“Pretty well for that,” answered Tom Chandler, a smile on his good-natured face. “She told us yesterday in the office that it must be the consciousness of guilt which has worried Sir Dace to a skeleton. Now then, we’ll begin.”
He dotted down my answers to his questions, also what I voluntarily added. Then he took a sheet of paper from his pocket, closely written upon, and compared its statements—they were Tanerton’s—with mine. Putting his finger on the paper to mark a place, he looked at me.
“Did Sir Dace speak of Pym or of Captain Tanerton that night, when you were playing chess with Miss Fontaine?”
“Sir Dace did not come into the drawing-room. He had left the dinner-table in a huff to shut himself up in his library, Miss Fontaine said; and he stayed in it.”
“Then you did not see Sir Dace at all that night?”
“Oh yes, later—when Captain Tanerton and young Saxby came up to tell him of the death. We then all went down to Ship Street together. You have taken that down.”
“True,” said Chandler. “Well, I cannot make much out of it as it stands,” he concluded, folding the papers and putting them in his pocket-book. “What do you say is the number of the house in the Marylebone Road?”
I told him, and he went away, wishing he could accept my offer of staying to drink tea with us.
“Look here, Chandler,” I said to him at the front-door: “why don’t you take down Sir Dace Fontaine’s evidence, as well as mine and Tanerton’s?”
“I have done it,” he answered. “I was with Sir Dace to-day. Mrs. Tanerton’s suspicions are of course—absurd,” he added, making a pause, as if at a loss for a suitable word, “but for her peace of mind, poor lady, we would like to pitch upon the right individual if we can. And as yet he seems to be a myth.”