“I know—­he told me,” said Allerdyke, interrupting him.  “He got her a car, she wanted to be driven to some station on the Great Northern main line—­I met her on the road at two-thirty.  I suppose the driver of that car can be found?—­he’ll have returned by this, I should think.”

“Oh, you can find him all right,” answered the clerk.  “The car was got from a garage close by.”

Allerdyke jotted down the name of the garage in his pocket-book, and proceeded to make further inquiries about his cousin’s movements on the previous night.  He interviewed various hotel servants—­waiters, chambermaids, porters, all could tell him something, and the sum total of what they could tell amounted, for all practical purposes, to next to nothing.  James Allerdyke had come to the hotel just as several other people had come.  He had been served with a light supper in the coffee-room; he had been seen chatting with one or two people in the lounge and in the smoking-room; a chambermaid had seen him in his own room—­according to all these people there was nothing in his appearance or his behaviour that was out of the common, and all agreed that he looked very well.

The manager, who accompanied Allerdyke in his round of these inquiries, glanced at him with a puzzled expression when they came to an end.

“Of course, sir, if you would like the police to be summoned,” he suggested for the second time.  “Perhaps—­”

“No—­not yet!” answered Allerdyke.  “I daresay they’ll have to be called in; indeed, I suppose it’s absolutely necessary, because of the inquest, but I’ll wait until I hear what these doctors have to say, and, besides that, I want to get some news from London.  It’s a queer business altogether, and if there has been any foul play, why”—­he paused and looked round at the people who were passing in and out of the hall, in a corner of which he and the manager were standing—­“we can’t hold up all these folk and ask ’em if they know anything, you know,” he added, with a grim smile.

“That’s the devil of it!  If there has, as I say, been aught wrong—­murder, to put it plainly—­why, the criminal or criminals may already be off or going off now, amongst these people, and I can’t stop them.  In a few hours they may be where nobody can find them—­don’t you see?”

The manager did see, and shrugged his shoulders with a gesture of helplessness.  Again he could only suggest expert help from the police—­but this time he added to his suggestion the remark that he understood there was nothing for the police to take hold of—­no clue, no signs of foul play.

“Not yet,” agreed Allerdyke.  “But—­there may be.  Well, I’m afraid that register is no good.  It’s meaningless.  A list of names conveys nothing—­except for future reference.  For the present we must wait.  But—­in any way you can—­keep your eyes open.  There’s one thing you can do—­there was a lady in here last night who took Room 265 and left it at midnight to go away in a motor-car which your night-porter got for her.  I particularly want to see the chambermaid who attended that lady.  Let me see her privately—­I’ve a question to ask her.”