“I shall be able to tell you better after I have seen the parties concerned,” said Cleek, after a moment’s pause.  “You have brought your motor, of course?  Let us step into it, then, and whizz round to Captain Morrison’s house.  What’s that?  Oh, undoubtedly a case of foul play, Mr. Narkom.  But as to the motive and the matter of who is guilty, it is impossible to decide until I have looked further into the evidence.  Do me a favour, will you?  After you have left me at the Captain’s house, ’phone up The Yard, and let me have the secret cable code with the East; also, if you can, the name of the chief of the Persian police.”

“My dear chap, you can’t really place any credence in that absurd assertion regarding the blue belt?  You can’t possibly think that Abdul ben Meerza really sent the thing?”

“No, I can’t,” said Cleek in reply.  “Because, to the best of my belief, it is impossible for a dead man to send anything; and, if my memory doesn’t betray me, I fancy I read in the newspaper accounts of that big Tajik rising at Khotour a couple of months ago, that the leader, one Abdul ben Meerza, a rich but exceedingly miserly merchant of the province of Elburz, was, by the Shah’s command, bastinadoed within an inch of his life, and then publicly beheaded.”

“By Jove!  I believe you are right, my dear fellow,” asserted Narkom.  “I thought the name had a familiar sound—­as if I had, somewhere, heard it before.  I suppose there is no likelihood, by any chance, that the old skinflint could have lived up to his promise and left poor Carboys something, after all, Cleek?  Because, you know, if he did—­”

“Captain Morrison would, as heir-at-law, inherit it,” supplemented Cleek, dryly.  “Get out the motor, Mr. Narkom, and let’s spin round and see him.  I fancy I should like a few minutes’ conversation with the Captain.  And—­Mr. Narkom!”

“Yes.”

“We’ll stick to the name ‘George Headland,’ if you please.  When you are out for birds it doesn’t do to frighten them off beforehand.”

CHAPTER XXV

It did not take more than five minutes to cover the distance between Sunnington Crescent and the modest little house where Captain Morrison and his daughter lived; so in a very brief time Cleek had the satisfaction of interviewing both.

Narkom’s assertion, that Miss Morrison was “half out of her mind over the distressing affair” had prepared him to encounter a weeping, red-eyed, heart-broken creature of the most excitable type.  He found instead a pale, serious-faced, undemonstrative girl of somewhat uncertain age—­sweet of voice, soft of step, quiet of demeanour—­who was either one of those persons who repress all external evidence of internal fires, and bear their crosses in silence, or was as cold-blooded as a fish and as heartless as a statue.  He found the father the exact antithesis of the daughter, a nervous, fretful,