“I learned, later on, that Foss had synchronized his watch with yours, Cecil; and that, of course, made it pretty plain that he was in the game. There was also another bit of evidence which suggested something. If either the valet or the chauffeur was the confederate, then they could easily enough have found out from the servants what costume Maurice meant to wear that night—a few questions to his valet would have got the information—and they could have chosen the Pierrot costume for their own runner in order to confuse things. That suggested that Foss’s servants might be in the business; but it proved nothing really. The white Pierrot costume was chosen mainly for its conspicuousness, I’m sure.
“Now I come to the disappearance of the man in white.”
“Thank goodness!” Joan commented. “It gets more interesting as it goes on, doesn’t it? That’s something to be thankful for.”
“One does one’s best,” Sir Clinton retorted, unperturbed. “Now the vanishing of that fellow could be accounted for in various ways, so far as I could see. First of all, he might have slipped down the rope into the little lake. That was what the rope was meant to suggest, obviously. But unfortunately one of the hunters had the wit to keep an eye on the lake; and it was pretty clear the man in white didn’t go that way. Then there was the possibility of his being concealed in the cave; but that was ruled out by the search of the cave. Thirdly, the gang might have hit on the opening of one of the secret passages of Ravensthorpe. Candidly, I ruled that out also. It seemed next door to impossible. But if you exclude all these ways, then there seem to be only two possibilities left. The first of these depends on the man in white having a confederate in the cordon who let him slip through. But the chance of a slip-through of that sort escaping the notice of the rest of the hunters seemed very small. It seemed to me too risky a business for them to have tried.
“The final possibility was that the fugitive disguised himself as something else. Well, what disguise would be the best? It’s a question of camouflage, and they had only a few seconds to do the camouflaging. You can’t dress up as a drainpipe or a garden-seat in a couple of seconds. So we come down to something that’s human in shape but isn’t really human. In a garden, you might pretend to be a scarecrow; but up on that terrace a scarecrow was out of the question. And then I remembered the statues.
“Suppose somebody had gone up there in the evening and had chiselled one of the statues off its base. The broken marble could be heaved over into the little lake and the bare pedestal would be left for the fugitive.”
“I ought to have thought of that,” Michael interjected. “It’s so obvious when you think of it. But I didn’t think of anything like that at the time.”
“My impression then,” Sir Clinton continued, “was that the man in white had white tights on under his Pierrot dress. His face and hands were whitened, also; so that as soon as he stripped off his jacket and trousers, he was sufficiently statuelike to pass muster in that light. His eyes would have given him away in daylight; but under the moon he’d only got to shut them and you’d hardly notice his whitened eyelashes. In the few moments that you left him, while the cordon was being formed, he took off his Pierrot things, wrapped them round the weight he’d used in breaking the case’s glass, and pitched the lot over the balustrade. That would account for the splash that was heard.”
Sir Clinton paused to light a cigarette.
“That theory seemed to fit most of the evidence, as you see. It explained why they’d chosen that particular place for the disappearing trick; and it accounted for the splash as well. Further, it suggested that there was a third man in the gang: the man who smashed down the real statue. They’d leave that bit of work to the last moment for fear of the damage being seen accidentally beforehand. Now Foss was at the masked ball, so it wasn’t he. The man in white might need all his powers in that race, so it was unlikely that he’d been up there on a heavy bit of manual labour just then, for the shifting of that statue, even in pieces, can have been no light affair. That suggested the use of a third confederate. But I’m no wild enthusiast for theories. I simply noted the coincidence that this theory demanded three men and that Foss’s party contained three men: himself, the valet, and the chauffeur.
“Now, for reasons which I’ll give you immediately, it seemed likely that this affair was only a first step in a more complicated plan. On the spur of the moment, I decided it was worth while taking a hand. So I got a patrol set round the spinney and issued orders that no one was to go up to the terrace until I’d been over the ground. I took good care that everyone knew about this; and I took equally good care not to go there myself. I rather advertised the thing, in fact. That was to assure the fellows that no one had seen the empty pedestal. They were pretty certain to rout about for information; and they’d hear on all sides that no one had been up to the terrace. That left the thing open for them to try again if they wanted to.
“Another thing confirmed my notions. When the Inspector was dragging the lake,
