“Quite, sir, as far as that goes. But I would like also to know some details to assure myself if his business here was genuine. What was his business, if I might ask?”
“You may ask and I’ll tell you too, be gad. He wanted to see Sir Jocelyn, that’s a three-year-old I’m goin’ to sell. Devilish good bit of horseflesh too. But he wouldn’t stretch to my figure. I wanted seven hundred, and he would only go five fifty. So it was no deal.”
“He came about this time in the morning, I suppose?”
“Yes, and a confoundedly silly time it was to come. He was to have been here at for the morning exercise, but he missed his train, so he said, in London.”
“I understood so from him. Just one question more, sir. When was the arrangement about his visit made?”
“Some days before; I think it was on evening I got his wire asking would suit me.”
“This is the man you mean, I presume?” and Tanner took out Cosgrove’s photograph.
The colonel nodded as he answered: “That’s he.”
“And there was nothing, sir, in the whole episode that seemed to you suspicious or otherwise than it appeared on the surface?”
“Not a thing.”
Tanner rose.
“Allow me then, sir, to express my thanks for your courtesy. That is all I want to know.”
Declining an invitation to go up to the house for a drink—“too devilish risky to keep it here, be gad”—he returned to Montrose and looked up the trains to London. There was one at which, travelling by Edinburgh and Carlisle, reached St. Pancras at the following morning. This, he decided, would suit him admirably, and when it came in he got on board.
As he sat a little later gazing out on to the smiling Fifeshire country, he went over once more, point by point, that portion of Cosgrove’s alibi which he had already checked. So far as he had gone it certainly seemed to him very complete. In the first place, not only was the journey north made with, so far as he could ascertain, a quite genuine purpose, but the selection of that particular night was reasonably accounted for. The arrangement for it had been made at least as early as the previous , which, again, would be a reasonable time in advance. Tanner could see nothing in any way suspicious or suggestive of a plant about the whole business.
Then, coming to details, the missing of the train at King’s Cross might of course have been faked, but there was no evidence to support such a supposition. On the contrary, everything he had learnt seemed to prove it genuine. But even if it had been a plant, it was demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt that Cosgrove had missed the as he said, and that, further, he had travelled to Montrose by the . Even as the case stood Tanner felt bound to accept the alibi, but if he could confirm Cosgrove’s statement of his visit to his rooms at or , and to the Follies about , any last shred of doubt that might remain must be dispelled. This, he decided, would be his next task.
The following morning, therefore, he returned to Knightsbridge. Here, keeping his eye on Cosgrove’s door, he strolled about for nearly an hour before he was rewarded by seeing it open and Cosgrove emerge and disappear towards Piccadilly. He allowed some ten minutes more to elapse, then he walked to the door and rang. It was opened by the same dark, clean-shaven butler who had admitted him before. The man recognised his visitor, evidently with suspicion.
“Mr. Reginald Willoughby, the Albany?” he asked with sarcasm, and a thinly veiled insolence in his tone.
“That’s all right,” Tanner answered easily. “I know my name is not Willoughby. It’s Tanner”—he handed over his real card—“and if you’ll invite me in for a moment or two I’ll show you my credentials so that you’ll have no more doubt.”
The butler was evidently impressed, and proffering the suggested invitation, led the way to a small sitting room.
“Mr. Ponson he phoned the Albany,” he explained, “and they said there weren’t no one of that name there, so we was wondering about your little game.”
Tanner, following his usual custom, rapidly sized up his man, and decided how he should deal with him. With the veneer of his calling removed the Inspector imagined he might prove a braggart, a bully, and a coward. He therefore took a strong line.
“I suppose you know,” he began, without heeding the other’s remark, “that Mr. Cosgrove Ponson is under serious suspicion of the murder of his uncle, Sir William, at Luce Manor?”
It was evident this was the last thing the butler had expected to hear. He stared at the Inspector in amazement.
“Lord lumme!” he stammered, “is that a fact?”
“That’s a fact,” Tanner went on sharply, “and I want some information from you. And let me advise you to give it to me correctly, for if you don’t you may find yourself in the Old Bailey charged as an accessory after the fact.”
The man blenched, and Tanner felt that the estimate he had made of his character was correct.
“I don’t know nothing about it,” he growled sulkily.
“Oh yes, you do. Mr. Ponson told me he spent that night here, or a part of it anyway. Is that true?”
Tanner had set his little trap to learn whether the butler had been primed with a story by Cosgrove. His victim did not answer for a time. Clearly a struggle was going on in his mind. Then at last he said, “Has Mr. Cosgrove been arrested?”
The question still further bore out the estimate Tanner had made of the man’s character. The Inspector could follow the thought which had prompted it. If the butler was to continue uninterruptedly in his master’s service, he would rather not have the latter know he had given him away,
