“Greek?” Hedger grunted. “Probably false.”
“They looked good to me.”
“Would you recognize a false passport?”
“I’ve seen a few, but to answer your question, probably not a good one.”
“Well, let’s sum up,” Hedger said.
“Not yet, there’s more.”
“More?”
“I went to find Lance and Erica; we had a drink, and then we returned to the Farm Street house. Erica cooked, and Lance asked me to go to the cellar and bring up some wine. I did, and the bodies were gone, everything cleaned up.”
Hedger looked really interested. “How long were you out of the house?”
“An hour and a half, maybe two hours.”
“Long enough for Lance to visit the house, clean up, and return to the other house?”
“If he hurried, and if he was very efficient. He was on the phone when I arrived at the other house, but I’ve no idea how long he had been there.”
“Could Lance have had any idea you’d been to the Farm Street house?”
“Possibly, since I got the keys from Monica. Maybe she told him.”
“So he sent you down to the cellar so you could see for yourself that everything had been cleaned up.”
“Perhaps. I’ll have to find out if Monica told him I had the keys.”
“Do that. Now, as I said, to sum up, what does this tell us about Lance?”
“You tell me.”
“It tells us that Lance is a part of something bigger than himself.”
“How does it tell us that?”
“You obviously didn’t read the papers this morning.”
“Not thoroughly.”
“Your two ‘Greeks’ were found in Hyde Park, in the trunk of a stolen car. The police are quite excited about it.”
“Oh.”
“I very much doubt if Lance had time to steal a car, load the bodies into it, and clean
up the wine cellar, all on his own.”
“You have a point. But what if it wasn’t Lance?”
“Who else might it be?”
“The bald man?”
“They were his men; why would he shoot them in Lance’s wine cellar, then clean up after himself? I could understand that he might wish to pin the murders on Lance, but in that case, he’d have left them where they lay, for somebody to find, wouldn’t he?”