He squinted through the keyhole again. The detective still had the knife in his hand and was looking at it intently. He heard him say, “This is new,” and then Dick entered upon a long and apparently explanatory statement, not a word of which came to the disgusted man who was listening. He was most anxious to hear some reference to himself, but, if it was made, he did not overhear his name.

Soon after, however, a familiar phrase caught his ear. Dick Alford was talking about the Black Abbot, and he heard rather a sketchy description of that spook. Then his voice dropped again, and coincident with this Thomas heard the stately footsteps of the butler, slipped back to the housekeeper’s room and was busy in the pantry when the stout Mr Glover found him.

24

The luncheon was not a genial meal. Harry had acquired the disgraceful habit of bringing a book to his meals, and he was utterly absorbed in the volume, and left Dick and his visitor to carry on a conversation as though he were not present.

Mr Puttler, who was a man of wide experience, was neither embarrassed by his magnificent surroundings – for Lord Chelford lived in a princely style, three footmen and a butler waiting upon them – nor did he feel it necessary to live up to the state in which he found himself. He was altogether unaffected, had a fund of anecdotes and could tell funny stories without apparently enjoying them himself, which is the art of amusement. Only once did Dick interrupt his brother’s reading.

“Leslie is coming to tea,” he said. “She phoned over just before lunch.”

Harry Alford looked up and his face fell.

“That is very unfortunate,” he said. “I had promised myself an uninterrupted afternoon with Fra Hiekler. I’ve just had a facsimile edition sent to me from Leipzig. Hiekler, you remember, Dick, was a cloistered monk in the days of Elizabeth, our abbey being one of the few that was not interfered with by Henry the Eighth or by Elizabeth either; partly, I think, because our particular order of monks were antagonistic to the Jesuits.”

Dick listened patiently, and when his brother had exhausted the history of the Black Fathers of Chelfordbury:“You’ll have to be civil and come to tea, and after that I’ve no doubt Leslie will not object to your going back to Fra Hiekler, who was a German, I presume?”

“He was a German,” said Harry gravely. “And the circumstances which brought him to Chelfordbury were rather peculiar.”

“The best German I ever read about” – it was Mr Puttler who interrupted – “was Robinson Crusoe.”

Dick thought it was a crude jest on the part of his guest, but, if it was so, Mr Puttler was unconscious of his humour. Harry stared at the “accountant.” He took such statements as these very seriously indeed.