“Go on.”
“We stopped at the house of the first doctor we came to and left Dean there, and then Mr. Hoff brought me on home in the car. At the ferry he put me into a taxi.”
“What did you talk about on the trip home?” asked Fleck suspiciously. “Didn’t he try to pump you?”
“We hardly talked at all. He seemed concerned only in getting me home without its becoming known that I had been in an accident.”
“Is that all?” asked the chief. She could see by his manner that he mistrusted her, that he felt that she was keeping something back.
“We hardly exchanged a dozen words,” she insisted.
Fleck shook his head in a puzzled way.
“I can’t understand it at all,” he said. “Old Otto is a common enough type of German, painstaking, methodical, stupid, stubborn, ready to commit any crime for Prussia, but the young fellow is of far different material. He has brains and daring and initiative. He is far more alert and more dangerous. I cannot understand his finding you there and not trying to discover what you were doing.”
“I can’t understand that either,” Jane admitted.
“There’s no doubt in my mind,” the chief continued, “that Frederic Hoff is the real conspirator, the head of the plotters.”