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Updated: June 25, 2025
To my surprise Easterton and Jack Osborne were there, and the widow seemed pleased at finding that I knew them I guessed it was owing to Easterton's being there that Jasmine Gastrell was made to pass as Gastrell's cousin.
Easterton, a great talker in the club, was particularly silent. He too was puzzled; worse than that he felt, I could see, anxious and uncomfortable. He had let his house to this man the lease was already signed and now his tenant seemed to be, in some sense, a man of mystery. We sat in the big room with the bay window, after dinner, until about half-past ten, when Gastrell said he must be going.
He is there now, and the police are with him." "Good God!" I exclaimed. "How did they identify him?" "He was not unconscious. The police want me to go there at once. Come." We walked up to Grafton Street, as it was such a little way, also Easterton wanted to tell me more.
Another club member besides Easterton had, it seemed, become acquainted with Gastrell through Gastrell's calling at the wrong house by mistake. A coincidence? Possibly. And yet I sucked meditatively at my pipe. Suddenly the telephone rang. Easterton was speaking. "What!" I exclaimed, in answer to the startling information he gave me. "When did he disappear?" "Where was he last seen?"
Think of all the most lovely girls and women you have ever set eyes on, and roll them into one, and still you won't get the equal of Jasmine Gastrell. What is she like? By heaven, you might as well ask me to describe the taste of nectar!" "Dark or fair?" "Both." "Oh, nonsense." "It isn't nonsense, Easterton.
"I have a reason for not wanting it to be generally known that I am married, least of all did I want Easterton, whose house I have just leased, to know me to be a married man; indeed, I told him some weeks ago that I was a bachelor I had to, for reasons which I can't reveal at present." He stopped speaking, and we watched him narrowly.
You say your man landed only yesterday?" "Yes, we came off the ship together." "Then he was on board on let me think ten days or so ago?" "Oh, yes." "It's most singular, this apparent likeness between the two men." "It is if they really are alike. When shall you see your man again?" Osborne inquired. "I have this moment had a letter from him," Easterton answered.
It was not until Osborne and Lord Easterton had talked for some time about shooting in general, and about "hippo" and "rhino" and "'gator" killing in particular, and I had been forced to listen to a repetition of incidents to do with the sport that Jack Osborne had obtained in Nigeria and elsewhere, that Jack presently said: "Berrington tells me, Easterton, he heard you say that you have let your house to a man named Gastrell, and we were wondering if he is the Gastrell we both know a tall man of twenty-eight or so, with dark hair and very good-looking, queer kind of eyes what?"
Stapleton's it seemed quite on the cards that men and women of equally bad character might also be included among her friends. I had several reasons for suspecting Mrs. Gastrell of duplicity, and I determined to remain on my guard. The dinner, I confess, was excellent. I was glad to see that Dulcie sat between Jack Osborne and Lord Easterton, and was thus out of harm's way.
For here was Lord Easterton's friend, Hugesson Gastrell, whom Easterton had told us he had met frequently in London during the past month; here was Jack Osborne claiming to be acquainted with a man named Gastrell, whom he had met on his way home from Africa, and who, as he put it to us afterwards, was "the dead facsimile" of Easterton's guest; and here was I with a distinct recollection of a man called Gastrell who well, the more I stared at Easterton's guest the more mystified I felt at this Hugesson Gastrell's declaring that he was not my Geneva companion; indeed that we had never met before, and that he had never been in Geneva.
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