“Silence!” snapped the Inspector, to whom discipline was all. “This young person was telling me that she watched as you requested. Go on, miss.”
“Well, Mr. Ferret had scarcely gone out when the foreign gentleman passed out of the street door and I immediately followed him,” went on poor Kate, with oozing hope that her blundering lie would be believed, now that that gimlet-eyed Ferret was here to observe her. “The man crossed the square and walked quickly down the next street.”
She stopped. Ferret seemed to be whistling in mild but growing unbelief—conduct which he suddenly abandoned on receiving a wireless message of caution from the Inspector. The nimble mind of Ferret caught his superior’s point at once, so he fell in with his policy and said, as if to encourage Kate to proceed bravely with her transparent and useful lie: “Didn’t I tell you he would do so?”
“Be quiet, Ferret!” cried Sharpe, fearing that Ferret would develop some new indiscretion. “Go on, miss, go on. You saw the gent turn the corner?”
“Yes,” replied Kate, with fresh courage; “he turned the corner and I ran after him. There were many people in the narrow street into which he had turned, but I kept him in view and——”
“And you jumped into the next cab as quick as a flash—” put in Ferret, when he noticed that her powers of creation were ebbing, “and followed him until you saw him go into—go on, go on, miss—you’re great, you are.”
“Alas, no,” sighed Kate, fearing to venture to be so specific as to locate the mysterious man in a definite house anywhere. “Alas, no. When I reached Pall Mall he had disappeared.”
“Oh, dam—that is, you know, I beg pardon—what a pity you missed him,” exclaimed Ferret, rapidly calculating what her game was.
“It is only just gone nine,” remarked the Inspector sternly. “When was it that you were at Mr. Fair’s house, Ferret? This is very strange.”
It was Ferret’s turn now to fear that the course of affairs reflected on his discretion, and, while he could hardly believe that the Inspector had failed to perceive that the governess was fibbing, he could not risk being thought a bungler, for Sharpe was a man of few words, quick action, and little given to reopening cases once he had decided them.