‘I shouldn’t, sir, dream of troubling you so far,’ Tanner assured him. ‘Besides, it is not necessary. A minute or two here when you are disengaged is all I want.’ ‘Be gad, sir, you’re modest. Comin’ all the way from London for a minute or two,’ and calling out some directions to a groom, he led the way into a kind of small office at the end of the stable. ‘Well, sir,’ he said as he seated himself before a small roll top desk, and pointed to a chair, ‘and what can I do for you?’ ‘I am engaged, sir,’ Tanner answered, ‘in making some confidential inquiries into the movements of a man, who, I understand, was recently here—Mr Cosgrove Ponson of London.’ ‘He was here’—the Colonel hesitated a moment—‘this day week. And what the devil has he been doin’?’ ‘Nothing, sir, so far as we know. It is the case of another man altogether, but it is necessary for us to know if Mr Ponson really was out of London on that day.’ ‘Well I’ve told you he was here. Is that evidence enough?’ ‘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 six 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 Monday evening I got his wire asking would Thursday 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 2.29 which, travelling by Edinburgh and Carlisle, reached St Pancras at 6.30 the following morning. This, he decided, would suit him admirably, and when it came in he got on board.