“You may not know, Miss Chacewater,” Foss continued, “that your winter-garden is a sort of whispering-gallery. Although I was quite a long way off from your party, your voices came quite clearly across to where I was sitting. They didn’t disturb me at all—I’ve got the knack of concentration when I’m thinking about business affairs. But although I wasn’t listening intentionally, the whole conversation was getting in at my ear while I was thinking about other things. I suppose I ought to have gone away or let you know I was there; but the fact is, I’d just got to a point where I was seeing my way through a rather knotty tangle, and I didn’t want to break my chain of thought. I wasn’t eavesdropping, you understand?”
“Yes?” repeated Sir Clinton, with a slight acidity in his tone. “And then?”
But the American failed to take the hint. Evidently he laid great stress on explaining exactly how things had fallen out.
“After a while,” he went on, with an evident effort to be accurate, “Miss Chacewater and someone else left the party.”
“Quite true,” Joan confirmed. “We went to play billiards.”
The American nodded.
“When you had gone,” he continued, “someone else joined the party—a red-haired young man whom they called Foxy.”
Sir Clinton glanced at Joan.
“That’s Foxton Polegate,” Joan explained. “He’s a neighbour of ours. He made these electrotypes of the medallions for us.”
Foss waited patiently till she had finished her interjection. Then he resumed his narrative.
“Shortly after that, my ear caught the sound of my own name. Naturally my attention was attracted, quite without any intention on my part. It’s only natural to prick up your ears when you hear your own name mentioned.”
He looked apologetically at them both as if asking them to condone his conduct.
“The next thing I heard—without listening intentionally, you understand?—was ‘Medusa Medallions.’ Now, as you know, I’ve been sent over here by Mr Kessock to see if I can arrange to buy these medallions from Mr Chacewater. It’s my duty to my employer to get to know all I can about them. I wouldn’t be earning my money if I spared any trouble in the work which has been put into my hands. So when I heard the name of the medallions mentioned, I . . . frankly, I listened with both ears. It seemed to me my duty to Mr Kessock to do so.”
He looked appealingly at their faces as though to plead for a favourable verdict on his conduct.
“Go on, please,” Sir Clinton requested.
“I hardly expected you’d look on it as I do,” Foss confessed rather shamefacedly. “Of course, it was just plain eavesdropping on my part by that time. But I felt Mr Kessock would have expected me to find out all I could about these medallions. To be candid, I’d do the same again; though I didn’t like doing it.”
Sir Clinton seemed to feel that he had been rather discouraging.
“I shouldn’t make too much of it, Mr Foss. What happened next?”
Foss’s face showed that he was at last coming to a matter of real difficulty.
“It’s rather unfortunate that I came to be mixed up in the thing at all,” he said, with obvious chagrin. “I can assure you, Miss Chacewater, that I don’t like doing it. I only made up my mind to tell you about it because it seems to me to give a chance of hushing this supposed burglary up quietly before there’s any talk goes round.”
“Supposed burglary,” exclaimed Joan. “What’s your idea of a real burglary, if this sort of thing is only a supposed one?”
She indicated the shattered show-case and the litter of glass on the floor.
Foss evidently decided to take the rest of his narrative in a rush.
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “The next thing I overheard was a complete plan for a fake burglary—a practical joke—to be carried out to-night. The light in here was to be put out; the house-lights were to be extinguished: and in the darkness, your brother and this Mr Foxy How-d’you-call-him were to get away with the medallions.”
“Ah, Mr Foss, now you become interesting,” Sir Clinton acknowledged.
“I heard all the details,” Foss went on. “How Miss Rainhill was to see to extinguishing the lights; how Mr Chacewater was to secure the keeper; and how meanwhile his friend was to put on a thick glove and take the medallions out of the case there. And it seems to me that it was a matter that interested me directly,” he added, dropping his air of apology, “for I gathered that the whole affair was planned with some idea of making this sale to Mr Kessock fall through at the last moment.”
“Indeed?”
Sir Clinton’s face showed that at last he saw something more clearly than before.
“That was the motive,” Foss continued. “Now the whole thing put me in a most awkward position.”
“I think I see your difficulty,” Sir Clinton assured him, with more geniality than he had hitherto shown.
