And, with a hurried good-bye to the others, he turned and left the room.
“A point upon which I require elucidation,” I said, turning to Kirk, “is the reason why you and those other men were so inquisitive regarding the new Eckhardt tyre.”
“Why I called to see the tyre was simple enough,” he said. “Max Leftwich was posing as the inventor of the tyre in question, and thereby trying to disguise his real profession of German secret agent. But as I had come across him in Berlin three years before in the guise of a small money-lender, I doubted his inventive genius. I came to you in order to examine the Eckhardt tyre, and I satisfied myself that Leftwich’s tyre was a mere worthless imitation. My assistants also came to your garage for the same purpose, just as I predicted they would. Leftwich had opened a depot in Charing Cross Road for the sale of motor accessories, and the ‘improved Eckhardt tyre’ was one of the inventions he claimed to be his.”
“But you also had a further motive?” I suggested.
“Certainly, Holford,” was his quick reply. “I confess that I had watched you for a year, and I felt that I could rely upon you. I wished to enlist your services as one of my assistants, and to initiate you into work for which the Government would pay well. It would assuredly have been worth your while to leave your business to the care of your manager, Mr Pelham, and take service in the department of which I hold control. But, remember, when I asked you to come here, even I was deceived. I believed that my friend Greer, with whom I had had a slight quarrel a few weeks before, was dead. When I found what had really occurred, I saw that the only danger lay in your discovering the truth. Hence all that tangled chain of subterfuges.”
“But surely the Professor might, even now, be charged with murder—or at least with manslaughter!” I remarked.
“My father may, Mr Holford, if you do not preserve his terrible secret!” cried Ethelwynn. “Upon you alone depends all the future!”
Once again I demanded the truth concerning Mabel and news of her whereabouts, but all Kirk would tell me was what Greer had already said—only a promise that we should meet, and that when we did she would make full and ample explanation.
I returned to Bath Road utterly bewildered, and, seated with Gwen, related to her the whole facts from the first, just as I have here recounted them.
She sat staring at me open-mouthed.