At the hotel, after I had put up the car, I saw my master and the German speaking with a tall, thin, consumptive-looking man in black, whose white tie showed him to be a dissenting minister. He was clean-shaven, aged fifty, and had an unusually protruding chin.
All three went out together and walked along the street chatting. When they had gone I went back into the yard, and on inquiry found that the minister was the Reverend Richard Raven, of the Baptist Missionary Society.
He had been a missionary in China, and had addressed several meetings in Nottingham and the neighbourhood on behalf of the society.
Why, I wondered, had Bob Brackenbury, so essentially a man about town, come there to consult a Baptist missionary, and accompanied, too, by the man he was scheming to unmask?
But the ways of the Secret Service were devious and crooked, I argued. There was method in it all. Had Ray and I been mistaken after all? So I, too, lit a cigarette, and strolled out into the bustling provincial street awaiting my master and his friend.
After an hour and a half the trio came back and had a drink together in the smoking-room—the missionary taking lemonade—and then I brought round the car, and we began the return journey of about sixty-five miles.
"What do you think of it now?" asked my master of his companion as soon as we were away from the hotel.
"Excellent!" was the German's reply. "It only now lies with her, eh?" And he laughed lightly.
Dinner was over when we returned, and Captain Kinghorne was profuse in his apologies to his host. I had previously been warned to say nothing of where we had been, and I heard my master explain that we had passed through Huntingdon, where a tyre-burst had delayed us.
I became puzzled. Yes, it was certainly both interesting and exciting. Little did the gallant German Colonel dream of the sword of England's wrath suspended above his head.