It wanted but thirteen minutes of being midnight when the gathering about the siding where the shunted carriage containing the body of the murdered man still stood received something in the nature of a shock when, on glancing round as a sharp whistle shrilled a warning note, they saw an engine, attached to one solitary carriage, backing along the metals and bearing down upon them.
"I say, Mr. Knockem, or Narkhim, or whatever your name is," blurted out Colonel Murchison, as he hastily caught the Hon. Mrs. Brinkworth by the arm and whisked her back from the metals, leaving his daughter to be looked after by Captain Crawford, "look out for your blessed bobbies. Somebody's shunting another coach in on top of us; and if the ass doesn't look what he's doing——There! I told you!" as the coach in question settled with a slight jar against that containing the body of Lord Stavornell. "Of all the blundering, pig-headed fools! Might have killed some of us. What next, I wonder?"
What next, as a matter of fact, gave him cause for even greater wonder; for as the two carriages met, the door of the last compartment in the one which had just arrived opened briskly, and out of it stepped first a couple of uniformed policemen, next a ginger-haired youth with a kit-bag in one hand and a saveloy in the other, then the
trim figure of the lady who had so long and popularly been known in the music-hall world as Mademoiselle Fifi de Lesparre, and last of all——"Cleek!" blurted out Narkom, overcome with amazement, as he saw the serenely alighting figure. And "Cleek!" went in a little rippling murmur throughout the entire gathering, civilians and local police alike.
"All right, Mr. Narkom," said Cleek himself, with a slight shrug of the shoulders. "Even the best of us slip up sometimes; and since everybody knows now, we'll have to make the best of it. Gentlemen, ladies, you, too, my colleagues, my best respects. Now to business." Then he stepped out of the shadow in which he had alighted into the full glow of the lanterns and the flare which had been lit close to the door of the dead man's carriage, conscious that every eye was fixed upon his face and that the members of the local force were silently and breathlessly "spotting" him. But in that moment the weird birth-gift had been put into practice, and Narkom fetched a sort of sigh of relief as he saw that a sagging eyelid, a twisted lip, a queer, blurred something about all the features, had set upon that face a living mask that hid effectually the face he knew so well.
"To business?" he repeated. "Ah, yes, quite so, my dear Cleek. Shall I tell the ladies and gentlemen of your promise? Well, listen. Mr. Cleek is more than a quarter of an hour beyond the time he set, but he gave me his word that this riddle would be solved to-night, to-night, ladies and gentlemen, and that when I saw him here the murderer would be with him."
"Oh, bless him! bless him!" burst forth Mrs. Brinkworth impulsively. "And he brings her! That wicked woman! Oh, I knew that she had something to do with it."
"Your pardon, Mrs. Brinkworth, but for once your woman's intuition is at fault," said Cleek quietly.
"Mademoiselle Fifi is not here as a prisoner, but as a witness for the Crown. She has had nothing even in the remotest to do with the crime. Her name was used to trap Lord Stavornell to his death. But the lady is here to prove that she never heard of the note which was found on Lord Stavornell's body; to prove also that, although it is true she did expect to go to a fancy-dress ball with his lordship, that fancy-dress ball does not occur until next Friday, the sixteenth inst., not the ninth, and that she never even heard of any alteration in the date."
"Ah, non! non! non! nevaire! I do swear!" chimed in Fifi herself, almost hysterical with fright. "I know nossing—nossing!"