‘Sorry!’ Stephen said. ‘Very annoying for you: you must now be back exactly where you started.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that!’ Hemingway replied.

‘No, I don’t suppose you would: not to me, at any rate. If it’s all the same to you, I’d now like to go back and finish my breakfast.’

The Inspector signifying that it was quite the same to him, Stephen returned to the dining-room, where the rest of the party was still seated at the table. Every face turned towards him as he entered, some asking a mute, anxious question, some avidly curious. He sat down in his place, and told Sturry, who had found an excuse to come back into the room, to bring him some fresh coffee.

‘Gosh, I quite thought you’d be under arrest by now!’ said Valerie, putting into words what everyone else had been thinking.

‘I know you did, my pretty one,’ Stephen answered.

‘What happened, Stephen?’ Mathilda asked him, in a low voice.

He favoured her with one of his twisted smiles, and took out his cigarette-case, and opened it, and selected a cigarette. As he tapped it on the case, every eye became riveted on it. Mathilda looked quickly up at him, but saw that he was not paying any heed to her, but rather letting his challenging gaze wander round the table, dwelling for a moment on Roydon’s face, travelling on to Mottisfont’s, and resting there for a moment.

Again it was Valerie who found her voice first. ‘Why, that’s your cigarette-case! The one the police took!’

‘As you say.’

‘Do you mean they’ve given it back to you?’ asked Roydon, in bewildered accents.

‘Yes,’ said Stephen. ‘They’ve given it back to me.’

‘I never heard of such a thing!’ exclaimed Mottisfont. ‘It can’t be the same case! You’re trying to pull our legs, for some reason best known to yourself! The police would never have relinquished the real case!’

‘I’d give it to you to look at, only that the Inspector warned me to be more careful with my property in future,’ said Stephen. ‘When I leave my things about, they have an odd way of transporting themselves – isn’t that nicely put? – into quite different parts of the house.’

‘What the devil do you mean by that?’ demanded Mottisfont, half-rising from his chair.

‘Do you believe in poltergeists?’ asked Stephen, still smiling, but not very pleasantly.

‘Stephen!’ Joseph said, his voice trembling with emotion. ‘Stephen, my boy! Does it mean that they don’t suspect you after all?’

‘Oh, I gather that I am wholly cleared!’ Stephen replied.

It was not to be expected that Joseph would greet such news as this in a restrained manner. He bounced up out of his chair, and came round the table to clasp his nephew’s hands. ‘I knew it all along!’ he said. ‘Thank God, thank God! Stephen, old boy, you don’t know what a weight it is off my mind! If – if the worst had happened, it would have been my fault! Oh yes, it would! I know that. My dear, dear boy, if it were not for that one great sorrow hanging over us, this would be a red-letter day indeed!’