“Ah! Sternroyd!” he repeated, as soon as I mentioned the name. “And you bought those portraits. Have you still got them?”
I drew them from my pocket and handed them across to him. As he gazed at Sybil’s picture he twirled his moustache, thoughtfully knitting his brow.
But my tongue’s strings were now loosened, and I confessed how I had discovered the young millionaire lying dead in Jack Bethune’s flat, and how, on my second visit to the place, I found the body removed, and afterward encountered my friend, who would not allow me to enter one of his rooms.
“You think he was concealing the body there?” he asked, glancing up from the paper whereon he had scribbled some brief memoranda.
“I fear to think anything, lest it should add to the evidence against him. He has left England again.”
“Yes,” the detective replied; “we are aware of that. He has eluded us.”
“Then you also suspect him?” I cried.
For answer he only shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows.
Continuing my story, I detailed the conversation I had overheard at Blatherwycke between Markwick and the Countess, described my visit to the house in Gloucester Square, my encounter with Dora, the subsequent discovery of a body, and the theft of the half-burnt letters from my own room.
When I had concluded he was silent for a long time. My story was evidently more startling and complicated than he had expected, and he was apparently weighing the evidence against the man suspected.