“What name shall I say?” asked Grant, surprised at her agitation.
She grew more confused than ever. “I won’t trouble you; it doesn’t matter in the least. I mean. Miss Monkton would not know my name, if I told it you.”
With a swift gesture, she turned and fled. She had been nervous to start with, but Smeaton’s steady and penetrating gaze seemed to have scared her out of her wits.
The detective chatted for a moment or two with Grant, but made no comment upon the strange visitor. Still, it struck him as a curious thing, as one more of the many mysteries of which this house was so full. Would the young woman come back to-morrow, he wondered?
Five minutes later Sheila and her lover arrived. They had spent the best part of the morning in each other’s company, and had lingered long over their lunch. But Wingate was loth to part from her, and insisted upon seeing her home.
She was puzzled, too, at the advent of this dark-haired young woman. “Oh, how I wish I had been a few minutes earlier,” she cried. “I shall worry about it all night.”
“Strange things seem to happen every day,” grumbled Smeaton. “A very mysterious thing happened at the corner of this street last night.”
Then he told them briefly of the midnight move from Forest View, of his dinner with Varney, and how they had seen Mrs Saxton in the taxi-cab in Coventry Street; of the taxi-driver’s story that he had driven her to the corner of Chesterfield Street, where she had got out, and dismissed the cab.
“But surely she was not alone,” cried Sheila.
“A man was with her, but the cab passed too rapidly for us to get a look at him,” replied Smeaton evasively. After all, it was only a suspicion, he could not be positive.