“We’ve got to decide what we’re going to do about ft first,” continued the Colonel. “The blighter! Gad, I should never have thought he’d got it in him.” “Neither should I, sir,” agreed the Inspector mournfully. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, by Jove! And there was that newspaper feller with the whole story under his eyes, if only he’d had the gumption to read it. You know, Cottingham, I seriously suspected those two at first, Doyle and Nesbitt; I did really. Until we found that bit of paper at the cross-roads, in fact. I was certain we were on a wild-goose chase over that; thought it was just a faked-up tale. And I admit that not for one moment did I expect that blood to be anything but chicken’s.” “Yes, sir; we were all taken in at one time,” said the Inspector, neatly including his chief in the general obtuseness. “And if I hadn’t traced the ownership of that bit of paper,” he added carefully, “we’d all be in the dark still.” “That’s right, Cottingham,” said the Colonel, ever generous. Far too generous, for instance, than to refer to a certain handkerchief whose damning initials had first put them on their present tack. “You did very well there; very well indeed. You know, now one comes to think of it, I can’t imagine why we ever paid any serious attention to the man’s story at all. Far too wild. Crown Prince, indeed! And never even arranging a sound _alibi_ for his movements that evening. Why, the thing was obviously a hoax on the face of it, if we’d only had our wits about us.” The way the Colonel used the first person plural instead of the second was kindness itself. “But what about the couple Graves saw?” asked the Inspector, shifting the conversation away from this awkward topic. “And the corpse, for the matter of that? In that case there must have been three others in it beside Mr. Foster.” “That’s right, there must have been. Mind you, Cottingham, I don’t imagine that the thing was planned with the intention of deceiving us. Graves’ intervention seems to me purely fortuitous. I shouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t all directed against the Nesbitts; or even against that fellow who was in the room with the girl. She was in it all right. That’s how the thing looks to me.” “Well, there might be something in that, sir, yes,” conceded the Inspector handsomely. The Colonel lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the river. “Still, it’s impossible to say either way yet. We must hear what this blighter Foster’s got to say for himself; ought not to be difficult to get him to give himself away. We’ll do that this afternoon.” Colonel Ratcliffe was no fool. His reasoning had been sound and, up to a point, perfectly correct. But unfortunately, the two brains pitted against his were just a shade shrewder; they also had the advantage of being perfectly unscrupulous. It was these two facts which caused the Colonel’s reasoning to deflect from the line of correctness and come to an end at the person of Reginald Foster, Esq.