‘Hope they’ll do him well at that place,’ muttered the chauffeur. ‘I’ll be pushing along there for a bite myself presently.’
‘Billy Jones is all right,’ said the garage man. ‘Keeps a good table.’
Mr William Jones, a big burly man of fifty and landlord of the ‘Bells and Motley’, was at this minute beaming ingratiatingly down on little Mr Satterthwaite.
‘Can do you a nice steak, sir – and fried potatoes, and as good a cheese as any gentleman could wish for. This way, sir, in the coffee-room. We’re not very full at present, the last of the fishing gentlemen just gone. A little later we’ll be full again for the hunting. Only one gentleman here at present, name of Quin –’
Mr Satterthwaite stopped dead.
‘Quin?’ he said excitedly. ‘Did you say Quin?’
‘That’s the name, sir. Friend of yours perhaps?’
‘Yes, indeed. Oh! yes, most certainly.’ Twittering with excitement, Mr Satterthwaite hardly realized that the world might contain more than one man of that name. He had no doubts at all. In an odd way, the information fitted in with what the man at the garage had said. ‘Folks that come and go …’ a very apt description of Mr Quin. And the name of the Inn, too, seemed a peculiarly fitting and appropriate one.
‘Dear me, dear me,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘What a very odd thing. That we should meet like this! Mr Harley Quin, is it not?’
‘That’s right, sir. This is the coffee-room, sir. Ah! here is the gentleman.’
Tall, dark, smiling, the familiar figure of Mr Quin rose from the table at which he was sitting, and the well-remembered voice spoke.
‘Ah! Mr Satterthwaite, we meet again. An unexpected meeting!’
Mr Satterthwaite was shaking him warmly by the hand.
‘Delighted. Delighted, I’m sure. A lucky breakdown for me. My car, you know. And you are staying here? For long?’
‘One night only.’
‘Then I am indeed fortunate.’
Mr Satterthwaite sat down opposite his friend with a little sigh of satisfaction, and regarded the dark, smiling face opposite him with a pleasurable expectancy.
The other man shook his head gently.
‘I assure you,’ he said, ‘that I have not a bowl of goldfish or a rabbit to produce from my sleeve.’
‘Too bad,’ cried Mr Satterthwaite, a little taken aback. ‘Yes, I must confess – I do rather adopt that attitude towards you. A man of magic. Ha, ha. That is how I regard you. A man of magic.’
‘And yet,’ said Mr Quin, ‘it is you who do the conjuring tricks, not I.’
‘Ah!’ said Mr Satterthwaite eagerly. ‘But I cannot do them without you. I lack – shall we say – inspiration?’
Mr Quin smilingly shook his head.
‘That is too big a word. I speak the cue, that is all.’
The landlord came in at that minute with bread and a slab of yellow butter. As he set the things on the table there was a vivid flash of lightning, and a clap of thunder almost overhead.
‘A wild night, gentlemen.’
‘On such a night –’ began Mr Satterthwaite, and stopped.
‘Funny now,’ said the landlord, unconscious of the question, ‘if those weren’t just the words I was going to use myself. It was just such a night as this when Captain Harwell brought his bride home, the very day before he disappeared for ever.’
‘Ah!’ cried Mr Satterthwaite suddenly. ‘Of course!’
He had got the clue. He knew now why the name Kirtlington Mallet was familiar. Three months before he had read every detail of the astonishing disappearance of Captain Richard Harwell. Like other newspaper readers all over Great Britain he had puzzled over the details of the disappearance, and, also like every other Briton, had evolved his own theories.
‘Of course,’ he repeated. ‘It was at Kirtlington Mallet it happened.’
‘It was at this house he stayed for the hunting last winter,’ said the landlord. ‘Oh! I knew him well. A main handsome young gentleman and not one that you’d think had a care on his mind. He was done away with – that’s my belief. Many’s the time I’ve seen them come riding home together – he and Miss Le Couteau, and all the village saying there’d be a match come of it – and sure enough, so it did. A very beautiful young lady, and well thought of, for all she was a Canadian and a stranger. Ah! there’s some dark mystery there. We’ll never know the rights of it. It broke her heart, it did, sure enough. You’ve heard as she’s sold the place up and gone abroad, couldn’t bear to go on here with everyone staring and pointing after her – through no fault of her own, poor young dear! A black mystery, that’s what it is.’
He shook his head, then suddenly recollecting his duties, hurried from the room.
‘A black mystery,’ said Mr Quin softly.
His voice was provocative in Mr Satterthwaite’s ears.
‘Are you pretending that we can solve the mystery where Scotland Yard failed?’ he asked sharply.
The other made a characteristic gesture.
‘Why not? Time has passed. Three months. That makes a difference.’
‘That is a curious idea of yours,’ said Mr Satterthwaite slowly. ‘That one sees things better afterwards than at the time.’
‘The longer the time that has elapsed, the more things fall into proportion. One sees them in their true relationship to one another.’
There was a silence which lasted for some minutes.
‘I am not sure,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, in a hesitating voice, ‘that I remember the facts clearly by now.’
‘I think you do,’ said Mr Quin quietly.
It was all the encouragement Mr Satterthwaite needed. His general role in life was that of listener and looker-on. Only in the company of Mr Quin was the position reversed. There Mr Quin was the appreciative listener, and Mr Satterthwaite took the centre of the stage.
‘It was just over a year ago,’ he said, ‘that Ashley Grange passed into the possession of Miss Eleanor Le Couteau. It is a beautiful old house, but it had been neglected and allowed to remain empty for many years. It could not have found a better chatelaine. Miss Le Couteau was a French Canadian, her forebears were émigrés from the French Revolution, and had handed down to her a collection of almost priceless French relics and antiques. She was a buyer and a collector also, with a very fine and discriminating taste. So much so, that when she decided to sell Ashley Grange and everything it contained after the tragedy, Mr Cyrus G. Bradburn, the American millionaire, made no bones about paying the fancy price of sixty thousand pounds for
