“You’re right! I remember. We had a hot time in the old town that night. Old Warburton was properly down in the mouth too when we blew in. I can remember that perfectly. In a regular Slough of Despond he was, poor old blighter. He seemed to have turned ‘Bolshie’ or something. Absolutely shouting Red Revolution. Goodness knows what had upset him—don’t know whether it was the sequel to his uncle’s trouble or what? Anyhow when we drifted in on that particular evening in question old Warburton was blowing off a lot of hot air about exterminating Royalty and a lot of proper silly ass tripe of that kind. Quite the soap-box thumper style. Can you remember him, Davey?”
“You’ve said it,” said Davidson, “you’ve brought it all back to me. I can remember how he was going off the ‘deep end.’ He’d got a particular grouch against some Foreign Johnny—some Prince of God knows where—he wouldn’t let on why when we pulled his leg about it—in fact he was inclined to turn sulky—but from what I could gather he fairly ached to present this Prince-person with something lingering with bags of boiling oil in it.”
Bannister sat transfixed in his chair as Davidson concluded his remarks and Anthony could almost see a question trembling on his tongue. Davidson, however, was sublimely oblivious of the fact. He rattled merrily on. “Can’t think of the particular merchant’s name,” he murmured with an air of attempted, but abortive reminiscence, “but it reminded me at the time of geraniums.”
Inspector Bannister leaned over the table and held him lightly by the fore-arm. “Think very carefully,” he said quietly, “was it by any chance the Crown Prince of Clorania? Was that the name?”
Davidson sat back in open-mouthed astonishment. “’Pon my solemn sole,” he exclaimed with a look of complete mystification, “you’ve holed in one. You’re sure some little laddie—what?”
Chapter XIII
Re-enter Mr. X
It seemed to “Pinkie” Kerr that her entire world had come tumbling hopelessly about her ears. That she had been relentlessly caught in the mesh of misery. The news that had awaited her upon her arrival at Tranfield had produced in her a species of mental paralysis. Her brain was numbed. The telegram that had summoned her from her Devonshire home and holiday had not told her all. Bannister had deliberately tempered the blow to her by partly preparing her for the inevitable shock. She sat in the dining-room of “Rest Harrow” with the brilliant July sunshine pouring through the windows and tried hard to realise that she would never see her beloved Miss Sheila again in this transitory world of hopes, doubts and fears. And the mental paralysis that had so completely taken hold of her mercifully prevented her from experiencing this bitter realisation to its full poignancy. To her, representative as she was of her class, a telegram was always regarded as the harbinger of evil and when it had reached her on the evening of the previous day, she had felt instinctively and assuredly that this particular telegram would prove no exception to the sinister rule. She had obeyed its startling summons almost mechanically—dumbly as it were—making no articulate complaint against the bludgeoning of Fate and accepted the scroll of punishment with a bowed head and the better part of a contrite heart. As she sat in the comfortable chair in the room at “Rest Harrow” and faced Chief-Inspector Bannister, supported left and right by Anthony Bathurst and Sergeant Ross, her sixty-odd years weighted heavily upon her but she tried hard to collect the best qualities of her intelligence for the sake of her “bairn” that had been so foully struck down and so ruthlessly taken from her. The only real consciousness that she possessed was clamouring for vengeance. She was half Devonian and half Scots and for the moment the Scots strain had struggled for the mastery and after the habit of its kind had succeeded in obtaining it. One thought was being registered clearly in her sorely-afflicted brain and one thought only. She might be the means of bringing Miss Sheila’s murderer to the penalty of Justice. An idea here or a suggestion there might well prove to be a shaft of enlightenment to the skilled brains that were waiting to question her. She sat there, fighting hard against the chaos of her mind. There was not only Miss Sheila’s memory of her to serve! There was also Colonel Dan’s Colonel Dan to whom she had ministered faithfully for more years than she cared to remember. Colonel Daniel Delaney had been a gentleman—more than that even—he had been an Irish gentleman and as his faithful servant had informed more than a few persons in her time, an “Irish gentleman was the finest gentleman in the world.” When the news was brought home to her years ago that he had been found drowned it had plunged her into genuinely deep distress-distress that persisted—but her supremely loyal nature after a time asserted itself and the distress became alleviated by the loving care that she showered upon the dainty blossom that Colonel Dan had left behind. When Colonels Dan’s widow followed him a few years later to “the bourne from which no traveller returns,” this are became even more assiduous—it became in the nature of a Religion. But now she was assailed by a black and devastating sense of complete and utter loneliness. All her loving care had been brought to naught—she had laboured in vain! The edifice that she had built so lovingly had been eternally shattered. As she sat there sobbing convulsively her tall spare frame shook with the paroxysm of her grief. She dabbed continually at her streaming eyes with her handkerchief and Bannister was sufficiently
