“Together the two gentlemen went up to Mr. Hubert Turnour’s rooms, and at half-past ten they ordered whisky to be taken up to them. But at this point all trace of Count Collini had completely vanished. The passengers arriving by the 10.49 boat train, and who had elected to spend the night in Dover, owing to the gale, had crowded up and filled the hall. “No one saw Count Collini leave the Grand Hotel. But Mr. Hubert Turnour came down into the hall at about half-past eleven. He said he would be leaving by the 1.50 a.m. boat train for town, but would walk round to the station as he only had a small bag with him. He paid his account, then waited in the coffee-room until it was time to go. “And there the matter has remained. Mrs. Brackenbury has spent half her own fortune in trying to trace the missing man. She has remained perfectly convinced that he slipped across the Channel, taking Alice Checkfield’s money with him. But, as you know, at all ports of call on the South Coast, detectives are perpetually on the watch. The Count was a man of peculiar appearance, and there is no doubt that no one answering to his description crossed over to France or Belgium that night. By the following morning the detectives on both sides of the Channel were on the alert. There is no disguise that would have held good. If the Count had tried to cross over, he would have been spotted either on board or on landing; and we may take it as an absolute and positive certainty that he did not cross the Channel. “He remained in England, but in that case, where is he? You would be the first to admit that, with the whole of our detective staff at his heels, it seems incredible that a man of the Count’s singular appearance could hide himself so completely as to baffle detection. Moreover, the question at once arises, that if he did not cross over to France or Belgium, what in the world did he do with the money? What was the use of disappearing and living the life of a hunted beast hiding for his life, with £80,000 worth of foreign money, which was practically useless to him? “Now, I told you from the first,” concluded the man in the corner, with a dry chuckle, “that this strange episode contained no sensational incident, nor dramatic inquest or criminal procedure. Merely the complete, total disappearance, one may almost call it extinction, of a striking-looking man, in the midst of our vaunted civilisation, and in spite of the untiring energy and constant watch of a whole staff of able men.” Chapter IV “Very well, then,” I retorted in triumph, “that proves that Hubert Turnour murdered Count Collini out of revenge, not for greed of money, and probably threw the body of his victim, together with the foreign banknotes, into the sea.” “But where? When? How?” he asked, smiling good-humouredly at me over his great bone-rimmed spectacles. “Ah! that I don’t know.”