He paused there and I waited, making no sign.
“With a lady’s hatpin,” he added, “a big, three-cornered affair with a silver knob.”
I had a swift vision of a white, frightened face beneath a woollen cap, but I could not quite connect the girl of the previous night’s visit with any thought of crime. She did not fit into a picture of that sort. Yet I knew as certainly as if she had told me that she was in some way mixed up with it all. And why had they come to me? Did they know of that midnight visit? I was determined that they should tell me. I would give them no lead. They must do all the talking. Pepster, after a rather lengthy pause, seemed to realise the position.
“Perhaps you wonder why we come to you,” he said in his small, soft voice. “It was merely on the chance that in your late stroll last night—”
So they did know I had been out. Had they also seen my companion?
“—Sergeant Gamley—you stood to light a cigarette and the match lit up your face.”
Pepster paused there again with an obvious appearance of waiting. Following the normal course, the person addressed should now break into more or less voluble explanations of the why and wherefore of this midnight stroll, explanations which the detective could weigh as they came forth and so form some estimate of their value or otherwise to the quest on which he was engaged. There might be nothing in it. Pepster knew full well that he would interview and interrogate scores of persons during the next few days and would have to sift a prodigious amount of chaff on the off chance of an occasional grain of wheat. In any case he had to go on sifting. That was his job.
“Seeing your name was mentioned in the way it was,” Pepster went on, “I thought you might like to explain—”
“Yes?” I said inquiringly, “explain?”
“Your name was mentioned, you know,” Pepster murmured.