“The next name on the programme is Thomas Marden. The police have no records of his early doings, but I suspect that Mr Marden had cause to bless his luck in this respect, rather than his honesty. I’m sure he wasn’t a prentice hand. As to his character, I believe he was rather a violent person when roused, and he had a deplorable lack of control over a rather bad temper.
“The third name is . . . ?”
“Stephen Racks,” the Inspector supplied in answer to Sir Clinton’s glance of inquiry.
“Alias Joe Brackley,” Sir Clinton continued. “I think we’ll call him Brackley, since that was the name you knew him by, if you knew him at all. He was nominally Foss’s chauffeur. Actually, I think, he was the brain of the gang and did the planning for them.”
“That’s correct,” the Inspector interpolated.
“Mr Brackley, I think, was the most deliberately unscrupulous of them all,” Sir Clinton continued. “A really dangerous person who would stick at nothing to get what he wanted or to cover his tracks.
“Then, last of all, there’s a Mr Blank, whose name I do not know, but who at present is under arrest in America for forging the name of Mr Kessock the millionaire. He was employed by Mr Kessock in some capacity or other which gave him access to Mr Kessock’s correspondence. I’ve no details on that point as yet.”
“This is the kind of stuff I always skip when I’m reading a detective story,” complained Joan. “Can’t you get along to something interesting soon?”
“You’re like the Bellman in the Hunting of the Snark, Joan. ‘Oh, skip your dear uncle!’ Well, I skip, as you desire it. I’ll merely mention in passing that an American tourist came here a while ago and asked to see the Leonardo medallions, because he was writing a book on Leonardo. He, I believe, was Mr Blank from America; and his job was to see the safe in the museum and note its pattern.
“I must skip again; and now we reach the night of the robbery in the museum. You know what happened then. Mr Foss came to me with his tale about overhearing some of you planning a practical joke. His story was true enough, I’ve no doubt; but it set me thinking at once. I may not have shown it, Joan, but I quite agreed with you about his methods. It seemed a funny business to come straight to the police over a thing of that sort. Of course he had his reason ready; but it didn’t ring quite true, somehow. I might have put it down to tactlessness, if it hadn’t suggested something else to my mind.
“That pistol-shot which smashed the lamp was too neatly timed for my taste. It was fired by someone who knew precisely when the keeper was going to be gripped, and it was fired just in time to get ahead of Foxton Polegate in the raid on the show-case. That meant, if it meant anything, that the man who fired the shot was a person who knew of the practical joke. But on the face of it, Foss was the only person who knew about the joke, bar the jokers themselves. So naturally I began to suspect Foss of having had a hand in the business. It was the usual mistake of the criminal—trying to be too clever and throw suspicion on to someone else.
“Now Foss wasn’t the man in white, obviously; for he came to see me while the man-hunt was still in full cry. So at that stage in the business I was fairly certain that at least two people were in the game: Foss and someone else, who was the man in white. That looked like either the valet or the chauffeur, since they were the only people I knew about who were directly associated with Foss while he was here. But this incognito business at the masked ball had made it possible for outsiders to come in unrecognized; so the man in white might be a confederate quite outside our range of knowledge. One couldn’t assume that either Marden or Brackley was in the show at all.
“I learned, later on, that Foss had synchronized his watch with yours, Cecil; and that, of course, made it pretty plain that he was in the game. There was also another bit of evidence which suggested something. If either the valet or the chauffeur was the confederate, then they could easily enough have found out from the servants what costume Maurice meant to wear that night—a few questions to his valet would have got the information—and they could have chosen the Pierrot costume for their own runner in order to confuse things. That suggested that Foss’s servants might be in the business; but it proved nothing really. The white Pierrot costume was chosen mainly for its conspicuousness, I’m sure.
“Now I come to the disappearance of the man in white.”
“Thank goodness!” Joan commented. “It gets more interesting as it goes on, does it? That’s something to be thankful for.”
