“Is Selford in this?” demanded Sneed.
“Very much in it,” was the reply, “but not quite so much as Stalletti. Forgive me being mysterious, Sneed, but nature intended me to be a writer of mystery stories, and I like sometimes to escape from the humdrum of detective investigation into the realms of romance.”
“Where is Cawler?”
“The Lord knows!” said Dick cheerfully. “My first idea was that he was responsible for the murders, but maybe I’m wrong. He hated his aunt—that, by the way, was Mrs. Cody—but I don’t think he hated her well enough to commit wilful murder. He was certainly very good to Sybil Lansdown.”
Sneed grinned.
“Which goes a long way with you, Dick.”
“Farther than you could see,” admitted Dick shamelessly.
Mrs. Lansdown was not visible when they arrived. She had gone up to the room where her daughter was sleeping and had not come down, Mr. Havelock told them.
“Have you arranged to get the police down?” he asked.
“There will be a dozen hard-eating men quartered in this kitchen tonight,” said Sneed good-humouredly.
Mr. Havelock put down the book he had been reading, and rising, stretched himself painfully.
“I’m worried sick. I’ll confess that to you, Captain Sneed,” he said. “Our friend Martin thinks I am romancing, but I can tell you that I shall be a very relieved man this time tomorrow morning.”
He strode up and down the room, his hands behind him, his high forehead wrinkled in a frown.
“Lord Selford is not in London,” he said without preliminary. “At any rate, he is not at the Ritz-Carlton. They have not seen him and know nothing about him.”
“Has he ever stayed at the Ritz-Carlton?” asked Dick quickly.
“No—that is the extraordinary thing about it. I asked that very question. It was on an impulse that I stopped as I was passing this morning. You will remember that I have had several letters from him on Ritz-Carlton paper?”
Dick nodded.
“But he has never stayed there; I could have told you that,” he said. “Have you ever sent money to him there?”
“Yes,” said the lawyer immediately. “About two years ago he rang me up on the telephone. I recognized his voice the moment he spoke. He said he was going to Scotland to fish and asked me if I would send him some American money—a very considerable sum—to the hotel.”
“How much?”
“Twenty thousand dollars,” said Havelock. “I didn’t like it.”
“Did you ask him to see you?”
“I didn’t ask him, I begged him. In fact,” he confessed, “I threatened to resign my trusteeship unless he came in to see me or allowed me to see him; just about then I was getting a little nervous.”
“What did he say?”
Mr. Havelock shrugged his broad shoulders.
“He laughed. He has a peculiar, weak, giggling sort of laugh that I remember ever since he was a boy. It is inimitable, and is the one sure proof to me that the doubts I had privately entertained had no foundation.”
“Did you send the money?”
“I had to,” said Mr. Havelock in a tone of despair. “After all, I was merely a servant of the estate, and he moves so rapidly as to allow of no delay in dispatching. It was then I began to think of sending somebody to ‘pick him up’—that is the police term, isn’t it?”
Dick thought for a while.
“Tell me one thing: when he called you up last night, did he tell you where he was speaking from?”
“I knew,” was the reply. “It was from a call office. The operator invariably tells you when a call office is coming through. The strange thing is that only a few days ago he was reported at Damascus. We have been working out the times, and we have concluded that by flying to Constantinople and catching the Oriental express, he could have reached London half an hour before he telephoned me.”
The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Mrs. Lansdown, who had come from her daughter. Sybil’s mother looked worn, but there was happiness in the tired eyes, which told of the relief she had experienced after the most terrible night of strain and anxiety.
“I don’t understand what it is all about,” she said, “but thank God my little girl is safe. Have you found the chauffeur?”
“Cawler? No, he has not been seen since Sybil left him.”
“You don’t think anything has happened?” she asked nervously.
“I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so,” replied Dick with a reassuring smile. “Cawler is quite able to look after himself, and I don’t doubt that if there was a fight he came off best.”
Later in the afternoon there arrived further news of Stalletti. He had been seen by a village constable soon after he had aroused his hired man. Apparently Stalletti had a small car which he was in the habit of driving about the neighbourhood, and the cycling constable had seen him speeding in the direction of London.
“Speeding” is hardly the term that could be properly applied, for the machine did thirty miles an hour with difficulty and had the habit of going dead for no ascertainable cause. Stalletti was looking wild and agitated and was talking to himself; he was cranking the car when the constable came up with him, and the policeman thought he had been drinking, for he seemed to be abnormally excited and scarcely noticed the advent of the cyclist.
“That bears out to a large extent my theory,” said Dick. “Stalletti is a devil, but a shrewd devil. He knows that the sands are running out, and with him, as with Cody, it is a case of sauve qui peut.”
He managed to get a few hours’ sleep, and in the evening he made a careful survey of the house, particularly of the sleeping quarters which had been assigned to the party. The upper floor was reached by a broad carved staircase, Elizabethan in design and execution, which terminated at a
