“Now, Mr. Reed,” he said. “I want you to be sensible. For some days a figure has been seen in the basements of the various Beauregard houses. Your friends, the Smythes, reported it. Tonight we are on watch, and we see you breaking into the basement of the Smythe house. We already know some curious things about you, such as dismissing all the servants on half an hour’s notice and the disappearance of the French governess.”
“Mademoiselle! Why, she——” He checked himself.
“When we bring you here tonight, and you ask to be allowed to go upstairs and prepare your wife, she is locked in. The nurse is missing. We find her at last, also locked away and badly hurt, lying in a staircase trap, where some one, probably yourself, has removed the steps. I do not want to arrest you, but, now I’ve started, I’m going to get to the bottom of all this.”
Mr. Reed was ghastly, but he straightened in his chair.
“The Smythes reported this thing, did they?” he asked. “Well, tell me one thing. What killed the old gentleman—old Smythe?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, go a little further.” His cunning was boyish, pitiful. “How did he die? Or don’t you know that either?”
Up to this point I had been rather a detached part of the scene, but now my eyes fell on the tongs beside me.
“Mr. Reed,” I said, “isn’t this thing too big for you to handle by yourself?”
“What thing?”