The detective instinct which was Blick’s second nature rose, strong and eager, when he heard this announcement. He, too, glanced at Grimsdale in knowing fashion. “Something to tell?” he suggested.
“Didn’t say as much to me,” answered the landlord, “but I should say so. Came hanging round our side-door till he got a sight of me, and then asked if you were in, and if he could see you, all to yourself—didn’t want anybody else to know.”
“Bring him in—and tell him nobody will know anything whatever about it,” commanded Blick. “Strictly private, eh?”
Grimsdale glanced at the window, and crossing over to it, drew its curtains. He left the room—to return a minute later with a young man in whipcord clothes and smart Newmarket gaiters; a shrewd-eyed, keen-faced fellow who regarded the detective pretty much as he might have regarded a slippery fox just breaking cover.
“William Pegge, Mr. Blick,” said Grimsdale.
Blick nodded affably to his shy and watchful visitor, and pointed to a chair close to his own by the cheery fire.
“Good evening, Pegge,” he said. “Sit down—will you have a drink?”
Pegge slid into the easy chair, put his hat on the ground, and grinned sheepishly.
“Well, thank you, sir,” he answered. “Don’t mind a drop of ale.”
Blick looked at Grimsdale, who went out and returned with a frothing tankard, which he set down at the groom’s elbow.
“See that we’re not disturbed, Grimsdale,” said Blick. “If anybody—never mind who it is—wants me, say I’m engaged.”
The landlord withdrew and closed the door and Blick pushed his tobacco pouch over to his visitor, who was fingering his pipe.
“Try a bit of that,” he said hospitably, “and light up. Well—you wanted to have a talk with me, Pegge. What is it?”
Before Pegge replied to this direct invitation, he filled and lighted his pipe, got it fairly going, and lifting the tankard of ale to his lips, murmured an expression of his best respect to his entertainer. Then, with a look round his surroundings, indicative of a desire for strict privacy, he gave Blick a shrewd glance.
“I shouldn’t like to get into trouble,” he remarked.
“Just so!” agreed Blick. “You won’t—through anything that you say to me.”
“Nor yet to get anybody else into trouble,” continued Pegge. “That is—unless so be as they’re deserving of it!”
“Exactly!—unless they’re deserving of it,” said Blick. “In that case, you wouldn’t mind?”
“Don’t mind telling what I know to be true,” replied Pegge. He looked the detective well over again. “I s’pose,” he went on, “I s’pose that if I tell you—something—I should have to tell it again—as a witness, like?”
“All depends on what it is, Pegge,” answered Blick. “You might—if it’s very important. Or, you mightn’t—if it’s merely something that you want to tell me, between ourselves. Anyway, whatever it is, you’ll come to no harm—so long as you speak the plain truth.”
“Them witnesses, now?” suggested Pegge. “Before crowners, and magistrates, and judges at the ’sizes—are they protected? Nobody can’t do nothing at ’em for telling what they know, eh?”
“Strictly protected, in every way,” said Blick, with emphatic decision. “Bad job for anybody who interfered with a witness, Pegge! Make yourself comfortable on that point, my lad.”
Pegge nodded, took another mouthful of ale, and seemed to make up his mind.
“Well, I do know something!” he said suddenly. “I was half in a mind to tell it this morning, up there at the inquest——”
“You were there?” asked Blick.
“Most of the time,” assented Pegge. “I heard all that Grimsdale said, anyhow. It was along of what he said that I thought of coming forward, d’ye see, but I didn’t exactly know what to do, and so, when I hear ’em talk about an adjournment, I thought I’d put it off, and think matters over. However, when I hear you were stopping here to look after things, I thought I’d mention it to you, like.”
“Quite right, Pegge—much obliged to you,” said Blick. “Make yourself easy. And now—what is it?”
Pegge removed his pipe from his lips, and leaned a little nearer to his listener.
“Well,” he said, “it’s like this here. You’d hear what Grimsdale said about Mr. Guy Markenmore coming to this house that night before he was murdered, and being in company with two other gentlemen?”
“Of course,” responded Blick, “I heard it.”
“One of ’em,” continued Pegge, “a tall man—tall as Mr. Harborough? So Grimsdale said—from what he see of him, as they was going away?”
“Yes—I remember,” said Blick.
“Well, I’ll tell ’ee something,” Pegge went on, showing signs of rising interest in his own story. “Grimsdale ’ud tell you that I’m groom at Mrs. Tretheroe’s—we’ve a coachman and two grooms there—I’m head groom. Our mistress has five horses at present—couple of hunters, two carriage horses, and a very good cob. Now, on Monday afternoon, this here cob—’tain’t common sort of an animal, for Mrs. Tretheroe, she give a hundred and forty guineas for him only a month since—took ill—colic, or something o’ that sort—and I had to fetch the veterinary surgeon to him. The vet., he was at our place for an hour or two that evening a-doctoring of him, and he sort o’ pulled him round, but says he to our coachman and the rest of us, ‘One of you chaps,’ he says, ‘’ll have to sit up with this cob all night, and look well after him.’ So I offered to do that—t’other two is married men, and lives in the village here; me being a single man, I lives over the stables, d’ye see?”
“I see,” said Blick. “You were on the spot.”
“On the spot, so to speak,” agreed Pegge. “Well, the vet., he leaves us some medicine, and he tells me what to do, all through the night, with this here cob, and so, when it gets late, and all the rest of ’em had gone, I gets my supper in the servants’ hall, and takes a bit o’ something to eat during the night, and settles down as comfortable as I could in the saddle-room, next to the loose-box where we had this poorly cob. He went on all right, that cob did—hadn’t no trouble with he at all, and he’s right now—quite fit again. However, that’s neither here nor there, in a way of speaking—what I mention the cob for is to show you how I come to be up all that Monday night, d’ye see?”
“I understand,” said Blick. “It’s all clear, Pegge. Go ahead!”
“Well,” continued Pegge, “there’s nothing happens till about a quarter to two o’clock in the morning. I know it was that ’cause I had to keep looking at the cob every so often from the time the vet. left him, and that was one of the times. I’d just been into his loose-box, and come out when I remembered that I’d no tobacco left in my pouch. But I had plenty in a tin in my bedroom, so I went off to fetch it. Now then, you must understand that our stabling at the Dower House is separated from the drive by a high hedge of macrocarpus trees—shrubbery, d’ye see? I was going along this hedge side, between it and the coach-house wall, on my way to the stairs that leads up to my bedroom, when I hear somebody coming down the drive, t’other side the hedge—soft, like. So I stops, dead——”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted Blick. “What were you walking on, yourself, Pegge? What sort of a pavement, or path?”
“Asphalt—laid down recent,” answered Pegge, promptly. “Runs all along the front of our stabling. Put down when Mrs. Tretheroe came and had things smartened up.”
“And what had you on your feet—what sort of shoes?”
“Pair of old tennis shoes that the housekeeper had given me,” replied Pegge. “Some gentleman had left ’em behind him.”
“Very well,” said Blick. “Go on. You stopped dead——”
“Stopped just where I was, stole in between the bushes, and looked into the drive. Then I see a man coming down it, from the side of the house, where there’s a door by which you can get out into the back gardens. He come right past me, walking on the grass path at the side of the gravel roadway.”
“You saw him clearly?”
“Considering it was night—a clear night, though—I see him as clearly as what I see you! That is—with a bit of difference, like.”
“You saw him clearly enough to know who he was?”
“I did!”
“Well?” asked Blick, eyeing his informant closely. “Who was he?”
Pegge looked with equal closeness at his questioner.
“That German gentleman that’s staying with our missis!” he answered.
“Baron von Eckhardstein?”
“That’s him! The Baron we calls him.”
............