so’s she could see it with her own eyes. Well, Lizzie sez to me, ‘That’s funny, it is, because she watched they two goin’ on the river, and was in the box a long time telephonin’ to a shuffer called Dale, at Hereford.’ Thinks I, ‘It’s funnier that the shuffer who’s here should be expectin’ a chap named Dale,’ but I said nothink. I never does to wimmen. Lord luv yer, they’ll twist a tale twenty ways for Sundays to suit their own pupposes afterwards.”
Lightning struck from a cloudless sky a second time that night at Symon’s Yat, and in its gleam was revealed the duplicity of Mrs. Devar. Medenham could not guess the double significance of Dale’s message and failure to appear, but he was under no delusion now as to the cause of those honeyed words. Dale had been indiscreet, had probably blurted out his employer’s title, and Mrs. Devar knew at last who the chauffeur was whose interference had baffled her plans.
He laughed bitterly, but did not pursue the inquiry any further.