“Decidedly not. It only serves to make the case more mysterious. You are certain that this man had the full confidence of Mr. Field?”
“I am. I have often heard him speak of the faithfulness of this man in particular.”
Nick did not at all like the appearance of things.
The story that Joe Timon had to tell had an air of truthfulness, and yet it was far from satisfactory to the detective. There were not a few points about it that appeared to him as unnatural.
In the first place it was rather peculiar that the assassins should have taken the trouble to go around and bind the servants if their purpose here was only to take the life of Mr. Field, something which could be accomplished in the fraction of a minute.
Their binding of the servants would, on the face of it, argue that they had need of time, as would be the case only if they were intending to take the time to systematically select the plunder they wanted.
Secondly, while the story of falling downstairs and rendering himself insensible might be true, still it had about it a something that to the detective was “fishy.”
Thirdly, it did not seem to him as being natural that Timon could forget that his fellow servants were bound and in need of assistance. In his opinion the natural course under the circumstances would have been for Timon to have unbound them before seeking Mr. Barnes.
A fact in connection with Timon’s failure to do this stood out before the detective’s mental vision very prominently—and this fact was that, in his interim when, according to his story, he was unconscious, the body of Mr. Field disappeared.
And he asked himself this question: