Tramp's Evidence

Roy Glashan's Library
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E. CHARLES VIVIAN

TRAMP'S EVIDENCE
(THE BARKING DOG MURDER CASE)

First UK edition: Ward, Lock & Co., London, 1937

First US edition: Hillman-Curl, New York, 1937, as
"The Barking Dog Murder Mystery

This e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2024
Version Date: 2024-12-07

Produced by Matthias Kaether and Roy Glashan

All content added by RGL is proprietary and protected by copyright.

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Chapter I. The Grey House
Chapter II. No Dog
Chapter III. A Black Man, and a White Woman
Chapter IV. Two Women, Both in White
Chapter V. One Mystery Solved
Chapter VI. Why There Was No Dog
Chapter VII. A Letter
Chapter VIII. Allday
Chapter IX. Getting Busy
Chapter X. Inquest
Chapter XI. Mainly Marital
Chapter XII. Alibi for El Hag Khalil
Chapter XIII. Martin Colston
Chapter XIV. Inference, But No More
Chapter XV. Films
Chapter XVI. Films Explained
Chapter XVII. Butters is Useful
Chapter XVIII. Ants' Eggs
Chapter XIX. Publicity
Chapter XX. Shadow of a Coming Event
Chapter XXI. Ensanguined Rag
Chapter XXII. Dream Becomes Reality
Brief Epilogue

Chapter I
The Grey House

NEARLY a quarter of a mile beyond Condor Grange, at the point where the wide, carefully-graded, post-war road, which runs up to the shoulder of Condor Hill and down into Carden village, branches to the right and away from the old coach road, Mr. Napoleon Marvel halted and looked back. Having passed Condor Grange, he had already begun the ascent of the ridge, known in the Westingborough district as Condor Hill, though, on the ordnance maps, Condor Hill is the north-western, highest point of the ridge, and the rest of it is not conspicuous enough to merit any name.

So far, the grade had been fairly easy: now, the really steep ascent began, and, to obviate the worst of its steepness, the new road had been cut. Surprisingly, on the face of it, Mr. Napoleon Marvel took the old coach road, which in one section involved a gradient of one in four, and, near the summit of the ridge, steepened to one in three and a half for a hundred yards or more. And Mr. Marvel, by the look of him, was not one to indulge in superfluous exertion: he gave the impression of having dodged anything of the kind since—probably—he cheated at marbles when playing with other instances of precocity.

He was of a type that, thanks to unemployment pay, the enclosure of open spaces, education of the masses at the expense of the middle classes, and similar measures for the betterment of British mankind, is fast disappearing even from rural England. He wore a tweed coat that some impoverished golfer had—probably—thrown away to save it from falling off in pieces; a hat that had once been of soft felt, but now appeared to be composed of grease, mud, and similar substances, with a liberal sprinkling of holes, and held together by remnants of soft felt and a no-colour-at-all band. His heavy corduroy trousers, not in bad condition, though very dirty, had previously belonged to a man who was stouter than himself, but several inches shorter, and his farm labourer's boots, their leather hardened to an almost iron-like rigidity, had very little left in the way of heels, while the toe of the right boot gaped cavernously, displaying a couple of dusty toe-ends and the bit of rag, with which Mr. Marvel atoned for his deficiency in socks, just glimmering in the gloom behind the toes. His shirt had once been an Army grey-back, but now grey flannel and erst-white neckband were of the same hue, no-colour-at-all. Otherwise, a mere smudge of dirtiness against the dingy brick-pinkness of his neck and chest. Let it be added that he had apparently shaved or been shaved a week before. It is the trademark of his kind, always to have shaved or been shaved a week before. They are never caught either completely and newly shaved, or completely bearded. The stubble is as inevitable as death, an income-tax demand form, or crooning in jazz.

Mr. Marvel, turning toward the old coach road in preference to the newer, easier ascent of the hill, was in no good humour. Westingborough, the town behind him, had been unkind: its police force, maintained in high efficiency by Superintendent Wadden—whom Napoleon hated with a red and murderous passion—had jugged him, planked him in front of the beak, and handed out fourteen of the worst. The official records stated that one Napoleon Marvel had been arrested for begging in the streets of Westingborough, and had been awarded fourteen days' hard labour for begging and resisting arrest. One bright spot, and only one, appeared in the darkness of that incident: released from captivity, Napoleon had had returned to him thirty-two shillings and twenty-seven pennies, the results of his begging campaign in Westingborough. Grudgingly, he had to admit that Superintendent Wadden and his men were honest: it went to his heart to admit any good of them, but there it was.

He knew the district. The new road, he knew, bore motors, motor lorries, motor cycles, and things of equally ominous import to him, on its surface, at the rate of about two a minute, on a fine July evening like this. They all went that way: many of them halted at the shoulder of the hill, beyond the cutting, where a wide parking-place had been cut because of the view over Carden valley. Blasted nuisances, they were, from Mr. Marvel's point of view. Interferin', nosey, can't-let-a-bloke-get-on-with-it stinkin' lot o' perishers!

But, because of the view and the easier grade, the old road was almost deserted, in these days. It was of barely two-vehicle width, and went up between high, gravelly banks, shaded by oaks as old as time, with bracken under them, to the crest of the ridge. An idyllic, ancient way: a token of the directness of our forefathers, who scorned the ease that the generation of to-day affects, and drove straight to their objective. Until the new road had been made, the old way had driven, heedless of gradients, straight from Westingborough to Crandon, the next town, ignoring Carden altogether in its quest for London. Now, it was a deserted, shaded way, and in such a summer evening as this in which Mr. Napoleon Marvel trod it, a steepness of gathering mystery as the gloom grew under the spreading oak branches, and the rabbits fled from human approach, retreating into their burrows under the bracken.

Their retreat irked Mr. Marvel, heavily. "If only I 'ad a gun!" he muttered to himself as he saw white scuts disappearing far beyond grabbing distance. But he consoled himself with the reflection that Allday's Farm was ahead, and not very far ahead at that.

Meum and tuum had no place in his vocabulary. He had subsisted on skilly, bread, and similar substances for fourteen days, and now he yearned for a real meal. In the rude pack that he carried were a box of matches, a tin billy, a table-knife sharpened to the nth of keenness, a paper wisp of salt, and another paper package containing two large onions. The shades of night were falling fast, and he was approaching Allday's Farm, where fowls ran about all day and roosted where they would all night.

He glanced back, and saw that the windings of this narrow way rendered its junction with the new road no longer visible: also, there was nobody in sight. With that certainty, he scrambled up the bank on his left and melted into the deeper shadows under the trees, where, presently, a transient glimmer of light proclaimed that he was about to enjoy a smoke. The evening was serenely luminous, promising a still and perfect July night: it was too early, yet, to go in illicit quest of chickens at Allday's Farm; country people retired early, but it were better to let them fall soundly asleep, lest an untimely squawk should betray his errand to them.

Thus he smoked, and reflected on the mutability of human affairs or, more probably, on the fierce eyes of Superintendent Wadden, who had warned him as to what would happen if ever he set foot in Westingborough again. At a low hostelry on the outskirts of the town, one known as The Brass Gridiron, Mr. Marvel had refreshed himself not long since with beer, bread and cheese, and more beer, so there was no real urgency about this contemplated fowl.

Considering the wealth that had been handed back to him by Sergeant Wells in the charge-room at Westingborough, there was nothing to prevent him from buying a fowl. But he had a rooted objection to buying anything, except beer: one had to buy beer, but buying a fowl was unthinkable, a waste of money that would utterly ruin the flavour of the bird. Stolen, simmered gently in the tin billy over a fire of sticks—with the two onions, of course—it would be a thing of unspeakable savour. And then to sleep out here under the trees, and gnaw the bones clean on wakening. Paradise!

Thus ran Mr. Marvel's anticipations. Some of Allday's fowls, he knew, roosted in the cart shed, well away from the farmhouse. In about half an hour, say—

Then he whispered profanity at the stars, for the deep note of a high-powered car engine reached his ears. It had come off the new road as had he, and was ascending this older way beyond his sight, though he caught the forward-thrown radiance of powerful headlamps on branches of the trees beside the road. The radiance passed: the noise of the engine grew fainter, and ceased—later, Mr. Marvel was to realise that it had ceased far too suddenly, but at the time he concluded that the car had passed beyond his hearing on its way up the hill. It would not disturb Allday's fowls, but it might prevent their owner from going to sleep for awhile.

Mr. Marvel, as nearly as he could estimate time, gave it half an hour. Then he put his pipe back in his bundle—for the pockets of the tweed coat had become incapable of retaining pipes or anything else, long ago. Bundle in hand, he made his way back to the road, for it was as dark now as a fine night in July can be, and, stepping gingerly down the steep bank, halted abruptly and very wrathfully. For, distinct though faint through distance, he heard the persistent barking of a dog, coming from the direction of Allday's Farm.

"People don't oughter keep dorgs," Mr. Marvel told himself, with a deep sense of injury. "Dangerous, thass what they are."

Going on and on, with brief intervals that served, apparently, for renewal of breath. Not the shrill yapping of a terrier, nor the deep bay of a great big dog which might prove friendly to all men, but that intermediate, weighty yet penetrating note which indicated that this was the type of dog that would mean business, and would not be cajoled. Mr. Marvel listened.

His plans for the night were ruined. Until that noise began, he had been certain that the Alldays kept no dog. Their head cowman had one, but he lived a good half-mile distant from the farmhouse and its outbuildings. Now, it seemed, they also had one, which meant that search of the cart shed in pursuit of fowls was out of the question, and he must go on over the crest of the hill and, possibly, try his luck at one of the farms down toward Crandon, and then trudge another couple of miles before he could find such shelter as this wood afforded for concealment of a cooking fire.

He told the summer night his opinion of dogs. He left them not only devoid of any virtue whatsoever, but possessing not a solitary redeeming feature. He used all his vocabulary, and repeated some parts of it many times.

Mr. Marvel grew curious, though not less resentful of the sound. Surely the dog's owner must hear it, and ought to put a stop to it for his own sake, as well as for that of a would-be fowl stealer. It went on and on, and eventually Mr. Marvel went on too, toward the noise. Thus, treading noiselessly on the grassy verge of the old road, he came to the car, and halted with a bristling sort of fear at the sudden sight of it. Long, black, lightless, backed into a gateway beside the road, it stood, a Rolls-Royce saloon.

The dog went on barking while Mr. Marvel gazed open-mouthed at the car. There ought to have been nothing ominous in a mere car backed in here under the trees, but, added to the angry voice of the dog, it gave a boding, threatful quality to the night. Mr. Marvel tiptoed round the front of the bonnet, and saw that it was not only lightless, but unattended. He went along it and gazed in at the driving seat and back seats: there was something in the back that looked like a rug or coat, but he rejected the idea of stealing it and turned again to continue the ascent of the hill.

The barking, louder now, came from somewhere nearer than Allday's Farm, and Mr. Marvel knew a renewal of hope. For the only other place from which it could come was The Grey House, Bernard Wymering's place of intermittent residence. It might be that Wymering had left a dog shut in the house or in an outbuilding, and something had wakened it: it might be, too, that Allday and his household had not been unduly disturbed by the noise, since they were nearly half a mile beyond it. It might even be possible to lift a roosting fowl from the cart shed, after all. Mr. Marvel went on, and the barking went on too.

The Grey House, as he knew, stood in a small clearing of the wood beside the road. There was fifteen to twenty yards of scantily-tended garden before it, guarded from the road by a paling fence in which was a wooden gate that gave access to the narrow, gravelled path leading to the front door. Once, when in passing Mr. Marvel had begged here, Wymering had laughingly thrown a sixpence at him and told him to get out and buy soap with the money. At other times, he had seen the house closed and silent, for Wymering spent most of his time in London and elsewhere, and only came here intermittently during the summer months. Evidently, after his last visit, he had gone away and forgotten the dog, whose bark sounded louder and angrier as Mr. Marvel approached the frontage of the place.

A frontage of grey stone, not of red brick, as were nearly all the houses in this district. A front door of old, weathered oak, with iron hinges extending almost all the way across it in black-enamelled scrolls. Two casement bays, one on each side of the doorway, and over them two flat casement windows under a roof of grey slate. It was, definitely, a grey house, though in the summer night it was like Mr. Marvel's hat and shirt, no-colour-at-all.

Mr. Marvel halted in rather fearful amazement, for the gate in the fence stood wide open, and the oaken front door, he could see, was open too—where it should have been visible was a blackness, and no light showed anywhere about the house. Out of that blackness came the voice of the dog, angry, persistent, menacing.

Tied up inside there—but the door was open! Wymering must be somewhere about, for surely, in face of that dangerous-sounding dog, no burglar nor housebreaker of any kind would have ventured into the black darkness of the house. It was inexplicable. Wymering must be able to hear the sound, for the open door indicated that he was somewhere inside, and yet—where was he?

Whether the three silent figures that suddenly appeared had dropped from the sky, or risen from the ground, was more than he could tell. At one moment he was alone, gazing at the darkness of the open doorway: the next, he was aware of one slender, white-robed figure, and two men, stealthily approaching in such a fashion as to drive him toward the gateway, and, lest he should have any doubt as to their intent, in the right hand of each one he saw a wicked-looking knife. One, a tall villain, grated out—"Kill him!" in a foreign-sounding voice. Another, not quite so tall, leaped at him and thrust within only inches of his face a dark visage with fierce, gleaming eyes, and the slender one in white appeared to hover behind these two, waiting a chance to dart in and strike. Mr. Marvel went backward through the gateway on to the garden path. The tallest villain, following, lifted the knife in his right hand, and with the left reached out as if to hold his desperately-frightened quarry for a throat-cutting, and at that Mr. Marvel turned and bolted frantically up the path, straight toward the barking dog. He heard the quick patter of their footsteps close behind him, and leaped up the two steps into the blackness of the house. Within, the din of barking was deafening, but, utterly heedless of it, the terrified man caught at the edge of the heavy door and swung it closed between himself and these murderous assailants.

Crash! went the door, and there he was, shut in with a dog that might fly at his throat at any moment, for all he knew. He had but exchanged hell for purgatory, but at least he had a chance against what, by the sound of it, was only one dog, while against three assassins with knives out and ready he would have had none at all. In here the barking, deafeningly loud and insistent, prevented him from hearing anything that the devils outside might be doing, and with an accession of terror he realised that the furious dog must be here in this room or hall with him! Somewhere at the back, perhaps, or was it over there at the side? He tried to listen for the clank of a chain or something of the sort, but the barking was too loud and echoed too much to permit of his hearing anything else.

"Oh, Gord!" he moaned desperately. "What 'ave I ever done to deserve this? Lemme once git outer heer, an' blimey, I'll work!"

It was the resolve supreme, the ultimate promise with which to cajole Providence into delivering him from either impending fate. For at any moment the three murderers outside might rush in and put an end to him, while, equally, at any moment the dog's teeth might be sunk in his throat. Scylla and Charybdis, devil and deep sea...

"Nero?" Mr. Marvel cooed, in an interval in which, apparently, the dog took a long breath. "Good dorg! 'Ere, old chap!"

Fruitless. The barking began again, fierce as ever. It was over there at the back of the hall, or whatever this apartment was: it sounded from the side, then from the other side, again from the back—Mr. Marvel could not tell whence it emanated. But, after certain agonised eternities which might have amounted to two minutes altogether had elapsed, he realised that the thing meant to go on barking, and had no immediate intention of translating the threat of the bark into an attack. For some reason or other, it could not or would not go for him, though its resentment at his presence was unmistakable. Each "Aoh!" thudded on his ear drums, just as one of those terrible knives might have thudded on his breast-bone if he had not fled to this doubtful refuge and banged the door.

"Oughter be 'oarse, by this time," he reflected, regaining some presence of mind as his immunity from harm was prolonged.

Then it struck him that it might be as well to stand back a bit from the door. If those three murdering devils burst it open and charged in, he might have a chance to charge out, once they had passed toward the back in search of him. He took two steps back from the door, and then, pausing, groped in his bundle and found that exceedingly sharp table-knife which, by this time, ought to have been in use on the carcase of a fowl. If either dog or men attacked, that knife would be a decidedly handy means of defence.

His bundle in his left hand, and the knife in his right, he took another step toward the barking, off the edge of some rug or mat on to a hard wooden floor. His next step, taken backward, was a stumble on something soft, something that half yielded and sent him shuddering away from it, at first with the belief that he had actually trodden on the barking dog, and then with the knowledge that it was inert, clothed flesh that his foot had pressed. At the limit of terror, now, he dropped both bundle and knife, and then went down on his knees to retrieve the bundle. His matches were in it, and he must strike one to find out what that was.

Groping, he realised that his hand was wet from its contact with the floor, stickily and uglily wet. Persisting in his search—for now he was almost past fear—he found the handle of the knife, and that too was stickily wet. He clutched it desperately, transferred it to his left hand, and went on groping for the bundle. Presently he shrieked aloud, for his sticky hand had come in contact with warm, limp flesh. As he withdrew it he struck the bundle, and, grabbing it, managed to stand erect again.

Deafening, awful, now. There was a new menace in the sound, a new terror in this place. He wiped his wet left hand on his trousers, and then, transferring both bundle and knife to that hand, managed to grope inside the bundle for his matches with the right. He found the box, got it open, and extracted a match. When he tried to strike it on the box, it broke, and he had to find another.

This time, he got a light, but what it revealed caused him to drop the match and reel back against the door, where he leaned, helpless with terror, heedless for the time of whether the barking dog broke loose and sprang at him, or no. For there on the parquet lay Bernard Wymering in pyjamas, and the wetness with which Mr. Marvel had daubed his knife, his hands, and his clothes, was blood that had gushed from the great slit in Wymering's throat and made a pool beside the body.

Now here was a danger far greater than that of the steadily-barking dog, equally terrible with that of the knives of the assassins outside the door. For let him, Mr. Marvel, be caught in here, all daubed with the blood of the murdered man, and that blood on his knife as well, and the hangman's rope must surely be his portion! He had to get out and away, somehow. He had to rid himself of those terribly incriminating stains, get out of the district.

If only that fearful, persistent barking would cease! Someone else would surely hear it, soon, and come to investigate its cause. Every minute here added to the danger of discovery.

Chapter II
No Dog

AT the very crest of the old coach road, Constable Lynton James Vane (he always suppressed the "Lynton," and gave his first name as "Jimmy") paused to look down the Westingborough slope of Condor Hill. This crest was bare, and beneath, as he gazed, Vane saw a green carpet composed of treetops, reaching to within fifty yards or less of the point at which he stood, and extending downhill almost to the edge of the marshland that fringed the River Idleburn. That is to say, there were miles of woodland, and it was Vane's task to comb the whole area in quest of pheasant poachers.

Squire Hastings, who owned most of this wooded tract and also raised pheasants, nurturing the young broods like tame chickens and driving them on to guns in the autumn as if they had been dangerous beasts meriting destruction, was responsible for Vane's task. The squire was certain that poachers were out after his old cock birds these summer nights: he had laid information to that effect at Carden police station, and the sergeant in charge there had ordered young Vane out to co-operate with Hastings' keepers. These latter, harried and worried by their employer in the daytime, shirked putting in nights as well on such a vain quest as this, so Vane had the task to himself. The keepers had turned out one night, uselessly, and would turn out no more. They said the old man had a bee in his bonnet, and, even if he hadn't, a hundred poachers could hide under them trees and nobody would be the wiser.

Having eyed the area of his patrol, Vane began the descent of the old road, and made it a leisurely business, since twilight had hardly ended, though behind him a crescent of young moon had vanished and the evening star was low. When he came in under the trees, he got the impression of night having fallen, instantly, but still he sauntered slowly downhill: poachers, if poachers there were, would not appear as early as this.

He paused to look along the drive leading to Tolston Hall, where Squire Hastings maintained a good front to the world in spite of a sadly diminished income, a son with expensive tastes, and a daughter for whom he had not yet been able to afford a London season. Constable Vane had half a hope that he might see Sheila Hastings: being of the new order of policeman, he had been at Marlborough with her brother, and though that brother might ignore him because of the calling he had chosen, Sheila would not.

It was too late, of course. The few yards of the avenue that he could see were innocent of human presence. A rabbit, lolloping into the undergrowth as Vane approached the gate, proved that nobody had been there for some minutes, at least, and the smart young constable, after a pause of gazing, went slowly on. Through the foliage ahead, he saw a glimmer of light in one of the upper windows of Allday's farmhouse, but as he came down to the vicinity of the house the light vanished. One of the Allday household, evidently, had just gone to bed.

A white line on the darkness, approaching him, resolved itself into a human figure, a slender, tall figure, clad all in white. He moved out from the side of the road, and Sheila Hastings—for he recognised her—halted uncertainly, and then came close to him. She was more than normally tall; her dark hair appeared black in this tree-shaded gloom of the sunken road, and Vane could see only the outline of her face as he heard her uneven breathing.

"Oh, it's only you!" she said, as if relieved. "But you frightened me. One doesn't expect—this time of night—"

"And what is Miss Hastings doing out at this time of night?" he demanded, with heavy pleasantry.

"I've been to see Brenda Allday's new baby," she explained. "A perfectly lovely little thing—but of course, you wouldn't be interested, Constable Vane!" She too, with the emphasis on the title, made a heavy pleasantry of it. Had he been more at his ease, he would have observed that she was rather disconcerted by this meeting. He did observe that she kept her right hand almost behind her back.

"I'm not so sure that I wouldn't," he countered. "They can be interesting, you know, even to constables."

"Don't scratch me—scratch father," he retorted half-enigmatically. "Father suggested business, and I hate business. Father said he wouldn't afford Sandhurst, couldn't afford the law, didn't want me to be a doctor, and wouldn't go on keeping me. Voilà!"

"Let's talk about it some time when you're not in that frightful uniform," she offered. "Not now, though—I must get home."

"You haven't been trying to slay the baby, by any chance," he inquired. For he had seen what looked like a slender carving knife in her right hand, which she advanced momentarily.

"Oh, this?" She held up the article. "Allday's boy was delivering eggs at home, and the cook remarked that the carving steel had come off its handle—the one belonging to the game carvers. The boy offered to mend it, and when I was there to-night I offered to bring it back and hand it to cook. Brenda told me about it."

"If at all. Now I really must go, Jimmy—it's so late. Good night—see you again soon, I hope."

"I hope so, too," he answered, as she passed him and hurried on on her way uphill, toward the hall gateway.

He might have offered to escort her as far as the gate, he reflected, gazing at her retreating figure, but, if she meant to get away at a Marathon pace, there would have been little profit in it. And her patent dislike for his uniform had nettled him—she had only seen him in it once before, and then he had had no chance to speak to her. Going slowly on toward Allday's front gate, he felt that this joining a mere county constabulary had been a silly business: he ought to have gone to London, enrolled there, and put his brains into C.I.D. work, for nothing ever happened in a hole like this. There had been certain murder cases in the district, certainly, but not one of them would have offered a chance of recognition for the abilities of a constable of the new type.

Disgruntled by Sheila's attitude, he paced slowly past Allday's place, where no lights at all showed, now. Then he halted to listen: from farther down the hill there reached him the angry barking of a dog, and he let fall an exclamation of profane disgust. For no poachers would pursue their avocation with a dog of that temper loose and alert: right in the midst of the woodlands, too.

The sound grew more clamorous as he advanced, and then he heard another, altogether different sound. Somebody had engaged the gear of a car engine, clumsily: a beam of dazzling light came up the hill together with the grinding sound of low gear on the steep gradient: a long, black shape shot past Vane and left him with specks before his eyes. All he had been able to distinguish was a figure at the steering wheel of the car: there might have been others in it, behind the driver, but he could not be sure.

In itself, there was nothing singular in a big car taking the old coach road instead of the wider, easier way through Carden village, but the barking of the dog continued. It could not be that the mere passing of a car at night had upset the dog, for it had been barking before the driver changed gear, somewhere beyond Wymering's place, The Grey House. Moving more quickly, now, Vane decided that the barking emanated from The Grey House: Wymering, on one of his visits to his country cottage, had brought a dog with him.

All the frontage of The Grey House was in darkness when Vane came abreast the open gate and paused to look along the path. The menacing, persistent sound came out at him—out from the house itself, apparently. A pause, and it began again—

An Alsatian, or a big Airedale, by the sound of it. The quality of the bark indicated that the animal might make a bad mess of a policeman's uniform if it had the chance. But there was something wrong at The Grey House: Wymering would not let the dog go on barking like that if he heard it, and only a deaf man, inside there, could fail to hear it. And Wymering, Vane knew, was not deaf.

A faint light glimmered for a second or two through the transom over the front door as Vane began to advance along the path. Burglars, for a certainty, and they had stunned or bound Wymering and shut the dog away somewhere while they got on with their work. And the car that had been halted downhill from the house—had the car anything to do with this? Thoughts raced through Vane's brain as, truncheon in hand and his belt-lamp swung round in front, he approached the iron-bound, oaken front door. He reached for its handle, an iron ring like that of a church door, but before his fingers made contact the handle began to turn, and, with truncheon half-raised, Vane drew aside, close to the pillar supporting the porch roof, and felt for the switch of his belt-lamp. He clicked it as the door swung open, and the ray showed him, first, a bloody knife in a blood-stained hand, and then, as he swung the lamp upward, the terror-filled eyes of Mr. Napoleon Marvel.

"Hands up! Drop that knife!" Vane shouted the commands, to render them distinct above the volume of barking that came out at him as soon as the door opened. And Mr. Marvel, obeying, dropped both knife and bundle with a clatter of blade and muffled clink of tin billy. He leaned helplessly against the lintel of the door while Vane kept the ray of the belt-lamp full in his eyes, and inwardly queried how on earth he should cope, single-handed, with a situation like this.

With his own handkerchief, by the light of his lamp, he knotted Mr. Marvel's wrists securely together, and while he worked the tramp kept up an incoherent, sobbing, muttering noise, but made no resistance of any kind. Vane spoke again—

It was difficult, with tied hands, but Mr. Marvel eased himself down on to the hard gravel path, and as he did so, Vane unbuckled his belt, slipped off the useful lamp, and with the belt secured his quarry's legs just below the knees. It might be an unorthodox sort of arrest, but Vane was taking no chances: he knew Mr. Marvel.

Satisfied that his man was helpless, he took up the lamp and went to the door again. As he reached for the handle, Mr. Marvel became articulate, lifting his head to call out in agonised appeal,

He sent the ray of the lamp to the back of the big entrance hall, questing for the dog whose voice sounded deafeningly near and threatful—it was somewhere in the hall itself, he felt sure. Then, raying the light nearer to himself, travelling it across the floor, he revealed the body and pool of blood only a few feet from the door, and, momentarily, reeled at the sight. Recovering, he entered and, avoiding the blood that Mr. Marvel had dabbled into smudges on the parquet, he bent and felt at Wymering's heart under the pyjama jacket. The flesh was still warm, but that fearful gash in the neck proved that the man was dead. And there, just inside the door, lay Mr. Marvel's bloodied knife, while outside lay Mr. Marvel with blood on his hands and clothes.

But the dog! Its voice was here, but it was invisible. The voice came from somewhere in this hall, beyond question. Traversing the light in every direction, Vane sought for the beast. It was there at the back, it was at the side of the hall—the volleying Aoh's, echoing and reverberating, prevented definite location of the source of the sound. Ignoring Mr. Marvel for the moment—he could not get far—Vane went round the hall, and as he chased the sound it seemed to retreat from him. There were three doors, one on each side of the hall and one at the back, in addition to the front door, and he opened and closed each one, only to be more certain that the dog was in the hall itself! And under his helmet his hair bristled, for the beast was invisible.

He had to get help, though, and to make certain of Mr. Marvel, who by some miracle might get loose and away if left out there too long. Vane retreated to the front door again, and the barking volleyed at him from the back of the hall. Faced inward, lest the brute should suddenly appear and attack him, he backed over the threshold, carefully avoiding Mr. Marvel's fallen knife and bundle. Then it struck him that, before leaving, he ought to secure the place, and he entered again and found, on the inside of the door, a Yale-pattern bolt which he released—it had been caught back so that the door could be opened by merely turning the handle. He realised that the door would have to be forced for re-entry to the hall, but dared not leave it insecure. Backing out again, he had almost closed the door when the barking ceased, and at that he pushed the door open again and looked in. That ghastly corpse lay as he had first seen it: the lamp's ray showed him conclusively that nothing in the hall had moved, and, standing as he did, he knew that no dog could have passed him.

He closed the door, hearing the bolt click before he released the iron handle and let the latch slide into its mortice. Then, turning about, he saw that Mr. Marvel had rolled over on to his back and was sitting up on the garden path.

But, for Mr. Marvel, the bitterness of death had passed... The very worst, short of being killed by those three ghostly assassins, had happened to him, and he blinked at the light in his face almost composedly, making no move to obey the command.

The impudence of the remark was staggering to such an extent that Vane did not immediately repeat the order.

"After finding you red-handed—literally red-handed!—and with the knife that did it in your grasp? You dare to say you didn't commit that murder?" he demanded incredulously.

"I reserves me defence," said Mr. Marvel, as majestically as might one who sat on a garden path with his hands bound behind him.

"If you don't lie down and turn over on your face, I'm going to stun you," Vane told him, and brandished his truncheon.

Mr. Marvel went down obediently, and turned over. Then Vane unbuckled the belt from round the corduroys, slipped his lamp on it, and put it round his waist again.

"Now get up," he ordered. "The first sign of a monkey-trick of any kind, and you're outed—I'll hit to crack your skull, mind. Go along this path, turn to the left at the gate, and keep on uphill till I tell you to stop. Come along—get a move on!"

They came to Allday's Farm, and Vane drove his prisoner up to the front door, on which he rapped with his truncheon. Allday himself, a youngish, rather saturnine-looking man, appeared in dressing gown and pyjamas after a while, and Vane explained.

"I want to use your telephone, Mr. Allday. I want, too, to keep this prisoner in sight while I use it. The charge is murder."

"Murder, eh?" Allday did not appear overmuch impressed or surprised. "The telephone's here, just behind me. I'll get a light."

Vane urged Mr. Marvel through the doorway, into the house, and, with his belt-lamp giving light for the time, closed the door.

Superintendent Wadden himself took the call, for Vane knew that, if he got through to the police station, the sergeant in charge there would only ring Wadden in turn and ask for instructions. Thus, in pyjamas without dressing-gown, the superintendent listened to the tale Vane had to tell, interjecting an occasional question.

"No, sir. I thought it best not to charge him without witnesses, since he's already said he didn't commit the murder."

"An' I didn't, neither," Mr. Marvel, overhearing, growled. "But I reserves me defence, you c'n tell 'im."

"To the extent of his having the blood of the murdered man on his hands, and having dropped the knife just inside the room where the body lies, before I took him and bound his hands behind him," Vane answered. "Now what am I to do, sir? March him into Westingborough, or wait here for you?"

"Wait where you are, of course. No, though, not at Allday's—it's not exactly pleasant for a man to have a murderer in his house—though we've still got to prove that Napoleon is one. Look here, it's a fine night—you go back with your man as far as The Grey House, and wait there. Is he safely tied up, though?"

"Right. Take him back there and wait, and lay him out with your truncheon if you find it necessary. You're sure there's nobody else in that house, though? Your evidence will be undisturbed, I mean?"

"Wymering always stayed there alone, when he came down from London," Vane answered. "And if there had been anyone else they'd have shown up, surely. There was nothing but an invisible dog."

"There was a persistent barking going on in the room—the sort of entrance hall room—where the body is lying, but there was no dog to account for it."

"Barking in the room, and no dog!" Wadden sounded utterly incredulous—as well he might.

Later, waiting on the garden path before The Grey House, Vane heard Jeffries, who always drove the big police saloon for the superintendent, change gear to make the ascent of the old coach road. He looked at Mr. Marvel, patient and resigned, now, and then gazed at the door which would have to be broken open, since he had no key. The house was silent, now—had the dog really barked, or had he imagined the sound?

Chapter III
A Black Man, and a White Woman

THE Superintendent, fully dressed, now, and with the fat of his neck bulging over the top of his uniform collar, blew fiercely—it was a habit of his when confronted by irritations—at hearing that the front door of The Grey House was locked. He directed Constable Jeffries and Sergeant Wells to make a tour of the back, to see if it were possible to find an unlocked door or get in through a window. Inspector Head, who had come out with Wadden and the doctor in the car, went with the pair, since he had a mind to get the lay-out of the place. Returning with them, he announced that it would be necessary to break in: there was no legal means of ingress.

"And the ground floor windows are hopeless," Wadden observed. "A ladder for an upstair window, or what?"

"While you're a makin' up of your minds, I'd like to say I reserves me defence," Mr. Marvel remarked abruptly.

Wadden gave him a fierce look. "You haven't been charged with anything yet," he pointed out. "When we want you to talk, we'll ask you. Meanwhile"—he blew menacingly—"keep quiet."

Head turned from the front door, which he had been examining by the light of an electric torch he had brought.

"Jeffries, fetch a couple of tyre levers," he bade. "The heaviest you've got. There's gap enough between the door and the lintel to get them in and force the bolt. It's the quickest way."

Jeffries went to the car and got the levers, and Head worked their curved ends into the wide crack between the edge of the door and its post. Then he pressed on one and Jeffries on the other, while Head himself held the latch back by means of the door handle. Presently, with a loud snap, the bolt gave way from its fastening under the tremendous jemmying pressure, and the door swung wide, banging against the end of a settle placed behind it in the entrance hall.

Then it ceased. Jeffries sprang backward off the-step on which he had been standing, Head tensed himself in anticipation of being rushed by the dog, and Wadden, too, stiffened as he stood on the path and gazed at the doorway. But there was no more sound nor movement.

Head flashed his big torch into the apartment. The light revealed Wymering's body and blood on the floor, travelled doorward to show Mr. Marvel's knife and bundle as they had fallen from his hands, went back and round to display closed doors, an empty fireplace, old oak furniture—all the extent and fitments of the hall, but no dog.

Passing the inspector, he entered, as if to proclaim that no dog, visible or invisible, should frighten him. Taking a box of matches from his pocket, he removed the glass chimney from a pendent, incandescent paraffin lamp in the middle of the hall, and, replacing the chimney, faced the doorway as the light grew brilliant.

"Come in, doctor," he bade. "All of you come in, and mind how you step. Over to the left, there, Wells and Jeffries. You go over there too, Vane, and take Marvel with you. Now, doctor, you'd better make your examination first, please, though it looks plain enough."

They waited, all but Inspector Head, who used the interval to make a thorough examination of the hall, and even pushed back the closed register of the fireplace, as if he thought the dog might be up the chimney. He touched nothing else, but supplemented the light of the incandescent lamp with that of his torch for examination of door handles, of Mr. Marvel's belongings, and of the smudges where Mr. Marvel had dabbled blood from the corpse on the parquet.

At that, Head went to the door at the back and opened it. Before him a staircase wound up, and after a momentary look at it he closed the door again and returned, just as Doctor Bennett stood erect.

"No. The cause of death—yes. But the man was tortured first. Look at the finger nails of the right hand."

Head looked, only for a second, and gasped. He feared lest he should be physically sick, but recovered self-control and gave Wadden an inquiring glance. The Superintendent nodded, toward Mr. Marvel.

Head went to the doorway and took up the tramp's table knife, on which the bloodstains had already dried a rusty brown. He took it and held it out in front of Mr. Marvel.

"You are not charged," Head reminded him. "Tell me—do you know who killed that man on the floor there?"

"It wasn't me—that's all," Mr. Marvel replied, and then closed his lips to indicate that he did indeed reserve the rest of his defence. But Superintendent Wadden intervened, and, to this tramp who knew him only as a holy terror to dishonest vagrants, his voice was surprisingly gentle: almost friendly, in fact.

"Marvel," he said, "I want you to tell Mr. Head all you know of what happened here to-night. You are not yet charged with anything, as Mr. Head has told you, and you may be able to help us as well as clear yourself if you tell the truth and stick to it. Now?"

"I have seen enough to know you didn't do all of it," Head told him, "and it's possible that you did none of it. What did you do?"

"We'd better all sit down," Wadden intervened again. "This isn't going to be over in one minute, or five, I can see. Find seats, all of you, but don't go near this on the floor."

Sergeant Wells, nearest the front door, closed it. Wadden produced a large handkerchief, and covered the face of the corpse, hiding the terrible wound in the neck as well. Vane urged Mr. Marvel to an oaken settle at the side of the hall, and Doctor Bennett seated himself on the other side of the young constable. The others found seats too, all except Head, who remained standing before the tramp.

"Well, let's follow you here, for a start. What time did you get here? No, though—why did you come here?"

"To save meself from bein' stuck with a knife—like that!" He nodded at the body on the floor. "Carn't I 'ave me 'ands untied? I carn't git away, an' I ain't goin' to try."

"Yes, untie his hands, Vane," Head assented. "Who tried to stick you with a knife, Marvel, and where?"

"Outside the gate, there. Three ov 'em—two men an' a woman. They all 'ad knives in their 'ands, an' was goin' to stick me."

Wadden blew softly and shook his head. The fairy tale was too thin for his liking, evidently. But Head persisted.

"Two men and a woman, with knives in their hands. Yes. And they tried to murder you. What were you doing outside the gate, Marvel?"

"Nuthin', I tells you. Just walkin' up the 'ill, an' as I passes 'ere I sees the front door open, an' that dorg in 'ere was kickin' up 'ell's delight wi' his barkin'. So I stops to look—outside the gate, mind yer I—an' these three come at me, with knives.'

"I dunno." Mr. Marvel shook his head drearily. "They just come at me. One minnit they wasn't there, an' then they was there."

"No, that they didn't, because I was standin' lookin' along the garden path at the door. Mebbe from the trees t'other side the road. Mebbe they riz up from 'ell. I dunno where they come from."

"Wi' that blasted dorg barkin' like 'e was? I wouldn't 'ave 'eard a traction ingin, wi' that goin' on all the time."

"I dunno. I 'adn't time to see nuthin', an' it's dark out there wi' the trees over the road, too. They chased me in 'ere, with knives in their 'ands, an' I slams the door an' got me own knife out in case they come in 'ere arter me, an' falls over that on the floor an' drops me knife, an' gets blood on me 'ands tryin' to find it agin in the dark. Not till I strikes a match does I know there's been a murder done 'ere, an' then I knows I got to git rid o' the blood on meself, so I picks up me knife an' bundle an' opens the door to git outer this, an finds meself nabbed. An' that's the Gord's truth, Mr. 'Ead!"

"Now we'll go back to these three people with knives," Head suggested patiently. "Did they say they were going to kill you?"

"One of 'em says—'Kill 'em!' an' sounded like a foreigner. Nuther one shoves his face clost to me, an' looks like bloody murder if ever anyone looked like it—"

"On the contrary," Head dissented, "I am inclined to believe every word of it, so far. Look at the finger nails of that right hand—Wymering's right hand. This is not quite a plain case."

"A black man, eh?" Head addressed Mr. Marvel again, and his tone betokened deep interest. "How was he dressed?"

"Not much different to you," Mr. Marvel responded. "It was dark, an' I 'adn't no time to give 'im a onceover. All I know, 'e was out to kill, an' if I thought at all, I thought one dorg wasn't as bad as three bloody murderers wi' knives. Any'ow, I runs in 'ere wi' them three chasin' me along the path, an' slams the door, as I said."

"In fact," Head observed thoughtfully, "you did exactly what those three people wanted you to do."

"But there warn't no dorg," Mr. Marvel pointed out. "Barkin', all the time—in 'ere, too. But 'e warn't in 'ere!"

"That dog can keep, for the present," Head remarked. "What was the other of the two men like?"

"'E looked to be a big man, but I 'adn't time to see what 'e was like, even if it 'adn't been dark out there. They was both big men, tall men, wi' knives in their 'ands. The woman 'ad a knife in 'er 'and too, but she kep' be'ind the other two."

Head saw Constable Vane stiffen as he sat, and express—was it resentment, or consternation? He grew very intent, in any case.

"Youngish, I'd say, slim, an' tall, an' dressed all in white," Mr. Marvel said slowly. "I'd say 'er 'air was dark, an' she 'ad a knife in 'er 'and, like the other two."

"Ah!" The half-suppressed exclamation fell into the pause from Vane's lips. Head appeared not to notice it, for the time.

"No, I'd say she was white, the glimpse I got of 'er. Dark 'air, though, an' a knife in 'er 'and like the men."

"A tall, young, slender woman, dark haired, and dressed all in white," Head reflected softly, and watched Vane's face as he uttered the words. "Such a one shouldn't be difficult to find."

He noted that Vane looked down at the floor after one momentary glance at Mr. Marvel, a fiercely resentful glance. And Vane's tightly closed lips quivered and moved, betraying his agitation.

"That's all you know about the crime?" Head addressed the tramp again after a fairly long pause.

"Yus. No, though, 'tain't." Mr. Marvel suddenly remembered an antecedent event. "Back down the 'ill a bit, there was a car, an' no lights on it. Backed into a gateway, it was. Rolls-Royce, a black car. Nobody in it, there wasn't. I looked."

"Not there now, but there'll be wheel tracks," Wadden observed. "That is, if this yarn about black men and white women has a shadow of truth in it. How far back from the road was it, Marvel?"

"Jest nearly on the road, Mr. Wadden. It's the Gord's truth I'm a tellin' of you, sir. Ast me all you likes, Mr. 'Ead."

"I will," Head promised quietly. "What were you actually doing along this road, Marvel? Stick to the truth, now."

"Well, Mr. 'Ead, I 'as a smoke back among the trees, waitin' for it to git proper dark. I 'ears a car come along, an' it must of been that car, 'cause I doesn't 'ear no other. It must of backed into that gateway an' stopped there, but I thinks it's gone up the 'ill all the way, so I gives it 'alf a nour as nearly as I can reckon, an' then comes along up an' sees it standin'—"

"That will be the car that passed me as I was on the way down the hill," Vane interposed, "five minutes or so before I found Marvel just coming out of this house. It was roaring all out up the hill—"

"Leave it for the present, Vane," Head interrupted his recital. "I may have quite a good deal to ask you, later. Now, Marvel, why did you give that car half an hour? What were you after?"

"I'll tell you the Gord's truth, sir," Mr. Marvel responded earnestly. "'Cause, while I was shut in 'ere wi' that dorg a barkin' an' me all smothered in blood from that corpuss, I promises meself if I gits outer this mess safe I'll turn over a new leaf. But when that car passes me as I was 'avin' me smoke in the woods, I reckons I'd 'ad a fortnight's skilly an' soup, an' I'd 'ave a chicking to-night. One of Mr. Allday's chickings what goes to sleep in 'is cart shed. I felt like chicking, but I didn't get no chicking, 'cause this young feller got me instead. An' now you says you thinks I didn't do no bloody murder, an' it looks like I might come outer this all in the clear, an' if I do I will turn over a new leaf, swelp me if I don't!"

Head nodded acceptance of the promise, which sounded genuine enough—for the time. Then he turned to Wadden.

"Exactly that. Marvel came along, and they frightened him in here. If the police came next—and Vane was next to arrive, too!—there was a scapegoat. It was sheer luck, of course, that he had a knife, and that he daubed it and himself in blood, but—still accepting the story—what those three wanted was time. Time in which the police would be occupied with something else, as we are now. Time in which to get clear away—and a Rolls-Royce might be a hundred miles away, by this time. We must check the wheel tracks, of course—"

"But, damn it, man! I heard it myself—you heard it! We all heard it, though not going on all the time, as he says."

"It was going on like that when I got here, and till I came out and was just going to shut the door," Vane put in. "And I'll swear it was in this room, too. The barking, I mean, not the dog."

"Then what waked up and barked at us when you burst the door in?" Wadden demanded, and blew half a gale for emphasis of the question.

"I've got to find out," Head answered thoughtfully, "but it can keep for the present. There are other things. Before we go, we'd better search the house—and I'll open all the doors myself."

"Exactly. I'll take you with me, Sergeant Wells, and Jeffries and Vane can see about getting the body out to the car. I shall want you to come in to Westingborough, Vane. You wish me to take charge of the case, Superintendent?" He looked at Wadden as if apologising for having given orders while his superior was present.

"Why, certainly," Wadden assented, rather irritably. "It'll leave me free to get on with indent forms and pay rolls, and all the other routine jobs that plague my life out of me. Suffering snakes! Why didn't I resign when I said I would? I'd have had my first crop of tomatoes ripening under glass by now, if I had."

"You'll come back to Westingborough too," Head told him. "We'll find you a nice clean cell and give you a good breakfast in the morning, and then you'll tell me this story all over again. You won't be charged with anything, but up to the present you're the most valuable witness in this case, and I'm not going to lose sight of you. Come along, sergeant. We're not going to find anything, but we'll look."

They went, first, upstairs, Head's big electric torch lighting their way. Two of the four bedrooms in the house, they found, were unfurnished and apparently had not been entered for some time. One, furnished, had not been used, as the folded blankets on the bare mattress testified. In the fourth that they entered, the bedclothes had been thrown back as by someone getting out of bed, but there was no other sign of disorder: a suit of clothes was hung over a chair, and underclothing draped the low rail at the foot of the bed.

"I think they knocked in the ordinary way, and Wymering went down and let them in," Head observed after a patient survey. "I'll just investigate the pockets of this suit, though."

He turned out all the pockets, retaining all papers that he found, but putting other articles back, with the exception of one handkerchief, a little, lacy thing that he examined carefully by the light of the torch. Smoothing it out, he came on the embroidered initials—"B.A.," and then pocketed the thing. He let Wells precede him out from the room, and, raying the torch down toward the floor as he followed, stooped near the door and retrieved a hairpin, which went into his pocket. The sergeant, on his way downstairs, noticed nothing.

"Two women, then," Head reflected to himself. "I wonder—was this one tall and slender and darkhaired and all in white?"

At the foot of the stairs was a door which gave access to the back premises of the ground floor. Head opened it, and stood still.

They entered a large, old-fashioned, stone-floored kitchen, in which everything was tidily arranged. Beyond it they came to a brick-floored scullery, and here the smell of burning—an odd, unusual sort of smell—was far more evident. Head directed his torch at the floor after a survey of the walls with their pendent utensils.

Circular metal receptacles, each about a foot in diameter, had been placed on the floor, and the interior of each was charred black. There were fourteen of these things, altogether, and in the sink Head found fourteen flat metal lids which would fit the charred cases.

He stood gazing musingly down at the things on the floor, and Wells, turning to look at him, saw his face in the light reflected from the whitewashed scullery walls. A strong face, kindly in expression, almost the face of a dreamer: Wadden had accused his inspector of being gifted with too much imagination, more than once.

"I think it was," Head concluded eventually. "Sergeant, we'll see if we can find where these were generally kept, I think."

Returning to the entrance hall, he opened the door on the left and entered a big, low-ceilinged room which had evidently been used as a study or workroom. The centre table was littered with papers; a kneehole desk stood in the window, and every drawer had been pulled out and emptied. Turning to the fireplace opposite the window, Head threw his light on a mass of charred papers in the grate, and, thrusting his hand into the blackened heap, he found that it was still warm. Then, in a recess beside the stove, he revealed a safe, its heavy door opened wide, and nothing within it.

"That will be where the films were kept," he remarked. "To-morrow, sergeant, I want you to come out here with your blower and go over every door handle and that safe handle as well, for finger prints. The desk and table, too. I don't think you'll find any but Wymering's own prints upstairs, but in here, and in the kitchen and scullery, you may find others. Be thorough about it."

They went out, and he ascertained that the dining-room—as it was beyond doubt—on the other side of the entrance hall was in undisturbed order. Wymering had had a meal there alone, evidently, and had left the table furniture, probably to be cleared away by some daily servant in the morning.

"Right. But I've got the body in the car, and it won't take the lot of us. What'll you do—wait here till the car comes back?"

"No. If you'll let Sergeant Wells stay here till the car can get back with a man to relieve him, Constable Vane and I will walk toward Westingborough. It's a fine night, and the car will pick us up on its second return journey."

But Vane's expression, as he gazed at Head, indicated that he was far from suited by the proposal.

"You hear, Vane," Wadden added, in a tone that made an order of the words. "Now, Marvel, come along! Let's see what that new leaf of yours is like."

Chapter IV
Two Women, Both in White

"THIS," said Head, directing the light of his torch along a grass-sprinkled way into the woods, a way across which a gate liberally tangled with barbed wire was set, some dozen yards back from the side of the road, 'tis where the Rolls-Royce was backed in."

Gazing, Vane could see the two sets of wheel-tracks in the soft earth. The back wheels had sunk in while the car had stood there.

"Looks as if it came from uphill as well as went that way," he remarked. "There's no entry from downhill."

"The driver," Head explained, "took the car up past the opening, and then let it come back in here. If you did much driving, you'd realise that as the easiest way to get into such a trackway as this."

"And the man who troubled to back in like that probably anticipated having to make a quick getaway," Head added thoughtfully.

"Even if the car were here, it doesn't prove any of that tramp's story, except that he saw the car in passing," Vane protested peevishly. "It's no evidence, even, of the rest of it. Black men and white women—whoever heard such a lousy tale? Putrid, I call it!"

"You don't believe him?" Head clicked off his light and took to the road again, with Vane beside him.

"Believe him? of course I don't! Taken red-handed like that, he had to invent something. And, by gosh, he did!"

"I mean the contemplated theft of Allday's chickens," Head answered. "That, at least, was true. But can you tell me any reason why a tramp like Marvel should murder a man like Wymering?"

"No, I can't. But how many murders have adequate motives behind them, if it comes to that?"

"Marvel, it appears to me, is a reasoning sort of scamp," Head pointed out. "Also, none of his kind will attempt robbery if they hear a dog on the premises. Further to that, they don't enter houses, but steal chickens and similar things from outside the dwellings they mark down—Marvel's whole record is one of petty misdemeanours. Do you imagine that he entered that house and killed Wymering inside it?"

"I don't believe one single word of that statement," the younger man insisted with some heat. "He's lying to save his skin."

Walking on, they came to the junction of the old road with the new. Vane made no reply to the obvious challenge.

"About a tall, slender woman, dressed all in white, dark-haired, and with a knife in her hand—near The Grey House to-night?"

They walked a good two hundred paces before Vane spoke. Head let him ponder, knowing that he would reply eventually—as he did.

"It's got to come out, of course," he said. "I shall do no good by trying to hide anything. But she hadn't a knife in her hand."

"You were taught how to make a report, I believe," Head reminded him. "Time, place, identity of those concerned, and the facts."

"I'm sorry." Vane spoke very stiffly indeed. "At ten forty-five to eleven p.m.—I can't state the time more closely—I was proceeding down from the crest of the old coach road toward the woods, having been directed to patrol the woods for pheasant poachers during the night. After passing the gateway of Tolston Hall, I met Miss Hastings, and stopped to speak to her, since I knew it was far too early for poachers to be about. She was coming up the hill when I encountered her, and told me she had been to Allday's Farm to see Mrs. Allday's baby. Miss Hastings was dressed all in white, and she is dark-haired. I asked her what she was carrying in her right hand, or remarked on it in some way—I forget exactly what I said—and she showed it me and told me it was the steel belonging to a set of game carvers at the hall. It had come out of its handle, and the boy who took eggs from Allday's Farm to the hall had offered to mend it. He had mended it, and Miss Hastings was taking it back to the cook at the hall. We then said good-night, Miss Hastings went her way, and I went mine. Shortly after, I heard the dog barking."

"I wonder if it strikes you that that tale of a game carver steel is just as thin as Marvel's story of black men and a white woman?" Head inquired. "Never mind, though. You're sure it was not a knife?"

"Miss Hastings held it, that is. Supposing she had held up a knife—in that almost-darkness—with its back turned toward you, and claimed that it was a sharpening steel. You wouldn't have been able to tell whether it were or no, would you?"

"Her brother and I were at school together. My father and hers have always been good friends. And I'm sure she—"

He did not end it. The big police saloon, bearing the man who should relieve Sergeant Wells on watch at The Grey House, passed them.

"You're making a mistake, Vane," Head said when the car had gone by. "You're letting sentiment override reason. It will be a very easy matter to check up on Miss Hastings' story of the sharpening steel and her visit to the Alldays. We have the time at which you found Marvel coming out from the house, approximately eleven ten p.m. The body, you say, was still warm, and from that Doctor Bennett will be able to tell us at what time the man was killed. But doesn't it occur to you that somebody in Miss Hastings' station of life is far more likely to have a motive for killing Wymering than a tramp like Marvel? And that Marvel, alone as he was, could not have inflicted those ghastly tortures on the dead man's hand?

"Alone in the house with the body, which was still warm. Vane, there was a devilish ingenuity about that torture business, something far beyond the mentality of the tramp class. And that story he told was too well-constructed and too wildly improbable to be untrue. He couldn't have constructed it from imagination, being what he is—"

"Have I said that I do? I want more facts about her, since she was in the neighbourhood of the crime with something in her hand that might have been a knife. Now, the car that you saw charging up the hill. Marvel says he saw a Rolls-Royce, definitely. What did you see, when the car passed you?"

"Two blinding headlights, a big saloon that might have been and probably was a Rolls, from the little I was able to sight of the radiator and bonnet. A man at the steering wheel, and what else was in the car I can't say. I have an impression there was somebody in it behind the driver, or perhaps more than one person, but I'm not sure. Mr. Head, I'm trying now not to let sentiment override reason. I feel perfectly sure Miss Hastings can clear herself, and realise that if I'm absolutely frank it will be the best thing for her in the long run. She knew Wymering, of course—it's no use keeping that back."

"Very slightly. I've spoken to him once or twice. I believe he went abroad a good deal. He brought a party of people down to the cottage—The Grey House—last summer, but usually he came down alone and spent a few days at a time there."

"And abroad," Head reflected aloud, "he might come in contact with black men. That is, with men whom Marvel would describe as black, though they might be not much darker than Italians."

"Does it? One or more persons in the back of the car as it passed you—remember, Vane, that those blinding headlights showed the people in the car that there was a uniformed policeman on the road ahead of them. The driver had to sit as he was at the wheel, but the others would almost certainly crouch down on the floor, or near it, to prevent you from seeing them—or seeing him or her, if there were only one. A certainty that there were three people in the car would let Miss Hastings out to some extent, but you don't appear able to provide that certainty."

"I'd no reason to suspect the car of anything but normal use, then. I'd already heard the dog barking, but didn't connect it with the car beyond thinking that the noise of the engine and gears might have started it barking as the car went past where the dog was."

Head made no reply to the explanation. As they walked on, Vane considered the possibility of resigning and trying some other form of career: without a single word that implied actual blame, Head had made him feel not only small, but useless at his work.

"How old is that baby at Allday's?" The question came so abruptly from Head that it startled the younger man, and then made him realise that the inspector's thoughts were far from himself.

"Seven or eight months, I should think," Vane answered. "It's not her own—not Mrs. Allday's own, I mean. It's the child of a sister who died in childbirth, and Mrs. Allday adopted it."

"I want everything, Vane. This district of ours contains over forty thousand inhabitants, and quite naturally it is impossible for me to know about the lives of a particular group of people unless I find it necessary to take an official interest in them. About Allday, you were going to tell me, I think."

"He—well, she married beneath her, that's all. And Miss Hastings and she were friends before Brenda Stopford became Mrs. Allday. And Miss Hastings isn't one to drop a friend for a mistake like that. But surely neither Allday nor his wife come into this, sir?"

"So far, only in the sense that Miss Hastings told you she had been to the Alldays' place when you met her. Man, I don't know what comes in and what doesn't! There are too many leads, red-herring trails, probably, all leading in different directions, and then there is the time factor. To-day is worth two of tomorrow, four of the day after, eight of the next day, and so on, when tracing the authors of a crime like this has to be faced. It means—work!"

He sounded almost irritable over it, Vane thought. Then, at the sound of a car behind them, Head stepped out into the road and held up his hand. Jeffries drew the police saloon to a standstill beside him, and he gestured to Vane to enter and got in himself.

"Nothing more to trouble you about to-night, Vane," Head observed as the saloon drew up at Westingborough police station. "You can sleep here, and be on hand when I want you in the morning. Wait, Jeffries. I want you to take me on home in a few minutes, and in case I should forget it, have my two-seater ready for me and outside here at seven-thirty in the morning."

With that, he entered the building and made his way to Superintendent Wadden's room. Wadden had awaited his Inspector's return, but Head made straight for the telephone and took off the receiver, dialling for the operator.

"Police, Crandon," he asked, when he got his reply. "Nothing more on it yet, Chief," he added as he waited for the connection.

"No dog," Head answered. "Vox et praetera—Oh, Crandon? Who's speaking? Sergeant Adams—yes. Head of Westingborough at this end. Adams, a black Rolls-Royce saloon should have passed through your town to-night at some time between eleven and eleven-thirty. It may have been headed for London, and was probably in a hurry. I can give you no more about it than that, except that in addition to the driver there may have been a passenger or two in the back, and if two, one of them should be a woman, young, tall, slim, and dressed in white. Got that? Yes. Well, I want that car in connection with murder at The Grey House on the old coach road. Find out if any of your men saw it and can add anything to this description, and if so, let us have it here at once. That's all."

"I remember quite a few haystacks," Head retorted. "But now I think we'll put another line out. Is Marvel available?"

"In the end cell—the far end one," Wadden assented. "I wouldn't wonder if his fit of repentance lasted nearly a week."

"Good night, Chief." Head made for the door. "A word with him, and then what sleep I can get. See you in the morning."

He went out and procured the key of Marvel's cell from the sergeant on duty, and then made his way to where the tramp lay wide-eyed, unable to sleep after his experiences of the night. Head seated himself on the foot of the hard wooden bed, having left the light in the corridor on and the door open. Mr. Marvel sat up.

"I can't get it outer me mind, Mr. 'Ead," he said. "But it was the Gord's truth I told yer about it. I been thinkin' an' thinkin', an' now I know it must seem the blastedest lot o' lies, but it's all true. I didn't do it. They druv me in there wi' that corpuss."

"Marvel"—Head went straight to the point—"how long would it take you to get a message through from here to London?"

The question soaked into the tramp's mind: he realised that there was definite purpose behind it.

"I gets yer, sir. Lemme see, now. London. Tomorrer night, some time. 'Pends on what part o' London you mean."

"Mr. 'Ead, I been snatched from the jors o' death to-night, twice," Mr. Marvel stated solemnly. "'Orrible death, too. I means it."

"Supposing I turn you loose and give you something to do for me?" Head suggested. "Mind, I could lay hands on you again before you could get that message through to London. But just supposing, now?"

"Well, sir, I was just a wonderin' when you come in. Y'see, I'm Nap Marvel, an' nobody's give me a job. If you gimme one, Mr. 'Ead, I'd just about lick your boots for startin' me new life."

"The job starts now," Head told him. "You know as much as anyone about the black Rolls-Royce that appears to belong to this case. I want you to use your own methods for finding out where that car went after it came out at the Crandon end of the coach road. You've got your own friends on the road, and you can make what use of them you like to find out what became of that car."

"Y'mean—I'm to go out arter it right away?" Mr. Marvel threw back the blankets and put his feet on the floor as he spoke.

"Right away, if you think it possible to do anything before morning. I suppose you can use a telephone?"

"Well, then, put a call through here as near on twelve o'clock noon tomorrow as you can, to give your first report on what you are doing. You have money on you, I know. Use it as you find necessary, and I'll see that you get back all you spend as well as being well paid for your time, and very well paid indeed if you trace the car. Now what about a good meal before you start? Do you feel like one?"

Mr. Marvel shook his head, drew some strips of rag from under the head end of his under blankets, and began winding one of them round a grimy foot. There was a deliberate sort of haste in his movements.

"Can't stop for that, Mr. 'Ead," he explained. "I gotter go arter Joe Baggs, right away. Y'see, I knows where to find Joe now, but if I don't go arter 'im quick, he'll be gorn."

"That wouldn't do nohow," Mr. Marvel dissented. "If it got round about me bein' in wi' the pleece, an' a ridin' in cars, I might as well chuck me 'and in an' stop 'ere. Kee-hee-hee! Me a workin' f'r the pleecel But I'll do it, Mr. 'Ead. You're the fust pleeceman that ain't called me a liar since I took to the road, I reckon, an' I'll find that car for yer or bust meself. Old Nap's on the job."

Head left him, then, and gave brief instructions to the sergeant on duty to the effect that Mr. Marvel was to be allowed to go where he would, unmolested, and then bade Jeffries drive him to his home for the brief sleep he could still get. The first of the summer dawn was showing when he closed his eyes, but, when he appeared at the station again, punctually at half past seven, he gave no sign of having had other than a normal night. He took over the two-seater from Jeffries and went out from the town in the direction of Condor Hill.

Beyond Condor Grange, he turned on to the old coach road, and, reaching the gateway into which the Rolls had been backed the preceding night, halted for another survey of its wheel tracks. The impressions were deep enough to tell him that the car had been Dunlop shod, and that the tyres were virtually new, but in that was little evidence. Most Rolls-Royces were well-tyred, and new tyres did not necessarily mean a new car. Also, Mr. Napoleon Marvel was, as he had said himself, on the job. Head had a curious faith in the tramp: there was another nearly-castaway in his history of cases in whom he had had faith, and found it justified, for the man was now an honest and trusted mechanic in Westingborough, though, when he had come to the notice of Head and Superintendent Wadden, he had been a down-and-out with nothing to recommend him.

Thorough inspection of the track leading to the gateway failed to reveal anything that might have furthered the case against Wymering's murderer—or murderers. The heavy car had left tracks, but there were no footprints: tufts of grass, growing between the gate and the road, had afforded foot-room, and evidently these people had been careful to avail themselves of this means of trackless progress. And they had dropped not so much as the conventional button or cigarette end, with which the master-sleuth usually fixes the crime on his man in the end. Head spent some time here, for, although farm people are early risers as a rule, Vane's information of the preceding night pointed at other than normal conditions at Allday's, and thus there was plenty of time. He had no mind to confront Brenda Allday until she was up and about for the day: Vane, unfortunately, had telephoned from the farm, so that there was no chance of finding her in ignorance of the crime at The Grey House. Therefore, no hurry.

At a little past eight he drove on, past The Grey House itself, and braked his car to a stop outside Allday's gateway. He went along the brief, rutted drive, passed through the trimly-kept front garden, and rat-tatted on the heavy old front door of the big farmhouse. It was a rambling, Jacobean structure, testifying to the importance of farming and farmers in the age in which it had been constructed, and in which agriculture had been the leading pursuit of the country.

"Inspector Head, from Westingborough," he said. "Can I speak to Mrs. Allday, please?"

Somewhere in the house a baby was crying, he noted as he waited in the narrow, cool hallway, and beside him a fine old grandfather clock marked off the seconds audibly. Presently, in the comparative gloom at the inner end of the hallway, appeared a tall, slender figure, clad all in white—as she neared him, he saw that she was wearing a frock of cream serge, but his first impression was of white, and he knew the frock would appear white in twilight or darkness. And she, too, was dark-haired, while her very dark, lustrous eyes gave the impression that she had wept much lately.

Sheila Hastings too, was tall, slender, and dark, and Head knew from Vane's statement that she too had been dressed all in white at the time that Wymering had been murdered.

Chapter V
One Mystery Solved

WHATEVER Mrs. Allday's emotions might have been during the night, since she had learned of Wymering's death, it was evident to Head that she was perfectly self-controlled as she faced him in the hallway of the farmhouse. A proud woman, he divined, attractive beyond the normal run, with tragic eyes and a passionate mouth—she might prove a difficult woman, from his point of view.

"Did you wish to see me, or my husband, Mr. Head?" she asked, with a hint of challenge in her voice, as if the maid might have made a mistake in reporting that he had asked to see her.

"Westingborough's great detective inspector would hardly have called on us himself for anything less important," she retorted, and made a gibe of the statement. "He would have sent a subordinate. Will you come in here?" She opened the door of a large, low-ceilinged room at the side of the hall. "Unless, that is, you are satisfied with merely seeing me. I don't know how far your omniscience goes."

He followed her into the room. Alldays had been prosperous farmers here for centuries, literally, and there were Jacobean pieces in the room of unique value. The father of this present Allday had been a bad business man in bad times for farmers, but had managed to avoid selling the contents of the house. It was difficult, viewing the room and its contents, to realise that Mrs. Allday had married beneath her, as Vane had said. But, Head reflected, he did not know Allday, yet. Mrs. Allday had tried to ruffle him, but had failed, though she did not know it yet. She faced him, composedly, waiting.

"Mainly," he said, "my visit is concerned with a Miss Hastings. Miss Sheila Hastings, whom I believe you know."

"She did." Surprise and distrust flickered in her eyes, and faded again. She was very much on guard at the question, he realised.

He risked a direct accusation. "Did she arrive here before or after you returned from The Grey House, Mr. Wymering's residence?"

She must have felt the flood of colour that surged up and transformed her paleness—and then receded, leaving her whiter than before. Taking a sidewise step, she grasped the back of a chair.

"Won't you sit down, Mrs. Allday?" Head queried evenly. "I conclude your answer, if you gave it, would be 'before'?"

It was brutal, merciless—but Wymering had been done to death mercilessly, and this woman was attempting to defy inquisition.

"I was wondering," she said after a long pause, "whether you are a man or a devil. Why you should—how you could know."

"It was—before," she said, shakily, and sat down on the chair at which she had grasped. "Sheila—I—but how did you—?"

The broken question trailed to a whisper. She gazed up at him, and he saw the tears gather in her eyes and roll unheeded down her cheeks. "And he's dead!" she said despairingly. "Dead!"

"There was a woman," Head said mercilessly, "dressed all in white, with a knife in her hand. Were you in white last night?"

The implication of the question stiffened her again, and she shook away her tears. "In white—yes," she said.

The answer, he felt sure, was truthful. She was of a type that lies so seldom as to render lies transparently obvious.

She shook her head. "There is—I went by the meadow at the back—there is a gap in the hedge. To the back of—of his house."

Again she shook her head. "No. He—he left the catch up on the front door—I had only to turn the handle and walk in. And nobody else—he thought nobody else would come in, so—so I think he didn't put the catch down after I had gone. I think—that was why—"

"No. By the path—through the gap. He—he widened it for me, when he first took The Grey House. Two years ago."

It was an old story that he was hearing, he knew, an old, ugly story. Before he could speak again, she accounted for her frankness.

"I—I've heard of Inspector Head, of course, but till now I didn't believe you could—could be what you are. But—but when you knew I had been there, I saw at once. It's no use lying, and there is no sense in lying. I don't care. I've nothing left. Now he is dead, I have nothing left. You can ask me, and I'll tell you."

"It is harvest time. He is out—we had breakfast very early, and he went out for the wheat cutting, if you want him. At the back of the woods—most of our land is a long way from the house."

"I didn't mean that, Mrs. Allday," he said. "It was your saying that you had nothing left. Your husband knows this?"

He marked the use of the name, mentally. "You mean that he knew nothing about it before?" he asked.

"If my husband killed him, let him suffer for it," she said harshly. "I wouldn't save him from his punishment."

"What time was it when you went to see Wymering last night?" he demanded, abandoning questions concerning Allday, for the time.

"I went there at about eight o'clock, just after dinner. It was a little past ten when I came away."

"A dog? No. He—Bernard never had a dog there. Do you mean a stray dog, or one nosing round when I went there?"

"Certainly not. If there had been one, Bernard would have told me about it. I'm sure he never had a dog there."

"A little after ten," he reflected aloud. "It could have been only a few minutes after she had left The Grey House that Mr. Marvel had heard the car arrive. Wymering, probably, had not released the catch of the front door bolt after she had gone, and whoever had murdered him had only to turn the door handle and walk in.

"Perhaps only just ten o'clock," she said. "When I got back, Sheila—Miss Hastings—was here waiting for me. Inspector, I'm being absolutely frank with you. Last night we arranged—when Bernard went back to London next week, I was to have gone with him. For good. We arranged it all last night, before I left him."

"I understand," he said. "Now, Mrs. Allday, it may be asking a good deal, but you seem ready to tell me all you can, and some of it may be very useful. I wonder—will you tell me just what you did and where you went inside The Grey House last night?"

"Because, by this time, there will be a man of mine looking for finger-prints all over that house, and you may help me, if you tell me all, to sort yours out from the rest when we check up."

"But you won't find any," she urged. "He opened the door for me, and—Oh, yes, though! Before I came away, I went up to his room to arrange my hair and tidy myself, and the hair brushes, perhaps—"

"In the entrance hall with him. He didn't light the lamp—we sat on the settee behind the door, and—and I had to come back here. So he gave me a box of matches, and I lighted a candle on his dressing table in his room, but I didn't touch anything in it. When I came down again, he told me he was going to set his burglar alarm as soon as I had gone, and then think over—next week—think over—"

Abruptly she bent forward as she sat, covered her face with her hands, and sobbed. In less than a minute she had controlled herself.

"Bringing it all back," she said whisperingly. "It's so hard—so hard to realise that I shall never see him again!"

"This burglar alarm, now." He wanted to keep her away from emotion, and spoke practically. "What was it—electrical?"

"I don't know. I only know he put it in this spring, when he came back. He had been away for the best part of a year."

"Nothing. Except that he put it in, and had a safe put in the house, too. Something of great value, he told me, but nothing more than that. I concluded it was something he had brought back with him. It was to be—was to mean fortune to him, he said."

She shook her head. "He had done a tour of the Near East—Egypt, Damascus, and some parts of Arabia. I believe he went to Mecca, too. He was a very good Arab scholar, I know."

Again Head reflected for awhile. Those burned films—if they had been films in the boxes, and he could not divine what else would have been burned in such a way—might betray the secret of the "something of great value" that Wymering had brought back with him, and whoever had murdered him might have burned the lot because it had been impossible to determine which one would reveal too much. Again, Wymering might have burned them himself, and they had nothing to do with his death. But Head felt that they were connected with it.

Again, Wymering had parted from her—according to her story—down in the entrance hall at somewhere near ten o'clock, and presumably he had been fully dressed, then. He must have set his burglar alarm, gone up to his bedroom, got into bed after undressing, and come down to be killed—but tortured first. In order to get his secret out of him, and with it the key of the safe that contained the secret and the fourteen film boxes. Or was there some revelation on one of those films, something of which, say, Farmer Allday knew, and which he was determined to destroy, even if it involved torturing and murdering the man who held the films?

"Dressed?" She appeared surprised at the question. "An ordinary dark grey suit, one he often wore. Why?"

"No, I'll question, Mrs. Allday," he answered firmly. "You are being most helpful, I think. Now you said a little while ago that Wymering took The Grey House about two years ago, I think?"

"I suspect nobody, yet," he answered. "Even if I did, a wife cannot be compelled to give evidence against her husband, and I intend to keep the spirit as well as the letter of that law. But there is nothing to prevent you from telling me anything you wish about your relationship with Wymering, if you think it will help to bring his murderer or murderers to justice."

"Or murderers," he repeated guardedly. In that business of the torture, he felt certain there had been more than one person concerned. There had been nothing to show that Wymering had been bound, so he must have been held: one could not have done it, alone.

"My relationship with him," she said, almost musingly. "But—since you seem to know so much, how much do you know already?"

"That the liaison, or whatever you choose to call it, has been going on for more than two years," he explained. "That something impelled you last night to throw up everything for Wymering's sake, and that the decision was altogether new." For, he felt, she had intended nothing of the sort when she adopted her dead sister's baby, for if at that time she had determined to leave Allday, she would never have burdened herself with the child.

"Until less than twelve hours ago, I didn't know you existed," he answered. "All this is elementary deduction, from what I have heard since I learned of Wymering's death. Part is what you have told me."

"All true," she said sadly. "Yes, all true. Mr. Head, I hated you when you came in here, hated having to tell you—anything. But—but you're human, and I don't mind telling you. Anything, if it will help to avenge him, for he was all I had. My husband—I know now that I was useful, because I had money. A hateful knowledge, and then Bernard—altogether different. A man of my own world—Oh, condemn me if you like! My money saved Allday's Farm for Jack Allday, and I—he has his own interests, lives his own life apart from mine. Humiliated—not ill-treated, but just ignored. He has no more need of me. And then I met Bernard. Last night we talked as we sat there in the big hall of The Grey House, and he made me realise—I might go on like this all my life. All my life! And at the end, what good in it, except the hours he and I had together? Futility! Better to go to him, to let my husband do what he would, divorce me, anything! To be open, honest with myself, and the rest—nothing! And now he is dead there is nothing, nothing left. But I shall leave Jack, all the same. It is impossible to stay here, now."

"Now that you have told him all the truth concerning yourself and Wymering," he suggested.

"Now that I see the utter waste of my life, in staying here," she amended. "He has used my money—all he could touch of it—and now has no more use for me. Why should I stay?"

"Which is irrelevant to the business of who killed Wymering," he pointed out, realising that this talk with her had lasted far longer than he had intended. "One more point, Mrs. Allday. Miss Hastings knew Wymering, I believe? To what extent, do you know?"

"To the extent of disliking him on sight," she confessed frankly. "She met him only a few times, but—she and I are quite good friends, and have been since our school days—but there was an instant antipathy. In fact, she tried to persuade me last night to have nothing more to do with Bernard, to forget him."

"Yes. She was rather upset about it. Partly for her own sake, I think. You see, there are not many girls and women with whom she can associate, living as near as I do, and she's rather intense in her friendships. Highly emotional—passionately intense, I always feel."

"I'm not sure. We went and had a look at the baby—she was asleep, of course. She left before eleven, because I was in bed by then. And when Jim Vane came and telephoned, I got out of bed and listened. My husband let him in. And after that, I told my husband everything. I was mad—mad with disappointment and the shock of it. So little time before, Bernard and I had been together, planning—"

"What you will," he answered. "Mrs. Allday, you say Miss Hastings definitely left here before eleven o'clock."

"Yes. Not very long after I got back, but I don't know how long. But why? You don't—" She looked hard at him, with fear in her eyes.

"Nothing—nothing at all," he prevaricated reassuringly. "Do you remember if she took anything with her when she went?"

"Took anything? Yes—yes, though. Jim Walton, our general handy boy, had repaired a carving steel for the cook at Tolston Hall. Sheila—Miss Hastings, took it back with her. Jim is rather a character, and she and I talked about him, and I remembered the steel was here. I got it at her request, and she took it to give to the cook."

So Vane had not been mistaken in describing the thing as a carving steel. But Mr. Napoleon Marvel, terrified by the three suddenly-appearing apparitions in the darkness, might have been mistaken in describing it as a knife. The two men had come near him, but the woman, by his account, had hovered behind them, and a steel belonging to a set of game carvers might have—would have!—looked like a knife.

"I wish you could fix the time of her leaving here more definitely," he said after a pause for thought.

"I can't. So much happened after, and I didn't notice the time," she answered. "It must have been after half-past ten, but beyond that I can't tell. Any time between half-past ten and eleven."

"Because we noticed it was twenty minutes past ten when we went up to see baby, and she said she must go soon."

The time fitted, and Sheila Hastings, by this incredibly frank woman's account, had disliked Wymering. Head abandoned the point, and determined to have a talk with Miss Hastings, later.

"After the half hour, but not much after," he commented. "Mrs. Allday, you've been extraordinarily helpful, and I'm grateful to you. I shall call later to see your husband, and may see you again then."

"Lunch time, between half-past twelve and half-past one, or in the evening. But—you don't work in the evenings, of course."

In turn she smiled, and then he saw why Bernard Wymering had wanted to take her from Allday. "Any time in the evening, then," she said. "And—and I've told you all the truth I can. Your judgment on me—I know what it will be."

He held out his hand. "I'm a man first, and a policeman afterward, Mrs. Allday," he said. "When I feel good enough to condemn anyone for other than actual crime, I shall be far too good to go on living. Good-bye for the present."

She clasped his hand with nervous intensity, and let the tears in her eyes and the pitiful smile that accompanied them stand for answer. Thus he left her, and, going out, turned the car about and went down the hill to The Grey House.

Chapter VI
Why There Was No Dog

THERE were points, Head decided, in connection with Mrs. Allday's confession—for it had amounted to no less than that—which called for thought on his part. That "something of great value" in the safe was one. Thus Wymering had defined to her whatever it was that he had kept in the safe in addition to the contents of the fourteen film boxes, unless those contents in themselves had been "of great value." But, had this latter been the case, why had they been destroyed? It appeared that the three people with knives had destroyed them, for, had Wymering done so prior to the arrival of those three, it was very unlikely that he would have left the door of the safe open, and in addition to that, Mrs. Allday would almost certainly have noticed the smell of burning, which had been still strong when Head had opened the door of the kitchen. And, with her evident will to bring Wymering's murderer or murderers to justice, she would have mentioned that smell, which was so unusual in quality that she would not have forgotten it. Head had purposely refrained from questioning her in connection with it: such a witness—and at that stage he saw her as a witness in the case—would be better left to testify on spontaneous and unaided recollection.

But what had that thing "of great value" been? He knew little of Wymering's character, so far: the man might have had, among those films—if the contents of the boxes had been films, which appeared almost certain—some unauthorised picture valuable from a blackmailer's point of view, and, lacking a screen or time to project the films and find out which was the one they wanted to destroy, the murderers might have decided to take no chances and burn the lot. Alternatively, some one of those pictures might have revealed the identity of these killers, and again, they had burned the lot to prevent the discovery of one of them. Thus there were three alternatives: they had murdered Wymering because of the existence of the films and the fact that, even with the films destroyed, he had some knowledge which rendered it necessary to kill him: they had destroyed the films after killing him to conceal their identities: or, the final alternative, they had wanted something else from the safe—but, in this case, why destroy the films? He had to get more information as to Wymering's life and character, but it began to appear as if that visit to the Near East had something to do with the crime. Not until his return from the trip had Wymering installed the safe, and Mr. Marvel had described one of his assailants as "a black man." Arab, Egyptian, Syrian—any one of the races inhabiting the southern and eastern confines of the Mediterranean could furnish such a one.

Then another point: Mrs. Allday had described Miss Hastings as "highly emotional, passionately intense," and had admitted that the girl disliked Wymering. He, Head, had yet to make Miss Hastings' acquaintance, but that description, coupled with Vane's admission of having met the girl at a time which rendered her a possible participant in the murder, was rather damning. The trouble there was that he could not fit in the other two whom Mr. Marvel had described, nor the car in which they had—almost certainly—made their escape after accomplishing their purpose at The Grey House. Miss Hastings might have known the time at which they would arrive; she might have paid her visit to the Alldays' house in order to establish an alibi, might have joined the other two in time not merely to help in frightening the tramp into the house, but to assist in the commission of the crime as well—and yet it appeared fantastic that the daughter of a country squire should have done such a thing.

But, Head felt, he could not afford to discard any theory, however fantastic it might seem, at present. He had to get more information, prove which theory was tenable, and, so far, acquit nobody of complicity. On that, as he drew up outside The Grey House—for he had not let his cogitations interfere with his activities—his thoughts reverted to Vane. Mrs. Allday had called him "Jim" Vane in a way that indicated some degree of intimacy: Vane himself had betrayed an earnest desire to defend Miss Hastings. Supposing he had known of the liaison between Mrs. Allday and Wymering, known too of Miss Hastings' dislike for the man and resentment against his intimacy with her friend, then had her passionate intensity led her to participate in this killing, and had Vane been shielding her to the point of withholding material and relevant facts in his statement? Did he suspect her of guilt, and determine to prevent Head from suspecting her?

With these questions Head reached the front door of The Grey House, and saw that, by the wall, there leaned a motor cycle, with a loose strap dangling from the carrier to show that some item of baggage had recently been riding there: Sergeant Wells had arrived with the fingerprint outfit, and, evidently, was still busy inside the house. Inside the doorway, stiffened to attention at sight of his inspector, stood Constable Hawker, one whom Wadden always described as his "man of weight." Hawker was useful in such primitive rough-housing scraps as the lower element of Westingborough occasionally staged at chucking-out time from the public bars: he was good at seeing school children across the street at traffic-infested points, and he could sing a good bass song at a smoking concert; he had been a simple constable for twenty years, and would remain one until he retired. But he was undoubtedly a man of weight.

"Morning, Hawker," said Head. "Anything to report?" He stepped inside the big hall as he put the question, and saw all as it had been the night before, after the removal of the body.

"Nothing, sir, except that Sergeant Wells is upstairs, fingerprinting. He's finished the downstair rooms."

"No, sir. Sergeant Wells told me last night I might, when I took over from him. This mornin', it was, properly speaking, being nearly two a.m. when I got here. But I haven't heard it."

"We'll try, anyhow. Back a couple of yards, and I'll stand beside you—that's it, near the middle of this apartment. No—I'll face you, to give the word." Head motioned the man back as he spoke, and took up his own position in front of him. "Now, when I say 'three!' leap as high in the air as you can, and come down with all your weight on the floor. Ready? One—two—three!"

He himself bent his knees and jumped too: they came down together with a shattering thud, and Head heard what he had expected.

"Aoh!" One single bark, coming so evidently from the back of the hall that Hawker, faced toward the door, spun about in fear for the seat of his trousers. But, as during the preceding night, there was no dog. The man turned about again, rather shamefacedly.

"I'm sorry, sir. Thought there was—" He paused, and then ended with emphasis—"There was, too! But he ain't there, somehow."

"That points to clockwork, rather than electricity," Head remarked calmly. "But how—where—let's have a look behind that picture."

Advancing to the panelled back wall, he swung aside a small landscape that depended from the picture rail by a long cord. Behind it was a small panel which slid easily aside between grooved wooden holders, and in the oblong recess behind the panel was a clockwork mechanism, a foot or so in height and strongly constructed. Set in the front of this mechanism, and near its top, was a brass winding key. Head gave it a turn to the right, and instantly the barking broke out again, an angry series of "Aohs" at which Constable Hawker looked exceedingly scared. Then, as the spring ceased to function, the barking ceased, and Head closed the panel and let the picture swing back into its place. Getting a chair, he stood on it to look level at the picture rail, and saw that a narrow slot, hidden from anyone standing on the floor, extended for three feet or so behind the rail itself.

"First time I've ever seen a burglar alarm like that," he observed, getting down from the chair and restoring it to its place. "Up there, in the wall, some sort of loud-speaking gramophone arrangement, and the clockwork actuates it. And treading on some part of the floor sets it going after it's been wound up, of course. Somewhere near the door, probably. A rod or something to release the catch that holds it silent. And once released, it goes on barking till the mechanism has run down. Simple, brilliantly simple, Hawker."

"No, sir." Hawker infused sympathetic regret into his concurrence with the observation. "Lucky for me I didn't do any jumpin' before you got here—before daylight, I mean."

Sergeant Wells came down from the upper rooms, the leather case containing the fingerprint outfit in his hand.

"Only the deceased's own prints, sir, except for some on one of his hair brushes, and a very indistinct one on the inside handle of the bedroom door," he reported. "Nothing at all downstairs."

"I brought a set with me," Wells explained. "The ball of the thumb and second joint of the forefinger are unmistakable. There was an old scar on the forefinger—of the right hand, of course. And what they did to the hand didn't spoil the whorls."

Head remembered what had been done to the dead man's right hand, and tried to forget it, but unsuccessfully.

"Those prints in the bedroom," he observed, "smaller, and fairly evidently made by a woman. Is that your opinion?"

"We will reserve that evidence, as far as the inquest is concerned," Head told him. "Now what about the handle of the safe?"

"Wiped clean, sir, or else handled with gloves. There's no mark anywhere except such as Mr. Wymering made himself, and the ones up in the bedroom. Not a trace of any other."

"I didn't think there would be. Now I'm going to look round the place for myself, thoroughly. You can get away back, and send a man along to relieve Hawker for his breakfast. Ah! Who's that, now?"

A middle-aged woman appeared and darkened the doorway. She stood gazing in at the two figures in police uniform and Head in his ordinary civilian attire: then she gasped at sight of the dried blood on the parquet, and put her right hand up over her heart.

At that moment, possibly because the man of weight made some movement which shook the mechanism in the back wall, another single and menacing "Aoh!" was fired out.

"Lawks!" the woman almost screamed, and turned to flee. "Bloodhounds! Save us all!"

Halfway to the gate, Head caught up with her and stopped her by the simple expedient of getting in front of her and barring the way.

"There's nothing to fear," he assured her. "Tell me who you are, please, and why you have come here."

"You can't, any more," he told her—Wymering was finally done for, in the worst sense of the words. "You mean you look after the place for him? Is that it?"

She looked a tidy body, and capable, but faced about and gazed nervously at the open door, as if she expected the dog to emerge.

"Don't be afraid," Head encouraged her. "There isn't any dog—it's only a mechanical thing in the wall that makes the noise. Is this the time you usually come to do your cleaning and cooking?" For it was already well on the way to ten o'clock.

"No, sir, I'm late," she half-apologised. "My Mary's 'eart's been bad ever since she had rheumatic fever, an' this mornin' she had one of her spazzums. Generly, I'm here before nine."

"Cotton—Mrs. Cotton, an' I live in the second cottage past the turn on the new road—past the turn where this road turns off. Me husband works for Mr. Allday, further up the hill."

"Well, come inside the house, Mrs. Cotton—I want to talk to you for a minute or two. You have not yet heard that Mr. Wymering is dead, I gather. Yes, Wells, you can get back, and send that relief."

For Wells had strapped his case on the back of the motor-cycle, and stood, holding the handles, awaiting such an order. He wheeled the machine down the path and out at the gate, then.

"Dead? Him?" said Mrs. Cotton, half-incredulously. "Lawks! But he can't be! He owed me for nearly a month's work!"

"I expect you'll get paid for it—in time," Head told her consolingly but cautiously. "But come inside. Mr. Wymering was murdered, and I want to find out if you can tell me anything about him."

"I feel quite sure you don't," he soothed her, "but you may be able to tell me something that will help in discovering who killed him. If you'll just come in and answer a few questions—"

"With that there blood all over the floor?" she interjected with a negative head-shake. "No, not me—an' I don't clean it up, either, specially since I ain't been paid for me work what I have done."

"An' why should I?" she demanded defiantly. "Who are you to ask me questions, anyhow? You might be the one that killed him, for all I know about you—though that'd hardly be, with them pleecemen—" She broke off, and half-turned her head to glance at the figure of the man of weight, which was filling the doorway.

"No," Head agreed, "that would hardly be. I am a police officer myself, and in charge of the case. Now are you going to answer?"

But she answered, and the sum of her replies was very little. For the past year she had looked after the cottage, coming in once a day, whether Wymering were there or no, at a wage of twelve shillings a week. When he was absent, she just looked in to see that everything was all right: when he was in residence, she cooked him a late breakfast and a hot lunch, and saw that a cold meal was left for the evening. On more than one occasion she had prepared that cold meal for two people, but she did not know who the other one was, and once during the preceding summer Mr. Wymering had come down with another man and two girls, and had paid her extra for "doing for" all four of them. They had brought down two camp bedsteads and bedding on their car, and the girls had occupied one of the spare rooms. But for the most part Mr. Wymering had been alone there, and, as nearly as she could recollect, he had not spent more than six weeks altogether at the cottage during the whole of the preceding summer. Six weeks "in little bits," as she phrased it, and always in the middle of the week, never at week-ends, which was just as well, since Cotton wanted his hot dinner on Sundays. Mr. Wymering had been a nice gentleman, and she had made his bed and washed up and kept the place tidy. No, she had no idea of what he did for a living, if anything, and except for that occasion when he had had the party of three others there with him, she had never seen any of his friends. The three had been nice people, a bit larky in their ways, but quite nice people, she thought. The other man had looked younger than Mr. Wymering, and had given her five shillings. Yes, nice people, gentlefolks, all of them: the two girls had not been at all what you would expect, coming there like that all alone with two young gentlemen. They seemed to behave quite properly, except that she had seen them drink sherry.

"And that, of course, is quite unforgivable," Head observed gravely. "Now, Mrs. Cotton, apart from these three people, have you ever seen anyone here with Mr. Wymering? Anyone at all?"

"Have you ever seen anyone, stranger or otherwise, in or about the place, or appearing interested in it?" he pursued.

"Not nobody whatsomever," she repeated solemnly. "Wait a bit, though. It'd be Thursday or Friday of last week, when Mr. Wymering wasn't here at all. Friday—yes, it was Friday. I'd got Cotton his supper when he come home from work, an' I'd been busy meself all day—ye know, when Mr. Wymering wasn't here, it didn't matter what time I come an' took a look round, as long as I got here once a day to look round, an' that day—Friday—I'd left it till the evenin', what with my Mary an' one thing an' another. So I come along about seven o'clock, it'd be, an' there was a gentleman with a car outside the gate here. He'd got the front lifted up to show the engine, but till he see me he stood lookin' at the house, not at the car at all, an' I thinks that's funny, because not many cars don't come this way now there's the new road. An' when I caught sight of him he wasn't payin' no attention to the car, but just standin' lookin' at the house, an' the gate was open, too. Nobody never went there but me when Mr. Wymering wasn't there, an' I never left the gate open. I thought, if it was him, an' he'd been inside the gate havin' a look round, he'd got a nerve. But I didn't say nothin', and neither didn't he. He pulled the front of the car shut, an' got in an' drove off."

"What sort of man?" Head asked, realising that he had got the main point of her story at its latter end.

"Darkish—looked like a foreigner, to me," she answered. "Got a black soft hat on, an' his face was Clark Gablish—you know, just like Clark Gable on the films—and sort of stary eyes. Stareish eyes, if you know what I mean."

"That's it, exactly! Fullish, and the white all stareish and noticeable, like. So you'd notice him when you see him."

"No, not till I turned to go in at the gate, he didn't. He did then. As if he thought I might not like the gate being left open, and didn't know I had anything to do with the house. But when he did know, then he drove away quick, before I could ask him about it."

"Oh, up. The car was pointed up the hill, an' I'd come from the down end. Gone before you could say Jack Robinson."

"No, a little one. Like that one outside the gate, but much lower down—the seat was much lower down. A funny little car. Grey."

A low-slung grey sports car, and high powered, since it could get away up the hill quickly. Useless to ask her the make, he knew.

"Gipsyish. Brown, like an Indian, I thought, but I didn't notice that much. His black hat made him look dark, I thought, an' p'raps he'd been out in the sun a lot. Them foreigners are dark, generally."

"Well, I didn't hear him say anything to prove it, but he looked foreign, to me. But Mr. Wymering wasn't here, then."

"One other thing, Mrs. Cotton," Head asked. "When Mr. Wymering came here this last time—first, though, when did he arrive?"

"I were. He wrote me a postcard like he always did, an' I turned up to see what he'd want, like I always did."

"And do you know if he brought any baggage apart from what he usually brought when he came on these visits?"

"Yes, there was a lot of round tin boxes, all tied together. Big round tin boxes, flat ones, like wheels."

"No. I never keep 'em. Cotton grumbled about me bein' out of the home so much, so I never leave anything about to remind him of it. I always burn 'em as soon as I've read 'em."

"Ah! Well, that's all for the present, Mrs. Cotton, thanks. The second cottage past the road junction, if I want to see you again. If I do, I'll let you know. Good morning."

For time was beginning to press on him, and there was much to do, yet. Passing her, he entered the house, and, after a few seconds of hesitation, she followed him as far as the doorway, and looked in. Constable Hawker looked out, and nodded at her.

"'Tis that, Mr. Hawker. I say"—she lowered her voice—"who's that man? He said he was a policeman."

"You have been talking to Detective Inspector Head," Hawker informed her with magnificent impressiveness.

"What? 'im?" In her incredulous surprise, she missed the aspirate altogether, and stood staring at the man of weight.

"But—but he didn't look nearly important enough," she protested. "I've read about him in the papers, of course, but he's not a bit like a detective. Only asked me a lot of ordinary questions just like anyone might, an' as for lookin' like a detective—why, anyone might take him for a gentleman, if they didn't know!"

"They might," Hawker admitted. "In fact, Mrs. Cotton, quite a lot of us do. There ain't many flies on our Mr. Head."

Chapter VII
A Letter

THERE was, of course, no direct connection between the dark man in the grey sports car and the story Mr. Marvel had told, but at the same time Head felt that Mrs. Cotton's description of the man she had seen went to prove that one of the three who had planned and carried out the murder of Bernard Wymering had reconnoitred the place in advance, and felt, too, still more convinced that the tramp had told no more than simple truth in accounting for his presence in the house with the murdered man. His "black man" and Mrs. Cotton's dark foreigner might easily be one and the same.

But how did a tall, slender, dark-haired woman in white come into the crime? If it had been a planned murder, with the ground surveyed beforehand, as now appeared probable, then surely no one of the three concerned in it would be such a fool as to admit a conspicuous figure like that woman to the commission of the crime. The woman herself would have had more sense than to turn out all in white, if she had intended to participate in a murder, and her two companions would have forbidden her to appear in such garb. Yet, unless Mr. Marvel had been romancing on that point, she had been there, and all in white, too. And it was hardly credible that Mr. Marvel had invented her.

Entering the room in which the safe stood, Head realised that the morning was passing far too quickly, and that Mr. Marvel was due to ring up Westingborough police station at noon. He gave the open, empty safe no more than a glance which told him that the key was in the lock, and then turned to the stove and surveyed the mass of charred stuff which, almost certainly, had been the contents of the knee-hole desk drawers not long before. It was all too thoroughly burned to yield any indication of what the desk had contained, though some of the fragments had the stiffness of cardboard rather than the flimsiness of burnt paper. Photographs, perhaps—whoever had burned the contents of the film boxes might have wanted all photographs in the place destroyed as well. But that was mere conjecture: nothing remained that would serve in any way as proof.

Head turned to the table in the middle of the room, and surveyed its litter of papers. Wells had dusted them all for finger-prints, and had got impressions, evidently, from two envelopes both addressed to "Bernard Wymering, Esq., The Grey House, Condor Hill, Westingborough." The addresses were typed, the envelopes plain and ordinary—and incidentally empty—and Head had little difficulty in ascertaining that the finger-prints had been made by one person only. By Wymering himself, according to Wells, who had found only the dead man's prints apart from such as Mrs. Allday had made in the bedroom.

Then there was an evening paper of Monday's date, an early edition which Wymering had probably brought down from London with him, and which lay open at the leader page; a current issue of The Autocar, closed and with its title page upward; a package of plain note paper, and another of plain envelopes; a sheet containing Mrs. Cotton's name and address in pencil, with the figures 36/6 under it—possibly Wymering had made a note of the amount he owed her. Two receipted bills, one from Harrod's and one from John Pound's, were evidently in respect of cash purchases, and bore no name beyond those of the firms concerned, and a wine merchant's catalogue completed the contents of the table. There was not a single thing which would give a hint of the dead man's occupation, or any other address than this, and, after a brief further search, Head decided that there were no more papers of any kind in the room. The contents of the grate gave the reason for this, and indicated that the visitors of the night before had destroyed all evidence relating to the dead man's activities. They had had very little time in which to accomplish their errand—less than an hour, between Mrs. Allday's departure and Mr. Marvel's arrival—and probably had destroyed everything in their determination to remove all traces of some particular thing that would incriminate them. Lastly, they had been gloved, beyond doubt.

Head tried, and failed, to reconstruct the details of the crime. The torture of Wymering—to get him to reveal where his torturers could find the key of the safe? Or to force some other information from him? Then, had they killed him first, and then set about their search of the desk and safe, or had one of them held him powerless while the others made their investigation and burned that mass of papers in the grate? Yet it appeared that the killing had come last, for the body had been still warm when Vane had found Mr. Marvel here. Had these assailants failed to get all they wanted, and killed Wymering at last in pure rage and disappointment?

Still searching, Head put these questions to himself, and then he went out through the hall, where Constable Hawker remained on guard, to the kitchen and scullery beyond it. There on the floor were the fourteen flat, circular metal boxes, and without disturbing them the Inspector went to examine the pile of lids. Wells had been at work on them, but with no result at all, and now, taking them up, Head found that four were inscribed respectively—"N 1, N 2, N 3," and "N 4," while of the other ten, three bore the figure "1," three more a "2" on each, two were marked "3," and the remaining two 4," all the letters and figures being in ordinary black ink. There was no other label or lettering, nothing to give a hint of what the boxes had contained, and the boxes themselves, as Head found by taking them up for examination, were so blistered and buckled by intense heat that they could reveal nothing at all. But, he decided from the lettering and numbering of the lids, four of those boxes had contained four negative reels of some sort of film, and the others had contained positives of the same film, which for some reason or other the visitors of the night before had wanted destroyed. It was thin reasoning, but he could arrive at no other conclusion, on what he had seen.

He faced about at a sound, and saw Superintendent Wadden standing in the scullery doorway. And Wadden looked the reverse of pleased.

"I have seen one person rather intimately connected with the deceased man, and found that he went abroad a good deal. Hence Marvel's black man, who was probably a long way from black—"

"I don't altogether like your letting Marvel go like that," Wadden interposed. "What about the inquest, and his evidence at it?"

"Secondary to evidence about that car," Head retorted. "Our business, surely, is to get the people who killed Wymering, not to tell a pretty story of how he was killed. Let Vane tell all that's necessary to make the proceedings reasonable, and then adjourn."

"Absolutely, Chief—for the simple reason that he couldn't have invented it. And he's got sufficient wind-up to make him use every effort to find that car. He knows we can lay hands on him almost instantly if he tries to get away from us, and I believe he'll play fair with me for the sake of his own neck."

"Well, you've got more faith than I have," Wadden said glumly. "Now what about Wymering's address when he isn't here, and other particulars? Who was he—what was he?"

"On that, Chief, I've slipped up," Head confessed. "I'm sorry, because I might have got it from my informant of this morning, but at the time I counted on finding all I wanted of the kind here. And as far as I've gone, it isn't here. It has all been carefully destroyed, and I think the people who killed him did that too. There isn't a paper or a letter that I can find giving any particulars at all. I went through his pockets last night, and all they tell me is that he banked in Piccadilly, went to Lingfield races for the last meeting, and watched the prices of certain industrial shares, especially aviation concerns. Here's his cheque book—you can get his London address from the bank." He took out a pocket cheque book and handed it over. "And that's all I can give you, up to the present."

"Umph! You don't appear quite as bright as usual, over this," Wadden observed as he took and opened the cheque book. He flicked at the counterfoils of used cheques. "Fifty—eighty-two ten—five—sixty-three—not a poor man, by the look of these," he commented.

Wadden pocketed the book. "I'll get the address from there—if he has one," he said. "Have you finished rummaging here?"

"I've to go upstairs, and do the dining-room, yet. They may yield something, though I think not, after what I've already found."

"They may. If you'll get on upstairs, I'll do the dining-room for you. I've fixed the inquest for three o'clock, at Westingborough. We couldn't drum up a jury any nearer, without going miles, and there's no point in bringing 'em all out here."

"That's as you think best," Head half-assented. "AII right, you tackle the dining-room, Chief, and I'll do upstairs."

"What are those things on the floor?" Wadden pointed at the boxes that Head had been examining as he put the question.

"I think they were a film, probably the sort of film that doesn't get shown except to a picked audience, and may have been taken without any intention of its being shown at all. But that's guesswork."

"May have been—and may not. It's horribly obscure, and I want to hear from Napoleon Marvel about a Rolls-Royce car. Also I want to hear things from several other people, and it's getting toward noon, far too quickly. Let's go, shall we, Chief?"

They went, Head to conduct an exhaustive but fruitless search of Wymering's bedroom, the spare bedroom, and the two unfurnished apartments on the first floor, while Wadden made his way to the dining-room. When Head had satisfied himself that there was no evidence of Wymering's activities or even of his tastes upstairs, he came down, and found the Superintendent reading a letter as he stood by the debris of the last meal Wymering had eaten before his death.

"Doesn't bear on the case—or does it?" Wadden asked. "Rather illuminating as far as the writer is concerned, but doesn't tell us much about Wymering. I found it in this book of poems, and kept the book open at the page where the letter was in it. On the mantel."

Head glanced at the book, an old, leather-bound volume of Jean Ingelow's poems, open at the page that bore the title "Divided," and contained the first verses of the poem of that name. Then he turned to the letter, a closely-written script.

"Unsigned, you'll see," Wadden remarked, "and by the look of it he's carried it about with him for some time. Undated for the year, too, and no address. She meant it for him only, and wasn't giving herself away."

"Since last November I have had no word from you, and now winter is over and the time of the singing of birds is here. But for me it is still winter, since you are not with me. Sometimes, in the evenings, I steal down to your grey house in vain hope—I know it vain, all the time—that you may be there, may have arrived without letting me know. Yesterday, when I went, there were catkins and pussy-willows in the meadow hedges. Last year we saw them together.

"Though it is five months since you wrote, five months of silence and waiting, I have absolute belief in you. Else, I should not write this. I am addressing it to the Eastern Exchange at Port Said as you told me, but wonder where you will read it. And as I think of you, which is always, I remember your telling me that you were going into great danger with Martin. Bernard, dear, I wish you had told me what that danger is, or else not told me anything, for now I cannot shape my fears for you.

"Yet I believe you will come back safely—back to me. Then, I think—but I will not tell you all I think until I see you again, hear you tell me again what I want most to know, though still I know it, even in this silence and absence. Only this—I cannot go on. My dear, I cannot go on. Life was not given me merely to be endured, but to be lived as I live it in such hours as you and I have known. And apart from you I have given and given and had no return. It was my own mistake in the first place, I know, but I will not pay all my life for that. You have not found my love so slight a thing that you could ignore me, leave me to go my own way while you follow your separate interests. The humiliation of it, daily, almost hourly—I cannot go on.

"Soon, there will be hawthorn blossom and dog roses in the hedges, but for me it is winter, since you are not here. Come back to me, dear, and tell me, as I tell you now—I love you.

"It's not unsigned," he remarked, "and it does bear on the case, in a way. Port Said—danger—Martin—I think I'll find Martin as soon as possible and have a word with him. Since they went together after whatever it was, they probably come back together. In any case, it appears that I ought to look him up."

"You'll just look up his address in the directory?" Wadden suggested, with a hint of impatience in the gibe.

"I shall consult the owner of a handkerchief," Head answered imperturbably. "As I have already told you, that letter was signed."

"There was no dog, as I told you. Come and listen. First, though, is this letter all you could find in here?"

"Unless you like to take the table or a chair away, and question it. If there'd been anything else, I'd have told you."

He went out to the entrance hall, opened the panel behind the picture, and gave the key of the clockwork half a turn. Instantly the barking broke out, realistic and threatening.

"I suspected something of the sort last night," Head observed when the mechanism had run down and the noise ceased again. "That was why I said it would keep, for the time. When the mere banging of the front door started it for us, and it didn't keep on as a natural dog would, I felt pretty sure it was mechanical. And then, this morning, I was informed that Wymering set his burglar alarm last night."

"A pretty effective alarm too, for a country district," Wadden commented. "But why—I see, though. If it got about that there was such a thing in the house, it would lose half its effect on unauthorised callers. That's why we never heard of his having it fitted."

"A man's house being his castle, he can do what he likes in it without telling all the world," Head pointed out. "Probably he had a mechanical turn of mind, and fitted the thing himself."

"I didn't. I merely looked. I haven't found out yet how he set it—what holds it quiet after winding and releases it if anyone breaks in. Probably some rod or wire under the floor—I'm not much interested. And I want to get to Tolston Hall and back to Westingborough before noon, Chief, for a word with Marvel."

"I'm moderately certain of it. I don't think it would be possible to persuade a man of his type to work, in the ordinary sense of the word, but getting on a trail like this appeals to him, and in addition to that he's terribly anxious to prove his story and clear himself. Oh, what report is there from Crandon?"

"A Rolls went through there at a quarter past eleven, headed for London and going like hell. The man who saw it thinks there was nobody in it except the driver, but he's not sure."

"Being visible himself, the driver is all he would see," Head observed. "Whoever was in the back would crouch down on the floor of the car, out of sight. There's plenty of room in the back of a Rolls for people to get down out of sight, if they see policemen interested in them. But why isn't this man sure about it?"

"For the simple reason that he hadn't time to inspect the car. His principal business at the time was jumping out of its way."

"Why should he? Unless, of course, he meditated a charge of dangerous driving, and we've all had a few raps over the knuckles about that. There wasn't a soul visible at that hour except himself—Crandon goes to bed with the dicky-birds, pretty much, and he hadn't a witness that the car was speeding, let alone a stop watch. He got the first letter on the rear number plate as 'Y,' which is about as much use as a plate of boiled cabbage to a man-eating tiger."

"Except that 'Y' is London registry," Head pointed out. "Possibly Marvel will find even that one letter helpful." He moved toward the door. "Chief, I've just got time to make Tolston Hall and get back before noon. If Marvel rings before I get back, tell him he's to ring again at one o'clock to talk to me, will you?"

"Half a minute, laddie," Wadden objected. "It won't take you much more than that to tell me what you've got up to the present."

"Well"—Head sounded resigned over it—"a woman in this district is very much—was very much, I should say—in love with Wymering, as this letter tells us. She had a good deal of faith in him as well, and that faith, as nearly as I can learn, was fully justified. She arranged with him last night, not long before he was murdered, that they were to go off together—I suppose she anticipated a divorce to regularise the position. She left him here at about ten o'clock, left him alone in this hall, and between that time and Marvel's running in in fear of his life, which was near on eleven o'clock, Wymering was murdered by some person or persons at present unidentified, and it appears that there were three of them, one being a woman. Before Wymering was killed, he was tortured to make him reveal something, and I think it was the means of opening the safe. He had in that safe films, four negatives and ten positives, in which I believe the murderers were interested, possibly because the films told a story which would lead to identification of the murderers, and possibly because they were capable of being used for blackmail. He had, too, papers in his desk and probably elsewhere as well, which these people very thoroughly destroyed by burning—again because there was a possibility of identification and therefore danger if the papers were left here intact, or because they constituted means of blackmail. It appears, as I said, that one of those three was a woman, and that either one or both of the men will prove to be Egyptian, Arab, Turkish, or some nationality of North Africa or Asia Minor, and that one of those two surveyed the ground on Friday of last week, using a low-slung, open, grey sports car, make so far unknown. Further to that, the woman of the three was dressed all in white, and a woman dressed all in white appeared on this road, though farther up the hill, at a time which would admit of her being one of those three, and with either a knife or carving steel in her hand. I'm going to interview her now. Oh, and she disliked Wymering on sight, had an instant antipathy toward him, and is passionately intense in character. Will that do for the present, because I want to get away?"

"It's a promising summary," Wadden admitted thoughtfully. "Head, who wrote that letter, though?"

"The woman who did not kill Wymering," Head answered. "There may be a reason why we cannot call her as evidence, and I have a feeling that I wish to keep her out of the case, if possible. Now—"

"You mean the husband may have killed him—been one of your three skunks. In other words, Wymering went round this district collecting other men's wives and indecent films at the same time?"

"Have it your own way—I'm off, Chief. We can resume this analysis later, and possibly I shall know more, then."

He went determinedly to the door, and there faced a swarthy, saturnine, tall man, well-clad in tweeds, who was just about to put his foot on the lower of the two steps outside the doorway.

"Allday, from the farm farther up the hill. I want to be first in the field about taking over this house, since the late tenant has no further use for it, by what I heard last night."

"You'll probably have no opposition," Head said drily. "What did you hear last night?"

"Young Vane used my telephone to report catching the man who murdered Wymering here," Allday answered frankly, though with a trace of sullenness for which Head disliked him.

"How many people?" Allday looked faintly surprised at the question. "I told my wife last night, since she wanted to know what the noise was about. Nobody else—I wanted first chance at getting this place, so naturally I wouldn't spread the news."

"Thanks," Head said, still more drily. "I shall hope to see you later in the day, Mr. Allday. For the present, I'm anxious to get away. Possibly you'd like a word with Superintendent Wadden—you'll find him inside there."

He went off to his car and turned it up the hill. If Allday had said nothing, and if Mrs. Allday and Miss Hastings had not met, there was a chance that he might precede tidings of the murder at Tolston Hall. If he could reach the hall ahead of the news, Miss Hastings' reaction to his announcement of Wymering's death might be enlightening.

Allday must wait, for the present. Besides, the Superintendent would probably deal with him, realising as he did without being told that Mrs. Allday had written the letter which, in Head's view, finally exonerated her from complicity in the murder of Bernard Wymering.

She had had nothing to do with it, Head felt convinced, but at the same time she may have been the cause of its having been committed. Not that Allday, though swarthy, fitted Mr. Marvel's description of the one he had seen most clearly as "a black man," but he might have been that "black" man's companion when they had frightened Mr. Marvel into the house.

Chapter VIII
Allday

WHILE, standing in the doorway of The Grey House, Head held his brief conversation with Allday, Wadden put his foot over the corner of a large rug in the entrance hall, and slid the fabric over the bloodstains which showed where Wymering had been killed. Then, as Head went off, the Superintendent came to the door.

"Mr. Allday, I believe," he observed almost genially. "Come in for a minute, Mr. Allday. I'd like a word with you."

He saw the sudden change of expression in the man's face, saw him hesitate and almost—but not quite—draw back to refuse the invitation. And at that he divined that Allday dared not refuse it.

"Time enough, apparently, to come here in the hope of getting the place for yourself," Wadden pointed out, and blew, very gently. "I wonder—yes," as Allday entered the hall, "let's go in there. I'm not likely to keep you long." He indicated the door of the dining room, pushed it wide, and let Allday precede him into the room. Then he closed the door, mindful of the man in the hall who had replaced Hawker on guard over the house, and turned to his visitor.

"I can deduce that you haven't much time," he observed, "since you get here to see if you can take over the house so soon."

"Wymering ought never to have had it," Allday responded irritably. "He stole a march on me after the last tenant left."

"And now you're stealing marches, eh?" Wadden suggested with an air of reflectiveness. Mr. Allday, did you really think coming here this morning would help you to get a lease of this house?"

"No? Well, for a start, now, does Inspector Head appeal to you as a likely house agent—or do I? Which of us is it?"

It was baiting, all the more effective for the apparent seriousness of the question. Allday's dark face turned a purplish red, and he made no reply—except that his fists clenched tightly.

"Because," Wadden pursued, "we're not in a position to transact business as far as the house is concerned. And we're interested in the last tenant and what happened to him, not in the next one."

"I thought there might be somebody—some next of kin or something of the sort," Allday said lamely, "and I might get information as to whether they, whether I could have it—" He broke off, for Wadden was shaking his head and blowing gently again.

"Wymering," the Superintendent pointed out slowly and incisively, "was alive twelve hours ago—it's not yet eleven o'clock. Do you happen to know where he came from—where he lived when he wasn't in residence here? Because this was only a sort of country cottage that he visited occasionally, I understand. Do you know where he lived?"

"I've got the same impression, Mr. Allday. Four hours away by express to Westingborough, and then add on the time it takes to get here from the station. What time was it when Constable Vane got to your place and used your telephone last night?"

"About eleven hours ago, say. Then I had to act on his report, come out here from Westingborough and hold what investigation I could, after finding and turning out our surgeon. And then, after that investigation, I had to set about finding some next of kin. Also, no newspaper has got any account of this affair, so far, as probably you know. Add to that the fact that my men are not paid to talk, and that you are probably the only person apart from police who has first-hand knowledge of what happened here last night—whatever you may have told others at second hand—and I come to one conclusion."

"That you knew perfectly well there couldn't possibly be any next of kin or representative of the dead man here yet."

"In a position to treat for the lease of the place before we even know whether there is a will, let alone getting probate on it? And you say you want to hire the place. For what?"

Wadden blew a long gust. "You're a native of this district, I believe, Mr. Allday?" he asked gently.

"Lived here all your life?" Wadden persisted, with an air of deep interest in the man facing him.

"Then you know the district. You know the people in the district. You know as well as I do, Mr. Allday, that if you suggested to your head cowman that he should come and live in a house where a murder has been committed, it would be time to advertise for another head cowman. I'll put that more plainly, if you like."

"You needn't," Allday said, and his rage sounded in his voice. "Why you should bait me like this, though, having got your murderer, is—well, I suppose it's your own affair. I'll say good morning."

"Well?" Allday faced him again, and made the query sharp and eager. "What then? What if you hadn't?"

"I wonder, in that case, if you would have been in quite such a hurry to visit the scene of the crime," Wadden said slowly.

"I don't understand." There was stiff, frigid resentment in the comment. "I heard Vane say last night that he had caught the man with blood on him, and seen the knife that was used—and I saw blood on the man, too. So why question me as if you suspected me?"

"Have I given you that impression?" Wadden asked, as if surprised. "In actual fact, Inspector Head is in charge of the case, and I'm—well, merely curious as to why you really came here. Your excuse is too thin, too flimsy altogether for me. And you may realise that in a murder case we don't neglect any small detail."

"Which doesn't mean that we've completed our case against him," Wadden said, and felt that Napoleon Marvel was being useful in a way that would not have appealed to him, had he known of this interview. "However"—he looked thoughtful, almost dreamy, and then appeared suddenly to come back to earth—"are you interested in films?"

"Films—the things they show in picture palaces—and sometimes don't. Talking pictures—or non-talking, they used to be."

"I haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about," Allday said angrily, "and I haven't got all day to waste, if you have."

"I assure you I'm not wasting a minute. But we'll let it go. Now, before you go, what was your object in coming here?"

He rapped out the question in a way that made a demand of it, and saw Allday start and turn a deep, purplish red again.

"Letters." The one word came after a long pause, a reluctant confession, and Allday averted his gaze from the man before him,

"Did you think we should leave this place unguarded for you to search, then?" Wadden asked, and made almost a gibe of it.

"And therefore we'd leave the scene of the murder for every Tom, Dick, and Nebuchadnezzar to explore as they like! Well"—he sighed heavily—"the police are always fools, I know. But does it strike you that if you did take letters from here, you'd be guilty of theft?"

"Make a secret theft of it, eh? Well, apart from such letters as interest us, Mr. Allday, I'm afraid that next of kin you hoped to find here will be the proper person to consider how many you can have. We happen to have taken possession of some correspondence—"

He broke off suddenly, in a way that rendered the statement incomplete, and watched Allday intently. There was a moment's pause, and then Allday made a fierce gesture with his clenched fist.

"Damn and blast the woman!" he exclaimed, losing all self-control for the moment. But Wadden saw that he instantly regretted the outburst, and looked rather apprehensive over it.

"If we hadn't got the murderer, that might be rather an indiscreet remark," Wadden said slowly. "It might take some explaining away—if we hadn't caught the murderer last night."

"Merely that the man Vane caught might not have killed Wymering, and in that case we haven't got the man who did—yet. But don't worry too much about it, Mr. Allday—and you said you were in a hurry, too. I won't detain you here any longer—I feel pretty sure we shall meet again."

"Well, why are you waiting?" Wadden asked at last. "I said I wouldn't detain you. I think I told you, too, Inspector Head is in charge of the case. He'll probably wish to see you, later on."

After another interval of silence Allday turned, opened the door, and went rather stumblingly through the hall and down the garden path. Wadden, standing by the dining-room window, watched him go.

"We can get him when we want him," he reflected, "and Head can do what he likes about it. I dunno—no, I dunno."

Knowing Miss Sheila Hastings by sight, Head recognised her in time to stop her as the car she was driving came down the hill towards him. She obeyed his signal to stop, and he too stopped, with his small car facing her larger one, and, getting out, went up beside her as she sat at the wheel—of a big, black saloon, but not a Rolls. He knew, then, that his hope of interviewing her while she was still uninformed as to Wymering's death was futile, for beside her sat Mrs. Allday, and the back of the car contained a trunk, suitcases, and a circular hat case. Mrs. Allday was wearing a grey coat and skirt, as if prepared for a journey, but the girl beside her was dressed in a white linen frock, and, hatless as she was, revealed the fact that she possessed wavy, almost black hair. Head removed his own hat and held it in his hand: the day was hot, and the cool breeze on his forehead a relief. The girl gave him a cool little nod.

"I was on my way to see you, Miss Hastings," he answered, "and I should like another talk with you too, Mrs. Allday. I don't know if you intended catching a train—" His hesitation made a question of the remark.

"Not at present," Mrs. Allday answered. "I have engaged a room at the hotel in Westingborough—the Duke of York—and Miss Hastings very kindly offered to drive me there."

"You know what inference will be drawn from such an action?" he asked, with a gravity that conveyed a warning.

"I know," she answered steadily, "but it means nothing to me. I will not spend another day in that house—my husband's house."

"And when can I hope to have a talk with you, Miss Hastings?" he asked. "In actual fact, a talk with each of you?"

He glanced down the hill, reflecting that Allday was at The Grey House and might appear at any moment.

"As an alternative, I want to get back to Westingborough, and you say you're driving there," he said. "Supposing I follow you with my car, could you spare me a few minutes at the Duke of York?"

"It concerns the murder of Mr. Wymering last night," he stated bluntly, and watched the effect of his words on her. But she merely shook her head and frowned slightly.

"I know no more about it than Mrs. Allday has told me, and it seems that she knows very little," she said. "Why me—what makes you think I am in any way connected with it?"

He stood back, and the car went on. Then, returning to his own car, he turned about—with some difficulty, in the narrow road—and followed toward the town. He saw nothing of Allday, who, as the two cars passed The Grey House, was being rendered extremely uncomfortable by Superintendent Wadden in the dining room, and Allday, since he was not facing the window at the time, saw nothing of either his wife or of Head. Once the saloon had emerged to the main road, it shot off at a tremendous pace, and momentarily Head questioned whether Mrs. Allday had told the truth, or whether she intended flight from the district. But, he reflected, it would not be difficult to trace her if she did attempt to get away, and as nearly as he could tell she had no reason for lying to him. He felt almost convinced that she considered Allday responsible for Wymering's death, though it was possible that, as she had said in the letter Wadden had found, she merely decided that she could not go on living with Allday, quite independently of the event of the night. Yes, it was possible, but...

He drew up behind the saloon outside the Duke of York in time to see Mrs. Allday's trunk being carried into the hotel, and, entering the vestibule, faced Sheila Hastings, apparently on her way out to her car. She stopped, facing him, and gave him a rather hostile look.

"I'm afraid I'd forgotten all about you, Inspector," she said. "What is it, now, that you want of me? I can tell you nothing."

"You are not the first useful witness to open with that remark," he observed. "But we can hardly talk here. If you don't mind coming through to the small writing room, I think we shall find it empty."

"What do you mean by 'useful witness'?" she demanded sharply, making no move in the direction he had indicated.

He lost patience, or appeared to do so. "Miss Hastings," he fired out incisively, "I haven't all the morning to waste, if you have. Will you go to the writing room with me and answer a few questions there, or do you prefer to be sub-poenaed for an inquest this afternoon, and have those same questions put in front of a local audience?"

She gave in without a word of reply, then, and followed him to a small room at the back of the lounge. There he closed the door as soon as he had made certain there was no other occupant, and, turning, faced a very angry girl, as he discerned with no difficulty.

"I thought third-degree methods were prohibited in this country," she said cuttingly. "Is this a preliminary to beating up, as they call it in the States, if I don't answer properly?"

"I'm afraid I haven't time to be funny, Miss Hastings," he answered with no sign of resentment. "I want to know, first, what time did you leave home last night, after sunset?"

"We'll have it out at the inquest," he said, and moved toward the door. "I'll see that a formal summons to attend is served on you between now and three o'clock to-day, and you can give evidence on oath as to your movements and anything else we want to know."

"Wait!" she begged, with a sudden change of attitude. "I—my father would have a fit if I—what is it you want to know?"

He faced her again. "I have already asked the first question," he pointed out. "Need I repeat it?"

"What time I—yes. Before ten—a little before ten. It might have been half-past nine. Jim Vane has told you—"

"We won't bother about what Constable Vane has told me," he interrupted. "You left home at between half-past nine and ten last night. To go where?"

"Easily. Jane Parkes, the servant there, had not gone to bed, and she let me in and showed me into the drawing-room, after telling me that Mrs. Allday was not in. I said I'd wait, because I wanted to see her. She looked in once while I was waiting, and told me she was going to bed. Then I think it was about ten o'clock when Mrs. Allday came back, and we went and just looked at the baby. After that we were talking in the drawing-room till nearly eleven, and then I went back, and met Vane on my way. I went nowhere else."

"Isn't that rather an odd thing for a lady of your position to be carrying about, Miss Hastings?" Head asked gravely.

"Position?" she echoed derisively. "In these days, Mr. Head, the daughter of a poor country landowner has to sink her pride and do many things that might appear odd to you."

"I know nothing whatever about him." The tone of the reply indicated that she wished to know nothing about the man.

"Miss Hastings, isn't between half-past nine and ten at night rather an odd time to go and see a baby?" he asked.

"Connected with your driving her here to-day, knowing that she is determined to separate from her husband?" he suggested.

She shook her head, and closed her lips with a stubborn expression that indicated she would not reply to the suggestion.

"Well," he said, "I appreciate your loyalty to your friend. You knew Mr. Wymering, I believe?"

"Really, Inspector, I don't see what my feelings for Mr. Wymering can have to do with you," she retorted freezingly.

"If you run about in the vicinity of his cottage—or not far from it—with what looks like a knife in your hand at the time of his being murdered, your feelings with regard to him and everything else about you become my business," he pointed out.

"You don't appear capable of it," he answered, with a touch of irony. "What do you know about him—who was he?"

"Just Bernard Wymering—that's all I know. A well-to-do man—I don't know if he had any profession, or what he did. He took The Grey House more than two years ago, as a country cottage."

"I am not going to discuss Mrs. Allday's affairs with you," she told him harshly.

"Martin Colston—yes, once." She appeared both surprised and impressed by the fact that Head knew the name.

"What do you know of him—where he lives, his profession, or anything else about him that you could tell me?"

"Only that I liked him much more than I did Mr. Wymering, and—yes, you asked where he lives. I don't know, but I do know he suggested that Mrs. Allday and I should go to a ladies' night at the Caravanserai Club. He and Mr. Wymering were both members there."

"The members, I gather, are big game hunters, explorers, and men of that type generally. That's all I know—we didn't go."

"Exactly what it says," he answered. "To be perfectly frank, I did suspect you, but now I don't. And I'll give you as little trouble as possible over the case—let you off attending the inquest, for instance. If you wish to go now, you may."

"Before I go"—she softened, became human as she made the request—"may I ask you to give Mrs. Allday as little trouble as you give me? This—you appear to know a good deal about it and about her—it has broken her, I know. Can you leave her alone?"

"I don't know," he answered. "By leaving her home in this way she has thrust herself and her husband into the very centre of the case, and I don't know yet where it will lead me. My business is to find out who murdered Wymering."

"She said—Vane caught one man, but it seemed that you thought there were others," she said perplexedly. "Mr. Head, I don't understand it. Do you mean you believe her husband—?" She broke off.

"But it isn't because of that!" she insisted. "It's because he is what he is—a cold, heartless sort of man who cares nothing for her and only married her for her money. Her position was hopeless long before Mr. Wymering took The Grey House, and now she has taken the step she contemplated even before she met Mr. Wymering. I don't blame her—you couldn't blame her, if you knew what her life has been with that man. Not life at all, but cold existence."

He nodded thoughtfully, and then looked at his watch. "Thanks, Miss Hastings—you have been most useful," he said. "I'm sorry to have given you all this trouble, and been so brusque over it, too."

She smiled. "I understand you a little better now, Inspector," she answered. "Of course, my meeting Vane like that, with the carving steel in my hand—but I didn't go near The Grey House."

She shook hands with him before going out, and, standing on the doorstep of the hotel, he watched her drive away, reflecting the while that there appeared to have been a third tall, dark-haired woman, dressed all in white, on the old coach road the night before. It might be advisable to check up Miss Hastings' alibi, certainly, but since Wymering's body had not been cold when Vane found it—

Puzzled, he went across to the police station and entered Wadden's room. The superintendent, seated at his desk, looked up.

"Went to the Majestic as soon as I got back here, and asked the manager to show me a roll of film, or reel of film, or whatever they call it. He did, and it was in a box like those on the scullery floor at Wymering's place—they're film boxes, all right. But he told me a box that size holds about a thousand feet of film, and it's wound on a metal spool—a japanned metal thing like the spool a typewriter ribbon is wound on, only much bigger. Just big enough to fit inside the box nicely, that is. Head, the people who killed Wymering hadn't time to unwind fourteen thousand feet of film and take the metal spools away with them, and it's a certainty that if the films had been burnt on the spools, there would have been enough metal left in the boxes for us to see. There wasn't any—there weren't even dobbles of metal that might have been spools melted down inside the boxes, and he told me the spools were japanned sheet steel. Now what?"

"Merely another hill to climb," Head said rather wearily. "It's nearly time for Marvel to ring up—that's why I came over. Has he rung already, though?"

He broke off at the sound of the telephone bell, lifted the receiver, and listened. Then he blew, a heavy gust.

Chapter IX
Getting Busy

"And what is the news, Marvel?" Head made the question a friendly invitation to talk, and grinned at Wadden, who, seated at his desk, expressed his disapproval by a momentary tornado.

"Well, Mr. 'Ead, I b'leeve we got 'em taped. Down Bedford way, to begin with. I got me brother Bizzy on to it, now."

"Well, sir, I do an' I don't. Y'see, Mr. 'Ead, 'im an' me's twins, an' our old man 'ad us christened Napoleon an' Bismarck. 'E said they was both marvels, an' we was both Marvels too. So I'm Nap an' 'e's Bizzy. An' 'e's on the job, now, an' I'm waiting to 'ear."

"It's a box at the cross-roads—fust cross-roads past Crandon. Y'see, I found Joe Baggs, an' 'e'd break 'is blinkin' neck f'r a pint, an' what 'e wouldn't do f'r a quart ain't worth talkin' about. Joe put the word along the roads f'r me, an' Bizzy spotted 'em along about three this mornin', on account o' their chuckin' a bloody rag out—"

"Cut it down for the present, Marvel," Head interrupted. "I want you here to-day, and you'd better tell your friends where to find you if they have any further news. Can you do that?"

"Five pounds to the man who finds the car for us, and a pound to every one who can prove that he helped in tracing it."

"Thass good enough, Mr. 'Ead. There'll be drunks all the way from 'ere to London, by ter-morrer night. An' you wanter see me?"

"Come back to Crandon, and take the first train to Westingborough. I want you to give your evidence about the woman and two men at the inquest, which means I want you here by three o'clock this afternoon."

"But—blimey, Mr. 'Ead, it'd ruin me, if I done that. It'd git about that I'd walked into a pleece station on me own accord, an' me own brother Bizzy, even, wouldn't own me if I'd done a thing like that. Y'see, Mr. 'Ead, we works in together, what there is left of us!"

"Well"—Head sharpened his tone to one of severe admonition—"I can't run about after you, and you know you're under suspicion. I'm trying to clear you by finding the people who killed the man."

"I got it, Mr. 'Ead," Marvel said, and his voice on the wire sounded like that of one who has had an inspiration. "I'll disguise meself—'ave a wash an' shave, an' buy me a clean shirt. Then none o' the reg'lars'll know it's me, see? I'll be there, sir."

"Right. Ask for me, and give me all your news then—not over the telephone like this. And remember—you'll be very well paid indeed if we find that car, and in bad trouble if we don't."

"Thass what I sent word to Bizzy, sir, an' 'im bein' me brother, 'e'll wear 'isself out to git me outer a jam. Now I'll go an' git me disguise, an' come right along an' ast fer you. Goo'-bye, sir."

The clank of the receiver on its hook followed. Head put down the instrument at his end, and turned to Wadden.

"He should come off the one-thirty-five," he observed, and by his tone, we shall find that car at the other end of its journey."

"Marvel thinks he has traced this one as far as Bedford, or near there," Head pointed out. "You see, Chief, there are not so many Rolls-Royce black saloons running about on country roads after midnight, and this one seems to have linked itself up with the one we want through somebody having thrown out what Marvel describes as 'a bloody rag.' We'll get details when he arrives here."

"Allday," Wadden explained. "I had a talk with him, after you left me at Wymering's place. He owned up to coming to search for letters, and lost his self-control enough to blast and damn his wife. Because he thought we'd arrested Marvel as the murderer—you see?"

"Well, what's the new bee?" Wadden snapped, after waiting vainly for an explanation of his inspector's brooding reflectiveness.

"You see, Chief, there are those burned boxes and their unknown contents," Head explained indirectly. "Not films, apparently, but something else. And Allday, you say, owned up to having come to look for letters. But was it only letters? Did he hope we'd taken the body away, locked up the place, and left, giving him a chance to make certain that he hadn't missed, say, one box? He may have hoped to find fifteen last night instead of fourteen—his wife has taken on a room at the Duke of York because, as she told me, she won't stay another day in what was and ought to be her home. Supposing two people, a man and a woman, went away in that car, and Allday is the third of the party at The Grey House last night?"

"A jealous husband doesn't invite his friends to his murder party, as a rule," Wadden objected—but he too grew thoughtful over it.

"She has very definitely left him, and won't go back—by what she told me. It sounded an absolutely final decision."

"Well, there's only one conclusion to be drawn from that. Add it to that letter we both read, the one she wrote to Wymering, and you can only draw the one conclusion. She believes him guilty."

"I'm not sure. I wouldn't put it past him. But if that's so—if we accept Marvel's story, what about the other two people and the fourteen boxes in the scullery? They don't fit, for me."

"I can't make them fit, either," Head confessed. "I can't make anything fit, up to the present. If Marvel locates that car for us, it will take us a big step along our way—and meanwhile Allday, you say, believes we've got Marvel as the murderer?"

"I nearly undeceived him, but not quite. He thinks now that I meant to frighten him by suggesting Marvel might not be the man."

"It would pay, I think, to convince him and everyone else that Marvel is the man," Head said. "None of those three is going to fear trouble for himself, if we do that."

"I think not. A certain Mr. Bismarck Marvel seems to be a moving spirit as far as that's concerned. Brother of our Marvel."

"He didn't mention a Mussolini Marvel or a Columbus Marvel by any chance, did he?" Wadden asked caustically.

But, without replying, Head reached for the telephone receiver, put it to his ear, and listened for the police clerk's voice.

"Head speaking, Potter," he announced. "I want you to look up the Caravanserai Club in the London telephone directory, get through, and ask for Mr. Martin Colston"—he spelt the name out. "If he's not in the club, get the secretary, and get Colston's address out of him—explain who wants it, in connection with the murder of Bernard Wymering. In fact, beginning with the Caravanserai Club where he should be known, use any means you like to get in touch with Martin Colston, and tell him, if you get him, that Inspector Head wants to talk to him on the telephone at one-thirty to-day. Is that clear?"

Wadden nodded approval as Head replaced the receiver. "So you've got a line on Martin," he observed, "and you're getting busy?"

"Bizzy is down Bedford way," Head responded. "Now, before thinking about a sudden lunch, I'm going to talk to Mrs. Allday again."

"Wait, man, wait!" Wadden urged testily. "Did you ever hear of a great detective stopping to think about eating when he was hot on the job? And I haven't got all your views on the case docketed, yet."

"Well, what do you want?" Head stopped to inquire. "And I can afford to think about food, not being a great detective."

"Sez he, modestly. But why worry Mrs. Allday any more? She'll go dumb if you ask her anything about the husband she's left."

"I'm not going to ask her about him. What I want is to get some information as to Wymering's life and habits—light on what was in those fourteen boxes, if possible. Miss Hastings knows practically nothing about the man, but Mrs. Allday is in a different position."

"Because I'm not a great detective, but only an average provincial rozzer. I banked on finding out everything at his cottage, and it wasn't there. Consequently, I will apply to Mrs. Allday."

"Does it strike you as possible that she had something to do with Wymering's death? She might try to cast suspicion on her husband by leaving him like that. You've only her word for what she did—"

"I've more," Head interposed. "I've Miss Hastings' word that Mrs. Allday was at her own home at the time Wymering must have been killed. If necessary, I can check them both to some extent by Jane Parkes, the servant at Allday's Farm. One of the servants, that is—I expect they keep more than one, since there's a baby at the place."

"And now— Oh, well, get along! The gong will go for lunch at the Duke of York in about ten minutes, and the woman may be hungry."

Head went out and across to the hotel. His inquiry for Mrs. Allday resulted in a wait of five minutes or so, after which one of the maids conducted him to a door on the first floor, which she opened to announce—"Inspector Head, madam." He entered one of the best bedrooms of the hotel, and Mrs. Allday came forward from the window, keeping her back to the light—as he noted.

"I'm sorry, but I didn't engage a sitting-room, Mr. Head," she opened on him. "I have no idea, yet, as to where I shall stay or what I shall do. Won't you sit down? That armchair, if you will."

She had fully recovered poise, he saw, and, as he complied by seating himself, she drew forward another chair and placed it so that, almost directly facing him, she kept her back to the light.

"All you know of the man who was killed last night," he answered with blunt directness. "I relied on finding all I wanted in his cottage, but it told me very little. So I come to you again."

"Concerning Bernard's life," she said reflectively. "Yes. So that you can punish whoever killed him. Is that it?"

He shook his head. "I'd rather not use that word," he said. "It is not a personal matter, to me—I am not commissioned to 'punish' anyone. My business is justice between man and man, and the preservation of law by elimination of the lawless—even if it be only for fourteen days at a time. I must keep myself impersonal over it."

"About Bernard Wymering, Mrs. Allday," he reminded her with a slight smile. "Forgive me, but time is valuable."

"Yes—I'm sorry," she said, and evidently meant it. "You want—let me see! Born in Egypt, only son of one of the magnates of the cotton exchange in Alexandria—only child, I should say. To my certain knowledge, no near relatives in England. I think you will find, when his will comes to light, that he has left all his property to me—that is, unless he made a later will. And he was a comparatively wealthy man, I know. But I don't want the property. In losing him, I lose everything that made life worth while."

"No. She goes—has already gone—to my unmarried sister, who wished to take her at first. You see, I anticipate—notoriety, I may as well call it. That would be bad for the child."

"I don't know—no, I don't know. And—may I remind you, Mr. Head?—a wife cannot be asked to give evidence against her husband."

"Which brings us back to Wymering," he said, "and he is the object of this second inquisition of mine. Can you give me his address?"

"No. Sometimes he stayed at one hotel, and sometimes at another. He had no settled address in this country, and I always wrote to him at his club, the Caravanserai. He was staying at the Imperial in Russell Square until he came to The Grey House on Monday."

"Thanks, that may be important," he said. "And Martin Colston—do you know if he stayed there too, by any chance?"

She started visibly at his casual mention of the name. "How did you know—who told you of him?" she asked, rather fearfully.

"I have heard of him from two quarters, so far," he answered. "Do you mind telling me in what relation he stood to Wymering?"

"They were friends—very close friends. Martin was a fluent Arabic scholar, and Bernard knew Arabic as well as he knew his own language. They both knew the Levant and Egypt, better than they knew this country, probably, and spent a lot of their time out there together. Mr. Head"—her tone changed as a thought occurred to her—"did you—did you find any letters that mentioned Martin?"

"One letter," he answered gravely. "I am afraid I can't let you have it yet, though it will probably be returned to you eventually."

She was in the wrong in every way, he knew, having deserted her husband in what might prove his hour of greatest need, and in having let her love stray to another man—and yet he could not avoid feeling sympathy for her, perhaps because Allday had repelled him at sight.

"I think I can promise that," he told her, but dared make it no more than a doubtful half-assurance. For, if Allday should come to trial, that letter might serve as evidence of motive, especially since Allday had owned to wanting to search The Grey House for letters. "Meanwhile, had Wymering any profession or occupation?"

"He had been called to the bar," she answered, "but told me he had never had a brief in his life. He loved travel, and hardly ever spent a winter in England. The last two, he went abroad. And we planned last night—only last night!—we were to have travelled together, he and I. Starting to-day. And now—nothing!"

"Mrs. Allday"—Head spoke prosaically, in a manner designed to rouse her from the thought of Wymering's death and the difference it made to her own outlook—"what was it that he kept in the safe in that room on the left of the big entrance hall?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. Something he always kept with him, but he would never tell me what it was. He had the safe brought to the cottage because of it, and when I asked him, he laughed and said he'd always wanted to make a name for himself, and now he had done it. People would be forced to recognise him, and his name would be known all over the world. And as soon as he had got it accepted, I was to be first to know, but till then he wouldn't tell even me. And I wondered—was that why—why he was killed last night? Was it something somebody else wanted, an invention—something—" She broke off with an expression of perplexity, and looked at Head as if she thought he might hold the key to the riddle. "But—but you ask me," she said eventually. "He wouldn't tell anyone."

"Did he ever speak of cinematograph films—or was he interested in them, to your knowledge?" he asked.

"I never heard him speak of them!"—she hesitated—"I always called him a wild man. He—he made reservations, and then again he would be utterly frank. He hinted at things in his life in the East, never anything I could take hold on and define, but—as if there were secrets, or a secret. Nothing wrong, or despicable, but—I can't quite explain. Unless—one thing he said last night. 'I must protect you from some things.' Yes, that was it. 'I must protect you from some things.' And though I asked him, he would not explain."

"No, it was not that. Nothing to do with him—it was not in connection with him at all, but while we were talking about travelling together after I had gone away with him. I don't know what he meant. Almost as if he feared some enemy, I thought, but that was only my supposition. For he was not the sort of man to make enemies, and so far as I know he had none. His was not the sort of life that makes enemies, either of men or women."

"Only on my account. She's—not old-fashioned, but puritanical in some ways. She quite approved when I told her I was going to leave my husband, but would never approve of my going off with another man. There was jealousy in it, to a certain extent. Sheila has rather a lonely life, and counts me her principal friend. If—if all that we planned last night had come true, Bernard and I, she would have had to give up the friendship. You couldn't call her Bernard's enemy."

"Neglect," she answered frankly. "Not cruelty in the ordinary sense, but—five years and more in which he has used my money to further his own aims, and apart from that I might not have been there. Ice cold to me—I knew, within a week of our wedding, that I was no more than a prop to hold up the place his people had held for so many generations, and nothing to him, personally. A curious situation, and I have determined to end it, rather than waste the rest of my life."

"Until last night, when he told me Bernard had been killed by that man whom Vane caught, I would have said he knew nothing—said that he didn't know Bernard and I were anything to each other. But then, if the murderer had not been caught there, I might have thought that—" She broke off. Then—"I don't know. Not jealous in the ordinary sense, for jealousy implies love, and he had none for me."

"Not at any time?" Seeing her as she faced him, he found the statement hard to believe: she was a very attractive woman.

"Not at any time," she answered evenly. "Mr. Head, I disliked you very much, at first, but now I know you are trying to do something I want done—make certain that whoever killed Bernard Wymering shall suffer for it. And I think you believe there is a mystery about his death—believe that the man Vane caught is not the real murderer. I want to help you to find that real one—I'll tell you anything you ask, quite freely, and do anything you ask, if it will help."

"One thing to begin with, then," he asked instantly. "Keep that idea of yours to yourself—about there being others involved in the crime, I mean. Keep it as secret as Wymering kept that possession of his that caused him to install a safe at The Grey House."

"And another thing. I want you to give evidence at the inquest as to the time you went to The Grey House last night, and the time you left it, and where and how you left him."

"Yes," she said. "Anything you ask. Only—keep back the letter you found, please. Can you promise me that?"

"And beyond that you can't see, of course." She stood up, and he too rose. "Where and when is the inquest?"

"In the Corn Hall here in Market Street, at three o'clock to-day. Your evidence will show simply that Wymering was alive and in no danger, to the best of your knowledge, at about ten o'clock last night. That's all I want from you, for to-day."

She considered it. "Only last night," she said, "and already—you have not been idle, Mr. Head."

"I see it as a case in which time is of the first importance," he told her. "That being so—" He broke off with a smile.

"I wish you success," she said. "If I can help toward it, let me. And I shall see you again at three o'clock."

Chapter X
Inquest

THE golden-haired, six-foot manageress of the Duke of York, known to the frequenters of the hotel as Little Nell, assured Head that she would be only too pleased to oblige him, and that within five minutes she would send across to the police station a lunch that would make him think she had abducted the chef from the Ritz, and something from the cellar as an aid to digestion. On that, he went back from his interview with Mrs. Allday, and sought his own room, avoiding Wadden's office for the time: he summoned Potter, the police clerk, with a view to getting news of Martin Colston.

"I got the Caravanserai Club, sir, and was told that Mr. Colston is at present out of town, but is calling in at about eleven to-morrow morning for letters. He left that message for inquirers."

"Then that's all we can do for the present, as far as he's concerned," Head concluded prosaically. "If you see a man from the Duke of York with a tray or something, guide him in here, please."

But there appeared two men with trays, under Potter's guidance, for Little Nell had done her best to fulfil her promise. One of them also brought a corkscrew, with which he performed on a bottle of Lafitte claret, and on that Head told Potter to ask Superintendent Wadden if he had a minute to spare. The Superintendent, arriving, gazed at the lunch occupying practically all the surface space of Head's desk, and then scrutinised the label of the bottle.

"Looks like nourishment, to me," he observed. "Rich uncle, or bribery and corruption?"

"It falls in the second category—Little Nell sent it over," Head admitted. "I asked if she could send me a spot of lunch over, to enable me to be here when Marvel arrives—though I didn't tell her the reason—and this is the result. If I ate all this lot I should be ill, and if I drank all there is in that bottle I should want to go to sleep for the afternoon—"

"Say no more," Wadden interposed. "Just let me use your 'phone to call my old woman up and tell her I shan't want a big dinner to-night, and I'm with you. I know that guzzle."

Some twenty minutes later, he lighted his pipe and admitted that meals of this sort were bad for the figure, though once in a while—

"And if Marvel caught that train, he's about due," Head observed. "I'd better see him in your room, I think. This desk looks rather unofficial, till someone comes and clears away the wreckage."

They moved into Wadden's office, where Head seated himself on the corner of the desk and smoked in silence for awhile.

"I'm merely wondering how far the case will take me," Head answered, "and giving my mind a rest from the details we've gleaned so far."

"I should say it will take you just as far as Allday's Farm on the old coach road, and you'll need a couple of men and a pair of handcuffs for the trip," Wadden remarked. "I didn't like that dark devil, Head, and it struck me he made just the poor sort of liar a man in his position with regard to the case would make. Thinks he's clear of suspicion because we've got what we think is the guilty man, and coughs up an excuse for prying that wouldn't deceive a cow. Out to see if he left any evidence last night, and nothing else."

"In that event, the other two," Head meditated aloud. "The case might take me a long way beyond the Crandon end of the old coach road, if Marvel is to be believed, as I still think he is."

The tinkle of the telephone prevented Wadden from replying. He took off the receiver, listened, replied—"Send him in here," and put the receiver back. Then he looked up at Head.

There was a certain self-consciousness about Napoleon's entry, for his disguise included not only a wash and shave and clean shirt, but a clean, if not new, suit as well. It was a check suit—a bookmaker's check suit, in fact, of which it would have needed not less than three of its kind to show the pattern properly; Mr. Marvel had been able to button only two of the vest buttons, and the belt of his trousers gave him a distinct waist. In place of his relic of a hat, he carried a cap in his hand, and his boots, the sole remaining item of his pristine outfit, hit the floor, as he advanced to stand before the desk, like intermittent thuddings of a pneumatic drill.

"Gosh!" Wadden ejaculated very softly as he gazed at this transmogrified Marvel. "Not only shaved, but damned near clean!"

"Y'see, sir," Napoleon explained sheepishly, "comin' 'ere'd be fair ruin f'r me—comin' 'ere on me own, like, I mean—if me pals knew I'd done it. An' Mr. 'Ead said there'd be good pay f'r findin' that car, an' I spotted this suit second 'and at Crandon—eight bob, they rooked me f'r it, an' the blinkin' tie was two bob—"

"And the shirt," Wadden interrupted incisively, "came off a line of washing somebody had hung out. Up to you, Head—take the witness and do what you like with him. I know what I'd do, though."

"Never mind your outfit, Marvel," Head said more gently. "We can arrange about that later, if you've really done any good about this car. What is this tale about your brother and the Bedford district?"

"Well, y'see, Mr. 'Ead, when you let me go arter it last night—'s'mornin', it was, reely, I managed to catch Joe Baggs afore he went off from—from where he was. An' fine weather like this, there's quite a lot of us reg'lars on the roads, so the grape vine's workin'."

"Grape vine telegraph, they call it—their means of communication." Wadden, older and more cognisant of tramps' ways, put in the explanation. "Carry on, Marvel. This Joe Baggs passed the word, eh?"

"Joe an' me brother Bizzy's great pals," Mr. Marvel explained. "I put it to Joe that I was in trouble, an' if we couldn't find that car it'd be worse trouble. I knowed it went up the hill last night, an' there's only one way if it went up, which is Crandon an' the London road. I spiels to Joe we gotter find it, an' he put it out all along the line. Don't take long, our way, to put the word along if there's danger or the pleece happen to be lookin' f'r someone."

"We don't miss a lot," Mr. Marvel half-reproved the scoffer. "Joe put through all I could tell 'im, an' after midnight there ain't a whole stack o' Rolls cars travellin' about, 'less it's near London. An' I knew that car'd travel like hell, an' knew Bizzy was down Bedford way, an' it might go through his district if it was makin' for London. An' sure enough it did, too. It'd be about half-past eleven 'smornin' when I got the word from Joe. Dizzy was sleepin' out, not far from Cardin'ton, which is Bedford way. In a bit o' wood—I reckon he'd scrabbled dead leaves to make a bed f'r hisself, under the trees, same as I do this weather. 'Longside a bridge, so's he'd have water f'r cookin', I reckon. Along comes a car an' stops on the bridge, an' Joe goes up a tree sudden, in case it was pleece lookin' f'r him. But it wasn't. A chap chucks somethin' out over the bridge, an' the car goes on—but Bizzy'd got the number, on account of it bein' easy to remember. It was a Y an' a O, an' a seven an' three fives. An' when all's quiet, Bizzy gets a stick an' fishes the bundle outer the water to see what was in it, an' there wasn't nothin'. It was just rag, all bloody, an' no good at all."

"That didn't come along the grape vine," Mr. Marvel admitted. "Just rag, he sez, an' all bloody, which was why they wanted to dump it, 'e reckoned. But thass the car, I reckon."

"YO 7555." Head read off the number he had pencilled on Wadden's blotting pad. "We'll check up that number, Marvel, and see what we make of it. This sounds much too quick to be true, to me."

"Thass on account o' your not knowin' the grape vine workin', Mr. 'Ead," Mr. Marvel said apologetically. "Y'see, there's more of us on the road, summer time like this, than you'd think, an' we all work in together, the reg'lar ones. Specially now things is tightened up agin us—pleece on the watch f'r us everywhere, an' if a chap so much as lifts a chicking there's a huroosh as if he'd broke into a bank. We gotter stick together, us reg'lars, an' up to September, when the nights begin to get cold, it's easy to pass the word anywhere."

"Well, we'll check it up," Head promised. "Meanwhile, Marvel, you will give evidence at the inquest—have you had a meal yet?"

"Nossuh. There warn't time f'r that, if I was to ketch the train an' get here as you said. Reckon I mustn't eat too much, else me trousers ain't goin' to stand the strain. But I could do with a bit."

Head took him along to the charge room, where Sergeant Wells presided for the time, and handed him over.

"Give him a good feed," he instructed, "and have him taken to the Corn Hall in time for the inquest, under escort."

"You're not going to get hurt," Head told him. "But we're not losing sight of you, for the present, and if we trace that car, all I promised you is coming true. You'll be well fed and well lodged for as long as we want you, so don't worry about it."

With which rather limited assurance he went back to his own room, whence, by this time, all signs of his own and Wadden's meal had been cleared away. Putting through a trunk call, he asked for identification of a Rolls Royce car, registered as YO 7555, with the name and address of the owner and where the car was normally garaged.

"If there is any difficulty about this," he added, "will you please inform Detective-Inspector Byrne, giving him the particulars as I have given them, and telling him that the inquiry is put through by Detective-Inspector Head of Westingborough."

For YO, he knew, was London registry, and Byrne, his cousin, had been useful in more than one case that had involved London inquiries. And, if Napoleon had got that number correctly, and had also told a true tale of the happenings of the preceding night, it appeared that one or more of the three who had done Wymering to death would be found in London. Then at a thought he left his room, and sought Mr. Marvel, who was busy in an otherwise empty cell with a plate of cold beef and suitable accessories. The tramp looked up, and swallowed a mouthful hastily and audibly, to permit of speech.

"About that rag you mentioned, Marvel," Head said. "I want it. Is there any means of getting it here?"

"That being quite out of the question," Head observed rather pensively, "how are we going to get hold of that rag?"

"D'jer mean you ain't goin' to let me go outer here?" Mr. Marvel asked, and, turning pale, laid down his knife and fork.

"Not only that," Head told him. "After the inquest this afternoon, you are going to be formally arrested and charged with murder—hold up, man!" For Mr. Marvel swayed as he sat and appeared in danger of complete collapse. "You're not going to get hurt, if the tale you told is true. You're going to be comfortable here, well fed and looked after, and the real murderers are going to be so sure they have got away with it that I hope to have them here in place of you, very soon. And quite possibly, if your brother Bismarck hears you are in trouble of that sort, he will be able to produce that rag as an aid to getting you out again—if he knows it's useful for that."

Mr. Marvel looked miserably at his half-finished meal. "I might git 'ung, f'r all I can tell," he moaned.

"No, you can't. You can have writing materials in here, and if you write the letter I'll see it posted for you, at once."

"If your story is true, you have nothing to fear. You will be arrested and charged this afternoon, and brought before a magistrate and remanded to-morrow—you're used to that, I know."

"Orright, Mr. 'Ead. I reckon Bizzy'll know where that rag is, an' I'll scribe 'im a line to pack it an' send it on—to save me from bein' 'ung." He took up his knife and fork again. "An' in case I do get 'ung, I reckon I better polish off this grub first."

Head moved toward the door of the cell, but Mr. Marvel recalled him before he had gone out.

"If ye don't mind, sir"—it was an apologetic request—"you said, if I found that car, it was a pound to all them as was on the job an' a fiver for the one as found it. Else, I couldn't of got the grape vine workin' like I did. An' now me pals'll be askin' what about it—an' me in 'ere can't cough up, like."

"When you write to your brother, put in a line to tell him the money is safe as soon as the car is located," Head told him. "I'll see that everything is paid, including the ten shillings you paid for your suit. Marvel, did you lift that shirt off a washing line?"

Mr. Marvel cut himself a huge mouthful of beef, and poised it on his fork as he looked up to answer.

"Strictly 'twixt you an' me, Mr. 'Ead, an' no witnesses present to 'ear what I'm a saying, I did. Me own was disgraceful, y'see."

"In that case, I'll see that a new shirt is bought you, and this one taken back after it has been washed. You'll give the address to which this shirt is to be sent, and the cost of the new one will come out of your reward for finding the car, if we find it."

So far as Westingborough was concerned, the death of Bernard Wymering was an event to provoke one query, and one only, from most of those who heard about it. "And who was Bernard Wymering?" was the query, which nobody seemed able to answer. A stranger, who spent a small part of his time at an old cottage situated somewhere on Condor Hill—this much filtered through from Mrs. Cotton's cronies—and therefore of no interest to ordinary residents.

But the few morbid-minded men and women who formed an audience for the inquest in the Corn Hall that Wednesday afternoon had their reward, since, after Mrs. Cotton had identified the body as that of the man who had employed her for the past two years, Mrs. Allday, called as witness, gave her address as the Duke of York Hotel, Westingborough. It was not more than five years since the beautiful Miss Stopford had—in the view of the gossips—thrown herself away by marrying Jack Allday, and now, by giving that as her address, she proclaimed publicly that she had left him. Well, well!

Then, with Mrs. Allday testifying that she had gone to Wymering's house by the back way the evening before, and stayed alone in the house with him till about ten o'clock, the gossips blessed the perspicacity that had led them to attend this inquest, and almost hummed with joy. When the coroner elicited from her that she had both gone to The Grey House and returned home by a footpath through the meadows, and that she had not gone near the road at all, they saw clear evidence that Jack Allday had turned her out from the farm, having discovered the intrigue, and that her new address was a matter of necessity rather than of choice. Here was a first-class scandal, full-blown in a night, so to speak.

The coroner, not being concerned with the moral aspects of the case, bade her stand down after ascertaining that she had left Wymering alive, alone, and well, in the entrance hall of The Grey House at ten o'clock or a few minutes earlier. Constable Lynton James Vane, following her, described how he had had his attention attracted by the barking of a dog, and had discovered and taken into custody one Napoleon Marvel, who had bloodstains on him which were evidently due to contact with the murdered man, and who had had in his hand a very sharp table knife, with which the wound in Wymering's throat might have been inflicted. Vane told all his tale, up to the arrival of Superintendent Wadden with his party from Westingborough, and was in turn bidden stand down.

Doctor Bennett, following, deposed that the cause of death was the severance of the carotid artery, and stated that the knife produced as the one which Napoleon Marvel had had in his hand at the time he was discovered by Vane might have been used to inflict the wound. He was not prepared to say definitely that it had been used for the purpose, but it was capable of being used to inflict such a wound. Under instructions from Wadden, he said nothing about the torture marks, which were in any case unconnected with the cause of the man's death. He agreed that, since the body had not been cold when Vane had found it, the murder must have been committed after ten o'clock, though how long after he was not prepared to say.

Then he stood down, and Napoleon Marvel, shaking and terrified, told his story of two men and a woman all in white, with knives in their hands, who had frightened him into a room in which an invisible dog had been barking fiercely. He described how he had got the knife out of his bundle as defence against either the dog or the three mysterious assailants who had determined on killing him before he bolted into the house and slammed the door, and who might burst in on him at any moment to put an end to him. He told how, discovering a body on the floor by touching against it, he had been so terrified that he had dropped the knife, and in groping for it had stained himself with the dead man's blood, which had got on the knife too. And, here in sober daylight, among credible people and things, he told the tale very badly, for it needed no intuition at all to show him that neither the coroner nor any member of his jury believed a word of it—and no wonder, for Mr. Marvel himself could scarcely believe it, now.

The coroner took him in hand, elicited from him something of his past record, a tale of 'chickings,' shirts, and other petty pilferings with their punishments, and then gave him a gruelling on his story of events at The Grey House. And, by the time that cross-examination came to an end, what with the darkness, the non-existent dog, and Mr. Marvel's insistence that the only one of the three assailants whose face he saw at all clearly was "a black man," the story was mere matter for ridicule. Mr. Marvel went back to his seat between two big police constables, and, in the opinion of everyone there but Superintendent Wadden and Inspector Head, The Grey House Murder case was as good as finished, for this romancing murderer had been taken red-handed, and the knife with which he had done the deed had been produced to clinch the case against him. Also, one had only to look at him as he sat there, a shivering villain already in custody, to perceive guilt written all over him.

The coroner summed up, recounting the evidence briefly, until he came to the story Mr. Marvel had told. Then he descended to comment.

"Members of the jury, you have heard this preposterous recital with, I do not doubt, similar feelings to my own. I am compelled to admit that this man Marvel has an imaginative gift which, if he were of a literary turn of mind, might have brought him fame and fortune. You have heard that he was taken by Constable Vane—whose single-handed capture of such a one, I may remark, is deserving of the highest commendation—and that at the time his hands and arms were daubed with the blood of the murdered man. You have seen the knife which Marvel admits is his property, an ordinary table knife, but with a razorlike edge, and in the opinion of Doctor Bennett a knife with which the deed might have been done. Moreover, you have seen on that knife stains which are indubitably caused by the blood of the murdered man—and Marvel had that knife in his hand when he was taken.

"Three men, he tells you—or rather, two men and a woman—suddenly appeared while he was looking at the house, and drove him in by threats of killing, and each of those three had a knife in his or her hand. One was a black man, and he can tell you nothing about the other two, except that one of them was a woman dressed in white. He retreated from those three towards the jaws of a savage dog which was barking inside the house, but which made no attempt to bite in addition to barking at him. He asks you to believe that he shut himself into the house with that dog, rather than face his three ghostly attackers—you note that they did not attempt to get into the house to fulfil their threat of killing him, but, once he was in there, vanished—for Constable Vane saw nothing of them when he reached the spot, apparently not ten minutes after Marvel had slammed the door.

"If you, members of the jury, can credit such a tale as this, then your credulity goes a long way farther than mine. Marvel himself admits a record which, as you have heard, involves constant contact with the police. Constant, that is, in the sense that the man is far more often in trouble than out of it. It is not for me to outline my belief as to the facts of this crime, for this is not a criminal court, but an inquiry into the way in which Bernard Wymering came by his death. I think you have heard enough, in the course of the evidence, to form a fairly good idea as to how the unfortunate man was killed, and, I may add, as to who killed him.

"You may retire, if you feel it necessary, to consider your verdict, and in returning that verdict remember that it is not final on any point but that of how and by whom Bernard Wymering was killed."

With such a plain invitation, the jury saw no need to retire, but after a brief, whispered consultation among themselves, returned a verdict of wilful murder against Napoleon Marvel, who, seated between the two large constables, sagged visibly as he heard his condemnation, since not even Head's assurance of ultimate justification availed to comfort him now. Outside the Corn Hall, formally charged in accordance with the verdict by Superintendent Wadden, he made no reply, and had to be half-supported back to his cell by his escort.

Meanwhile, as the rather thin audience of the inquest dispersed, the gossips noted that Jack Allday rose up from a seat at the back of the hall, and, making no attempt to approach his wife, went out. Since she was an object of greater interest, and Marvel of greater interest than either, nobody noted the direction in which Allday went after leaving the hall. And within an hour Westingborough was humming over the prospects of a local divorce case, and troubling very little about the murder, which meant—they said—merely swift trial and punishment of a worthless character, a tramp who would be better out of the way since he had developed homicidal qualities.

Meanwhile Wadden, invading Head's room at the police station with no ceremony at all, faced his inspector grimly.

"I don't. But if you do, how are you going to get him out of this shemozzle? He's in it up to the neck, now."

"Not quite up to the neck, chief," Head dissented. "As for getting him out, a clever counsel—Calloway, for instance, and he'd love to do—it could rip holes in the charge with no trouble at all, given the evidence of Allday's attempt at searching the house this morning, Vane's evidence of the Rolls charging up the hill, and a few other things I have in mind. Chief, I'm gambling on laying hands on the right man, or men and women, long before Marvel can come to trial. Meanwhile it costs very little to keep him here, and you couldn't call his reputation one that will suffer from this to any extent."

"You're going for Allday, then?" Wadden asked, in far less minatory fashion. "I mean, going to let him damn himself in some way while he thinks we're happy over having caught Marvel?"

"Honestly, I don't know," Head answered. "Remember, Wymering was alive, seventeen hours ago—there hasn't been time for the dust to settle, yet, and I can't see clearly the line I am to follow—yes, what is it, Wells?" For the sergeant, with a preliminary knock, had entered the room and stood waiting.

"Well, let him, and see that the letter is posted. It's probably to hurry up something I want, but whatever it is, let it go as soon as he's written it. And treat the man decently—go and get him his writing materials, for a start. That's all, Wells."

Wadden shook his head. "Not a word. It ought to have been through before this, and on either your desk or mine."

"Umph!" And Head took off his telephone receiver, asked for a line from the man at the switchboard, and dialled "Trunks."

Chapter XI
Mainly Marital

SINCE, on returning to the Duke of York hotel, Mrs. Allday had ordered tea in her room, she anticipated no more than a maid with a tray when she called "Come in!" in response to a knock. But, as the door opened, the maid announced—"Mr. Allday, madam," and at that his wife faced about from the dressing table.

For some seconds the trio of husband, wife, and maid formed a tableau, the man just inside the room, the wife in an attitude of resentful forbidding, and the maid a picture of bewilderment. Since when had a husband been forbidden entrance to his wife's room, her expression asked as she stood out in the corridor.

Mrs. Allday broke the stillness of the tableau by pointing past her husband toward the corridor, a gesture of determination.

"I think I said not in here," she insisted. "Down in the lounge, if you wish to see me—anywhere, except in my room."

She made no reply, but merely gazed straight at him with her extended index finger still pointing out at the corridor behind him.

"It is you who are making it," she retorted coldly. "Go down, and wait, if you must see me. I insist—not here."

After a momentary hesitation he withdrew, and Mrs. Allday called to the maid before he closed the door—

"When Mr. Head called this morning, you didn't bring him straight up to this room, did you?" Mrs. Allday asked.

"I make no exception whatever," Mrs. Allday interrupted. "I want you and the whole world to know that Mr. Allday is no more to me than any other man, and the sooner it is known the better. That's all, Nellie—you're not to blame, girl, but"—she almost laughed, then—"I'm advertising the fact that I have left him, as plainly as I can. If he should call again, send up and let me know—but I don't think he will call again. Now I'll go down and see him."

She went down to the lounge, which, since it wanted yet half an hour of bar-opening time, was empty except for herself and her husband. As she faced him in one of the window bays, imperious, cold, and yet more attractive than he had ever realised before, his gaze told her his errand before he spoke. He knew his own folly, now.

"But—honestly, last night, I thought it was because of that man—Wymering. That you could leave me when he no longer exists—" He broke off in a way that indicated his inability to realise it.

"Not that man, nor any other man, but yourself," she told him evenly and quietly. "Five years—can you look back over five years?"

"Taken my youth and starved it." Still she restrained herself to quiet statement. Taken my money and used it. Left me to go my own way while you went yours. I saw the years pass, saw life—the best of it—slipping from me, and knew that Allday's Farm, the mere material possession, meant far more to you than I did. There may have been other women—I think there were other women, for it is impossible that you, a young man, should live as you made me live."

"Till you met Wymering," he pointed out, stung to the retort by the bitter quietness of her accusation—for it was no less.

"As you made me live," she repeated, letting his gibe pass. "I accepted you, married you—I was young and silly, and thought your love was a real thing. It never occurred to me that an old house and its contents meant more to you than I did. Wymering—any man! Why, you fool, couldn't you see that you made life impossible for me? If you had given only unity of spirit, some sign that I meant more to you than the money I brought, this would never have been. Now, I have no pity for you. No pity for you!"

"Then you think that?" His swarthy, gipsy-like face darkened as he fired out the question angrily—perhaps with a tinge of fear.

"It is not for me to give evidence against you, even to yourself. But—where were you last night, when he was killed? Not in the house, to my certain knowledge, for I looked into your room when I came in, and heard you come in, long after. Don't think that I condemn you—I have no right to condemn anyone, and a mere police inspector has taught me a lesson to-day about the difference between justice and punishment. A mere police inspector, but a man worth respect as well. Now tell me, Jack—what do you want—why are you here?" She put the question with sudden harshness.

"What do I want?" he echoed. "Brenda, I want you to come back, to stop this—this folly while there is still time to stop it. Your coming here for the day can be taken as a necessity for the inquest, but if you stay the night as well, there is only one interpretation."

"I intend that interpretation," she answered. "I told the maid who took you up to my room that she is to make no difference between you and any other man, announce you as she would announce any other man, and wait for me to say where I will see you. Is that plain?"

So far, he had retained full self-control, probably through her example of quiet restraint. Now, he lost it.

With that as a final, acrid thrust she turned away and left him staring, voiceless, while she walked the length of the lounge and disappeared beyond its curtained doorway. Then he started forward, as if to run after her, but checked his pace to a mere saunter after half a dozen steps, since Little Nell, the manageress, appeared where Brenda had vanished. Approaching her, he agreed that it was a fine day and good weather for the harvest, and then went out, walking heavily and slowly, to the car in which he had driven into Westingborough for the inquest. He drove back in it to his farm, and Constable Parkin, on guard at The Grey House, made a note of the time at which the car passed on its ascent of Condor Hill.

Head, with the telephone receiver to his ear, looked up. "He may not be in at all, at this time of day," he explained, "but if he is, and if he got my message—Hullo! Yes, Terry, it's Jerry speaking."

"So-ho!" said the voice in the receiver. "And how's the crop this year? Stands Westingborough where it did?"

"Terry, I asked for a message to be put through to you about a car," Head remonstrated. "YO 7555, a Rolls Royce black saloon."

"'T'sall right, Jerry," Detective-Inspector Terence Byrne answered, "except that there's no such car tacked on to that number. It simply doesn't exist. You're barking up the wrong horse, this time."

"The right one, that is, to fit YO 7555. I'll tell you, Jerry. A Bugatti, two-seater, owned by—got a piece of paper handy?"

"Put it down, and tell me to spell what you don't get. Owned—bought second hand, that is, three weeks ago, and now owned—by Mohamed Tewfik Afifi. Now I'll spell it for you."

He spelt the three words of the name, and Head inscribed them on the blotting pad before him. Wadden looked on interestedly, hearing only the one end of the conversation, and let his eyebrows go up as he saw the name appear on the pad.

"Ah! You wurzel wallopers have to come to us if you want to know anything. Mohamed is secretary to—catch hold of something, Jerry!—secretary to El Hag Khalil Said el Matari. Now I'll spell that out, and you can call it back to me for checking."

He spelt it out, and Wadden shook his head gravely as he watched the name grow on the pad and heard Head call the letters back one by one. But Head was smiling, rather grimly, as he wrote.

"All down, Terry. Now who is Mohamed, and who is El Hag and all the rest of him? Where and what, and how?"

"El Hag and all the rest of him, Jerry, has the best suite at the Carshalton, which means big money. He's been there about a month, and his last address was Alexandria. Speaks no English at all. Mohamed is fluent English, and interprets for him."

"Good! Now there should be a tall, slim young woman in the party. What about her—have you got her name?"

"No woman, either slim or fat, tall or short. They're celibates, Jerry—at least, there's nothing to prove the contrary. El Hag and the rest appears to be simply rolling in money, and Mohamed buys a car when he feels like it, I gather. Highly respected, even at the Carshalton, and you've got to have a lot to be respected there."

"We'll take that as read. Terry, I'm catching the six twenty-two up, and if you've any regard for me you'll meet it. I've just remembered an appointment with a member of the Caravanserai Club at eleven to-morrow morning. Do you know that club?"

"Do I know that club! All the members hail from the wide, open spaces, and they keep the worst whisky in London. Six twenty-two, I think you said. I'll look up the time it arrives and meet it. No, miss, we don't want another three minutes. So long, Jerry."

"There's a perfectly good clock on the wall, and you've over an hour before you need start," Wadden told him. "Is either of those two you wrote on the pad a black man, by any chance?"

"I shouldn't be surprised if both were, by Marvel's standards," Head answered. "Egyptians, probably—or something near it."

"I don't. I mean I believe I've found the small sports car that one of the gang used when he came spying round The Grey House last week, before Wymering got here. I believe so, but I'm not sure."

"The number Marvel's brother gives as on that Rolls is given me as belonging to a Bugatti, which is essentially a small sports car, and this particular Bugatti, number YO 7555, was bought three weeks ago by"—he looked at his blotting pad—"Mohamed Tewfik Afifi."

"It looks to me as if they'd slipped up badly," Wadden observed pensively. "And yet—putting the Bugatti number plate on the Rolls for last night's trip—I've got to think it out. They'd reason that as long as they got away, and we didn't spot the number at this end—I see. They didn't want the Rolls recognised at the other end by its number plates, for some reason. And the fact of changing it like that—Head, you've got your men. What about putting an end to the misery of that poor devil Marvel, now? All we need is to say that we don't intend to offer any evidence against him when he comes up to-morrow morning, and he can go back to his chicken-stealing in peace."

"Can he?" Head objected. "What evidence have I that those two men are in any way connected with the crime, so far? What evidence have I that the number plates were changed, as you suggest? And if I let Marvel go, tell the world that I haven't got the man who killed Wymering, don't you think Mohamed and El Hag etcetera will go to ground as fast as they can? That is, if they're the guilty ones, for I don't know that they are, yet. Byrne has got enough to give me a line, and I'm following it, but is it the line I want?"

"There's Allday, of course, and his wife believes he did it," Wadden half-surmised. "He might be the third man of the party—no, though, for if Marvel is right that third man was a woman."

"That I'm catching the six-twenty-two," Head answered calmly. "I think I shall be back to-morrow, but don't depend on me."

"I won't," Wadden promised sourly. "And yet"—he brightened at a thought—"you're not exactly the village idiot. Here's this murder not yet twenty-four hours old, and you've got one man charged with it, you're off after two more, and if they clear themselves you'll still be able to go out after Allday. Oh, yes, and you can scoop in Sheila Hastings as your white lady, and make a good bag."

The reporter on the staff of the Westingborough Sentinel and District Recorder, who "covered" the inquest on Bernard Wymering, wrote a full report of the proceedings for his own paper, and sent a curtailed version over the wire to the London agency for which he acted as representative in cases of minor importance. This agency work totted up a few extra pounds a year for him, and merely involved copying out reports which appeared in the Sentinel, for the most part. In this case, he reported that the man Marvel had told a fantastic and incredible story to account for his presence at The Grey House at the time of the murder, and gave no hint of the nature of that story.

Less than half an hour after he had sent off his wire, he was called to the telephone—rather to his disgust, since he wanted to get away early to take a girl out motor-cycling.

"That you, Potts?" he heard. "Yes? Well, it's Bletherby at this end. Bletherby—Universal chief sub. Yes, got it? All right. Now then, that story you wired in. What's the full of it?"

"Man, don't you realise this is the third week in July?" Bletherby's interruption had angry irritation in it. "We're simply howling for a good story, and you've cut this down to about three sticks. Absolutely nothing doing anywhere—we're reduced to feeding the public on League of Nations and Hore-Belisha's antics, and here you wire in stuff which looks like a wow and cut out all the meat. If that man told a fantastic story before they arrested him, what was the story?"

"It was a silly yarn," Potts explained rather sheepishly. "About being driven into the house by three men—no, two men and a woman, though—who rose up out of the darkness and threatened him with knives. But anyone could tell he was lying—"

"I don't CARE!" and this interruption was almost a shriek. "I don't care if he said the Archangel Gabriel came down and blew him into the house with his trumpet! We want stuff—it's not as if we had a decent murder and a couple of fire insurance cases running. This is the flat season, the damned silly season, and I want columns and columns to go with the breakfast bacon to-morrow morning. Here you've given us mysterious house on lonely road, murder at dead of night, alleged murderer gloating over corpse with the knife that did the deed in his hand and dripping with gore—and then you hold up on the prize lie of the year, with a woman in it, too! Gosh, man, can't you SEE what a story it'll make? Oh, for crying out loud! Look here, Potts, how long will it take you to put that story on the wire? Or can you dictate it if I—here, exchange, I want this line! Don't you dare interfere with it! What about it, Potts?"

"I've got a full transcript," Potts answered. "I'll type it on to message forms and let you have it in—in twenty minutes."

"Right! It's too late for the evening rags, anyhow. Put in all the frills, or give us enough lead to put them in ourselves. Give us all you can about the woman—Lord, a woman in it! A godsend!"

"I don't CARE! I don't care if it's—if it's blasphemy! Work it up for all you're worth—it's front page stuff at a time like this. And the dead man—Wymering? Know anything about him?"

"Not a thing," Potts confessed. "He used the house as a weekend cottage apparently, and hailed from London—"

"There you are! Mysterious figure arousing curiosity of locality—lived alone at the place, didn't he?"

"Well, there you are! Work it up, man—work it up! Mysterious recluse, attacked at dead of night—dog gallantly defended its master, but in vain. The policeman heard the dog, didn't he?"

"Oh, does it matter? I don't care if the dog was on the roof with his tail between his legs! WE WANT SENSATION! Weigh it in, Potts, and spread yourself. You can't libel a dead man, and I don't see that tramp living long enough to sue for damages. Pile on all the agony there is—gosh, two men and a woman with knives in the dark! It's lovely—work it up! Take an hour over it, if you like. We work all night, here. What about pictures?"

"You can't get any in time for the morning, I'm afraid. You see, the house isn't on the main road over Condor Hill, but the old coach road, very little used since the new one was cut—"

"Oh, gosh, man! We'll feature the beauty spot and say the house is just round the corner. Can you get a photo of the tramp?"

"Well, you weigh in with his yarn, and put in everything. Go to it, Potts, and don't spare expense over this—we'll pay. It's your chance to-night, but I'll have one of our own men down there first thing in the morning, so make the best of the time you've got."

The headlines resulting from Potts' efforts varied from Ghastly Discovery By Intrepid Constable to Tramp's Incredible Story, and included Murder of Mysterious Recluse and Famous Beauty Spot Becomes Scene of Brutal Murder, as well as Tramp's Tale of Ghostly Assailants and Dog's Devotion To Murdered Master. For the dog played a large part in the story as Bletherby and his staff wrote it up: possibly they took advantage of the fact that it is as impossible to libel a dog as a dead man.

Chapter XII
Alibi for El Hag Khalil

THE tall, rather melancholy-looking man waiting at the barrier, and appearing far less like a detective than a well-dressed but unhappy poet, stepped forward a pace as Head delivered up his ticket, and then glanced round at the station clock behind him.

"Eight minutes late, Jerry," he said as Head paused beside him, "and I got here four minutes early. What was it—cow on the line?"

"If so, I didn't feel us hit her," Head responded. "How's business, Terry? Much work these days?"

"Just so much that I could do without acting as accessory to your cases, but I've nothing on hand for the evening. You look fagged."

"Do I? Then I mustn't feel it, yet. Come to think of it, I have had rather a day. Did you ever hear of a man named Wymering?"

"I did. Course bookmaker, Grand National, Welshed. About five feet high and eight feet round at the equator. Why?"

"Wrong one, Terry. My Wymering was found with his throat cut, still warm, about"—he looked up at the clock—"twenty-two and a half hours ago. And that car number appears to be in the case."

"I notice you don't say the car," Byrne observed sadly. "An easy number to remember, that, seven and three fives YO. What do you want first—a look at the car? Because, if you do, it's in the Carshalton garage, within shouting distance of Piccadilly Circus when it's quiet—which is never, or nearly so. But we'll go, if you like."

"The car comes second," Head dissented. "Terry, I want to know where El Hag etcetera and Mohamed Alfalfa or whatever you call him were last night, and it appears to me I ought to begin on that at once—if you know anybody I can begin on. Because if I leave it till to-morrow, it will be the night before last, and—"

"And you're not sure whether anyone in this city can remember as far back as two nights ago," Byrne interposed. "P'raps you're right. We'll go and interview Gibbins at the Carshalton, for a start."

"Somebody far more important than a mere manager. The head porter on the door, my lad, and my special friend—because he knows better than to be otherwise. Useful man, Gibbins. We'll take a taxi, and you can pay and put it down to expenses. This is your case."

He led the way to the taxi rank, directed the driver of the leading cab to the Carshalton, and seated himself beside Head. "If we draw blank with Gibbins, we'll get on to Alphonse," he observed. "It ought to be easy to get him, dinners being of the past and suppers still in the future. Alphonse knows everything, and nothing when he's paid to know just that. But not with me."

"Head waiter at the Carshalton, and my special friend—because he knows better than to be otherwise. Useful man, Alphonse."

Head made no rejoinder. They sat silent until the taxi had crossed Oxford Street, and then Byrne spoke again.

"Useful man, Barker," said Head, gravely. "I know Barker, the man in charge of the garage."

"Only occasionally," Byrne dissented with equal gravity. "I don't cultivate him as I do the other two. But what's the case, Jerry?"

Head had barely finished outlining it when the taxi drew up at the main entrance of the world-famous hotel, and a portly, box-cloth and gold lace official hastened forward to open and hold the door. Byrne gave him a cool little nod in response to his salute as Head paid off the taxi driver.

"Evening, Gibbins. We don't want a table in the grill, and you can see we're not dressed for anything else. Want a word with you."

He beckoned, and another individual as gorgeous as himself came forward. To that one he murmured a few words, and then turned to Byrne again with—"If you wouldn't mind coming this way, Mr. Byrne," at which both Byrne and Head followed him through the entrance, and into a stuffy, inconspicuous little room at the side of the vestibule.

"Would you or your friend like anything, sir?" Gibbins inquired solicitously, as he pulled chairs forward for his visitors.

"Thanks, if you'll order in the usual for me, and Mr. Head—this is my very good friend Gibbins, Head—Mr. Head will take one like it."

"He wouldn't do that," he said pensively, "for an earl. I don't know about a duke. But you see he may be a useful man."

Uncannily soon, Gibbins reappeared, accompanied by a page bearing a tray on which were three glasses containing amber liquid, and a soda siphon. Gibbins bade his guests say "When," handed each a glass, and raised his own with a respectful bow at Head.

"Very pleased indeed to make your acquaintance, Mr. Head," he said. "I've read quite a lot about you. Your very good health, sir."

"And yours, Mr. Byrne!" and Gibbins bowed again. "And now, in what way may I have the pleasure of affording you gentlemen my assistance?"

"Also, Mohamed Tewfik Alfalfa—Afifi, I mean. That's your fault, Head. The secretary bloke, Gibbins."

"We'll take the rest as read," Byrne interrupted ruthlessly. "Can you tell me where Hag and Alfalfa—to shorten 'em up a bit—where they were last night, say between nine and two o'clock?"

"The—er—Mr. Matari, as I always call him—he was at the Society of Antiquarians' dinner in the red room, sir, last night," Gibbins answered. "That would be from eight to twelve."

"Well, I can make sure. Alphonse can soon tell you who was in charge of the red room, and then you can—"

"Make a final check up on it. We'll come to that later. What about the other one, the secretary? Would he be at the dinner?"

"Well, if you want him, Mr. Byrne." Gibbins laid heavy emphasis on the first pronoun. "Shall I ask him to come here?"

"If you wouldn't mind. And—" As completion to the sentence, he laid his finger on his lips.

"Certainly, Mr. Byrne—certainly! I shouldn't make that mistake a second time, I assure you. I'll find Alphonse for you."

He went out. Byrne put his empty glass down on the only table in the room, at which Head finished his drink and followed suit.

"Eats out of my hand," Byrne remarked. "He made that mistake of wagging his chin once, and knows I could turf him out of his job here by merely wagging my chin in the manager's office—and that job, I'd say, is worth all of two thousand a year. Alphonse is different. If he gives you a chance, flatter him over something."

Alphonse proved a small man in full evening kit, with marvellous teeth revealed by an almost perpetual smile and hard grey eyes that, as Head saw at a glance, missed nothing. He shook hands warmly with Byrne, and extended a like enthusiasm to Head on being introduced.

"It is a pleasure to meet one so renowned," he observed in perfect, faintly French-accented English. "You will dine, gentlemen?"

"Much as we should appreciate it," Byrne told him, "we haven't the time to spare this evening, Alphonse. No—information."

"Ah! And who has been misbehaving himself, now?" Alphonse inquired, widening his smile a trifle.

"That is what we are trying to find out," Byrne said. "It appears to have been a gentleman in the country, and I think—I don't know, but I think—he may have tried to put it over a wealthy Egyptian you have staying here. Consequently, we're trying to trace the movements of—let me see—Matari is the name, isn't it, Head?"

"M'sieu' Matari," Alphonse remarked as Head nodded. "But he does not make many movements. Not to the country, that is."

"He was at the dinner in the red room, a private function," Alphonse answered. "After the dinner, he made a speech."

"M'sieu, all at the dinner understand French," said Alphonse, with a very wide smile indeed. "M'sieu Matari spoke in French."

Alphonse shook his head. "Non, m'sieu," he said. "M'sieu Afifi dines always in the suite, not in the public rooms like M'sieu Matari."

He left them. Gibbins looked in, saw that they were still there, and vanished again. Presently there arrived another waiter, bearing two more drinks. He removed the empty glasses and retired.

"Having had dinner, we can stand it," Byrne observed, squirting soda water into both glasses. "It's Gibbins' way of apologising for his error, and I've known worse apologies. Here's to crime." He swallowed the mixture and put the glass down.

"Merely that he's the cleverest faker of Egyptian antiquities in the business," Byrne answered. "Also very wealthy through it."

Then Alphonse returned, and inclined his head at each of the two callers in turn as he entered the room.

"M'sieu," he said to Byrne, "I find that M'sieu Afifi had dinner sent up to him at eight o'clock, to the suite."

"The dinner was sent up at eight, M'sieu Head," Alphonse repeated. "There is Yakub, the personal servant of M'sieu Matari, who would take it in, and if M'sieu Afifi were not there he would not order it, hein?"

"I questioned the man who took up the dinner, soup, cold chicken and salad, and water—M'sieu Afifi does not drink intoxicants, I find. Yakub, the personal servant, took the tray at the door of the suite. I have been most exact in my inquiries, M'sieu Byrne, knowing that you will have all particulars when you are inquiring."

"Always the servant takes the tray, and Afifi does not appear," Alphonse confirmed him. "It is every evening the same."

"Is that all you want, Head?" Byrne asked, "or do we get this Yakub and have a word with him on the subject?"

"It is the principal requisite of my position," Alphonse said, and smiled very widely again. "I am here some years, now, and M'sieu Byrne can tell you—Alphonse is not a fool."

"No," Byrne observed, "a fool wouldn't last long at his job. It looks as if Master Alfalfa might have been amusing himself somewhere last night while the man Yakub wolfed his chicken and cheese for him. Do we leave it for the evening, or do you want to carry on?"

He led the way, and Head pondered as they went. The fourteen tin boxes recurred to his mind, together with the phrase—"something of great value." If Matari were a forger of antiques, had he palmed off on Wymering substitutes for things of great value, and had Wymering in disgust burned the contents of those fourteen boxes? Further, had Matari had Wymering murdered to prevent discovery of the swindle he himself had perpetrated, and in that case had his agents burned the contents of the boxes, which might have betrayed their origin and so blazed a trail straight back to Matari? Yet again, was Matari implicated at all—was even Afifi implicated? The possibilities of the case appeared to increase with every gleam of light thrown on it.

Ten minutes' walk from the Carshalton entrance brought the pair to a fairly wide cul-de-sac in which the garage premises of the hotel were situated. A big, arched doorway, closed—if ever it were actually closed—by sliding doors gave access to the garage, and as the two men entered a blue-overalled being came forward.

"I don't want to take a car out," Byrne answered. "I want to see Mr. Barker, if he's about anywhere."

"Sorry, sir, Mr. Barker won't be here till the morning. Can I do anything for you?"

He went into the little, glass-sided office just within the doorway, where he apparently ran his finger down the columns of an account book. Then he emerged, and nodded cheerfully.

Conducted between rows of vehicles that testified to the opulence of such as chose to patronise the Carshalton, they paused as their guide pointed his finger at a small, grey car which appeared a veritable midget, standing as it did between a magnificent Rolls Royce and a gorgeously showy Isotta Fraschini saloon. Head recalled Mrs. Cotton's description of it as "a funny little car," and felt that she had been fully justified. There was hardly any body at all behind the bonnet: just enough to contain two leather cushions on the floor of the car, and, behind them, two bucket-seat backs, with, over the back axle, an altogether disproportionately large petrol tank.

Head stopped to look at the front number plate of the car, YO 7555 in aluminium lettering on black, and then went round to examine its fellow at the rear. Each was held in its place by two bolts, of which the heads showed on the fronts of the plates, and, feeling at the back of each plate, Head ascertained that the bolts were held by "wing nuts" in place of the ordinary hexagon or square nuts one would expect to find. There was a spring washer behind each nut, and the "wings" gave leverage enough to admit of unfastening and screwing up quite securely by hand, without the use of a spanner.

He returned to where Byrne stood waiting, and, faced toward the Bugatti, gazed at the car on each side of it, in turn. Then he started toward the Rolls Royce, on the left of the Bugatti as he faced it.

"Look here, Byrne," he said, and pointed at the front number plate of the Rolls. "Have you got a ruler on you, by any chance?"

He knelt before the car, reached up and took the steel tape, and pulled out enough to measure the exact distance between two holes in the number plate of the Rolls. Then he measured the distance between the two wing-nutted bolts that secured the Bugatti number plate.

"Eleven and four-fifths inches," he said softly. "I'll just have a look round at the back with the tape."

"Eleven and four-fifths again—interchangeable," he remarked. "And all four plates are the same size. Who owns this Rolls?" He turned to the mechanic to put the question.

"I dunno, sir—I'll have to look it up for you. We don't often get a thing like that Bugatti in here, so I know who owns it, but Rollses are plentiful with our sort of people."

They returned to the tiny office by the entrance, and again the man ran a finger down the pages of his book.

Another consultation of the book. Then—"No, sir, it was in after five o'clock yesterday afternoon, and hasn't been out since."

Still another study of the book was required, and the man emerged again. Went out at six, sir, last night. Came back in about ten this morning. No petrol or anything on the card."

"Well, sir, they're mostly all chauffeurs that drive in and out here, and there's a card to each car. Chap comes in, and we fill in particulars and give him a card. When he wants the car out, he hands in the card, and we book up petrol and everything on it, and then enter it in the book. When he comes back, he takes the card again. As soon as anyone's leaving the hotel, we get notified, and the chauffeur brings the card stamped as account paid before he can have the car out. And every time the car goes out is entered in the book."

"Well, no, I didn't see him. We're pretty busy just about that time, and we know he and his boss are just lousy with money. There was a lot of cars going in and out just then, and he said his tank was full and he wouldn't want anything, and tipped me a half-crown, so I didn't take any more notice. And of course I wasn't on this morning when he came back—that'd be Arthur's turn, about ten in the morning!"

"Oh, yes, he'll be here. But he'll be pretty busy—half the cars in the place want to get out about then."

"I must make a point of seeing Arthur," Head observed. "You're not given to talking about inquiries of this kind, I hope?"

"Don't break the rule in this case, under any circumstances." He produced two half-crowns and handed them over. "If you see this Arthur before I do, you haven't seen us. What's his other name?"

A shining Rolls Royce glided in through the doorway, and a lad appeared from nowhere to escort the chauffeur to his place and guide him as he backed in. Away off at the back of the garage another man in thigh boots and waterproof overalls was busy washing yet another Rolls on a square of stone paving equipped with stand-pipes and hose. Almost every second radiator in the place bore the neat RR plate.

"Well, whaddye think?" Byrne inquired as they left the garage behind. "Looks rather dusty for the Alfalfa bird, eh?"

"All I've actually got, so far, is that it isn't a bit dusty for Matari," Head answered. "I've no proof, yet, that his Rolls went out last night with the Bugatti number plates on it, and if it did get dusty on the roads it's been washed and polished since, as you could see. And how to connect it up with The Grey House between ten and eleven o'clock last night is more than I can see, yet. We can suspect anything we like, but only evidence counts when a case comes to trial."

Chapter XIII
Martin Colston

STANDING before the mirror in his hotel bedroom, Martin Colston surveyed himself after he had finished dressing. A pair of soft brown eyes looked back at him, but there was something queer about the eyebrows: he took a comb, and accentuated the parting in his hair, revealing the fact that, though on the surface it was black, the roots were a nice, chestnut brown. He grinned at his pleasantly ugly face, put down the comb, and turned away from the mirror.

It was still early: it was, in fact, about the time that Inspector Head set out from his hotel to interview Arthur Smith and Mr. Barker at the garage belonging to the Carshalton—but Colston, of course, knew nothing of the Inspector's movements, nor, at that time, cared what any police officer might be doing. He went down from his room, ascertained that there were no letters for him, bought a morning paper, and proceeded to the dining room for breakfast, all in quite leisurely fashion. Having given his order, he opened his paper.

Almost instantly his happy unconcern vanished. A scare-line extending over four columns—

first attracted his attention, and then the name—"Bernard Wymering" flared out at him from the text. He read the whole story, though, since news was scarce that morning, it included every word that Potts had been able to furnish and a good deal more as well: he read the tale told by that incredibly imaginative tramp, Mr. Napoleon Marvel, and then, careless of the fact that the bacon fat on the plate before him was beginning to congeal, beckoned to his waiter.

"Get me an A.B.C.," he ordered, "and you might ask for my bill at the desk at the same time."

There was a certain grave urgency in his manner which caused the waiter to hurry, but, when the man brought the time table and informed Colston that the bill would be along in five minutes, the egg-and-bacon plate was empty, as was the coffee cup, and the table napkin lay crumpled beside the greasy plate. Opening the time table and turning to Westingborough, Colston found that there was an express at 10.5 a.m., which, as he found when he consulted his watch, gave him about three-quarters of an hour to pack and get to the station.

He snatched up his bill when the waiter brought it, went to the desk and paid, and then hared up to his room. Being a methodical sort and used to a suitcase rather than a permanent-wardrobe type of life, he packed in a quarter of an hour, and three minutes after finishing was in a taxi with his immediate belongings, headed for the Caravanserai Club. There he picked up one letter, and gave instructions for any others that might arrive to be forwarded to Westingborough, poste restante; after that, having kept his taxi waiting, he made for the terminus and boarded the 10.5 just before ten o'clock. By the time the train went out, he had read his letter and pocketed it again. Also he had read the account of Bernard Wymering's death in two more newspapers he had obtained, but had learned no more than from the one he had read at breakfast. The "View from Condor Hill" given in two of the three papers did not interest him, for he knew that The Grey House was nowhere near that view.

By half-past one he was in Westingborough police station charge room, where Sergeant Wells informed him that Superintendent Wadden was out at lunch, probably gone home for it, Inspector Head was not available and might not return till the morrow, and nobody else on the premises was in a position to discuss or give information of any kind about the murder at The Grey House.

"Oh, the devil!" Colston exclaimed impatiently. "When do you think I shall be able to see your Superintendent, then?"

"He should be back between two and two-thirty," Wells answered cautiously. "That is, unless he has some outside business to delay him. Generally he's back from lunch by two-thirty."

"I see. Look here, sergeant—I suppose you read the papers this morning—the tale that tramp accused of the murder told, I mean?"

"Well, that story's true—a thousand pounds to a penny, it's true, and the man who told it is absolutely innocent."

Colston gave it. "Now is there a good hotel here where I could get a meal, and stay at if necessary?" he asked in turn.

"There's the Duke of York across the road—you can see it as you go out from here," Wells told him. "Can I take it that you will be there for the next hour or two, in case Superintendent Wadden would like to see you about The Grey House case?"

"You can assume just that," Colston assured him, "and in all probability I shall be here again looking for him before he gets after me."

"Very good, sir." And Wells, with the name before him, put his pen down again. "I'll inform the Superintendent when he comes in."

Colston went out, discerned the Duke of York as the imperturbable sergeant had promised he should, and, crossing the street, entered and found the dining room doorway, where he stood, suitcase in hand, looking for a vacant table: but there was none; a big auction sale in the town had caused an influx of visitors for the day. Four tables had only one chair at each occupied, however, and Colston entered the room, deciding he would eat at one of these before going again in quest of the police Superintendent.

He decided against sharing the table at which sat a rather dingy-looking, clean-shaven young man, who, although Colston did not know it, was Percy Butters, an exceedingly live member of the Universal agency staff whom Bletherby had had sent down to cover The Grey House case and get as many more columns of text as he could out of it. Butters, Colston noted as he advanced into the room, appeared very interested in one of the window bays, and, glancing in that direction, Colston observed a woman seated alone at a table in the bay. He made straight for that table instantly, and she looked up as he faced her.

He pulled out the chair facing her and seated himself. "And I to see you," he answered. "But—here?" The query was significant.

"After—you mean... that?" he asked, and knew he need not explain the question. But she shook her head.

"Just breaking point," she said. "For the rest, I don't know, and I don't care, much. Who told you about Bernard?"

Glancing round, he saw that they were practically immune from being overheard. Other tables in the room had been drawn well back from this one, as if Mrs. Allday had desired and perhaps paid for separateness. He noted, too, that fully half the occupants of the big room were eyeing him and his companion interestedly.

"Nobody. But Detective-Inspector Head knows it—I've had two interviews with him—or rather I ought to say he insisted on interviewing me twice, and eventually asked me to keep my belief that Marvel is innocent to myself. I think they're using him as a sort of decoy, to make the one who really did kill Bernard feel quite safe."

"Not one, but three," Colston amended. "Marvel told the truth at the inquest, I feel certain. And now—I wonder. Will they be satisfied, or is it my turn next?"

A waiter stood beside him, and he looked up at the menu the man held out to him. "Yes," he said, "I'll take the lunch as it stands, and bring me a pint tankard of bitter. Oh, yes! Roast mutton, not cold meat and salad, and I don't want soup."

"Your turn next?" she asked as the man went away. "What on earth do you mean, Martin? Will who be satisfied?"

There was a note of alarm in her voice, and he smiled reassuringly. "It was just a thought—nothing in it," he said. "Nothing I can tell you, that is. I'm so terribly sorry, Brenda—it was more because of you than anything else that I came down here as soon as I knew. All that this must mean to you. I wish I could help."

She managed a smile. "It's very sweet of you," she told him. "AII the more so because I'm quite alone now, and don't know where to go or what to do. You see—I expect Bernard told you some of it—I've got to the point where I had to leave Jack. It was—how can I express it, though? Moral and spiritual atrophy—I'd rather be a bad woman in the eyes of people like these round us than no woman at all. Bernard was going to take me away—we planned it all out, only an hour before he was killed. Then Jim Vane came to our house to telephone, after he'd caught Marvel, and it wakened me. I'd just got to sleep. After he'd gone, Jack came into my room and told me, sneered at me over it. I don't know what I said, but I do know my right arm and left shoulder have black bruises on them where he gripped me to fling me back on my bed before he slammed the door and went to his own room. I'd have been loyal to him if—if I'd meant half as much to him as his dog. I was nothing, when he'd got all the money he could out of me. Moral and spiritual atrophy—I had to go."

"Justifiably, obviously," Colston said. Inwardly, he was relieved over having got her to talk about herself, and abandon questioning over his query as to whether he were destined to go the way Wymering had already gone. It had been an incautious reflection, before her.

The waiter put down a plate before him and retired. Brenda Allday sat silent for a while, and then leaned across the table.

"No, the truth, please. You're not the sort to dye your hair for mere vanity's sake, I know. What was it that Bernard and you—?" She broke off, leaving the question incomplete.

"Not yet, Brenda," he said. "It's too long a story to tell here, in any case, and also I promised—but that's neither here nor there, now. I'll tell you the whole of it, some time—if only because of what Wymering would have wished, I'm not going to lose sight of you while I can be of use. So—never mind my hair."

He nodded. "Only for the present, though. You know, since I came down here last year with my sister and Ann Mannering—" He broke off without ending it. Brenda Allday smiled.

"I saw it all," she said. "Your little plan—Bernard was to have married your sister, and Ann—why didn't you marry Ann?"

"She found a—what do they call them? Yes, an affinity, while Wymering and I went East last winter. Ann was always too intense, and she liked shocking people, too. The letter she wrote to tell me she was already married must have given her great satisfaction, seeing that she was to have married me as soon as Wymering and I got back."

"I've exchanged heartbreak for relief. I believe I should have had a devil of a time. I've just thought of something. Do you know Wymering left you everything he had, and made you sole executor?"

"I witnessed the will. He had it drawn up before we went East at the beginning of last November, in case of accident, he said. And he told me there wasn't another soul on earth he cared about, and there are no near relatives, so you need have no scruple over taking it. He wasn't a poor man, either, by a long way."

"Martin"—she changed the subject abruptly—"you say you know the man Marvel is not the murderer. Does that mean you know who is?"

"No. I'd better not say any more about it, even to you, Brenda, until I've seen the police and found out how much they know."

He shook his head. "I can't tell you—can't tell you anything, yet. I must get in touch with the police, before saying or doing anything at all. The police here on the spot, I suppose. That Inspector Head—you say he's interviewed you twice, so I suppose he's in charge of the case. Which means he knows about you and Wymering—but how?"

"They found a letter. And before that, he made me tell him I was with Bernard the night he was killed—an hour before he was killed."

"I don't mean third degree, or anything of that sort. When you meet Inspector Head, you'll understand. A sort of intuition he has, as if he read one's mind and saw all the thoughts under the surface. A kind man with a big heart, I think, in reality, and his work can't alter it. I detested him at first, but not now."

"Umph! You know, Brenda, I can't help admiring the way you take this. I expected to find you broken down by it, and instead—"

She smiled faintly. "It's the relief of getting away from the farm, I think," she said, as he did not end his sentence. Something to do—something to occupy my thoughts, and added to that the inability to realise Bernard's death completely, as yet. I realised it far more yesterday. To-day it seems quite unreal, and your being here makes it even more so. I know, but I don't feel, for the present."

Colston finished the contents of his tankard and took out his cigarette case. The waiter hovered with an inquiry as to coffee: most of the tables in the room were deserted, now.

"Then I won't, either. Merely a bill, waiter—I haven't booked a room, yet. I suppose I can have one, though?"

"For two reasons," he answered. "You're the first—your possible need of somebody—like me, for instance—to advise or help. And the second—I may be able to help to put the right man or men behind bars in place of that miserable tramp."

There was a third reason, but he made no mention of it. Butters, one of the few persons remaining in the room—the auction sale which had brought most people in was due to begin at two-thirty, and they had gone to attend it—rose from his chair, and came into the window bay. He inclined his head at Brenda Allday.

"Mrs. Allday, I believe—excuse me, sir," he said. "I wonder if you'd be so good as to—you gave evidence at the inquest yesterday—"

"That is so, sir," Butters admitted. "Representing the Universal for this case, and it seems very difficult to get—"

"Mrs. Allday is not talking," Colston interrupted again. "Neither am I. We have nothing whatever to tell you."

"You win," he admitted. "I'm sorry. But if I could find out a thing or two about the murdered man—he's such a mystery."

"Well, go to the police in charge of the case," Colston advised. "It's no use coming to us. We are definitely not talking."

"For that—happenings like that, I'm glad you are here," Brenda said. "Having taken this step, I shall keep no friends here, I know. And yet, until I know what is going to happen to Jack—"

She left it incomplete. Colston glanced at the bill the waiter put down beside him, and put down the necessary silver. The man went off, and for a while the two at the table sat silent.

"Honestly, now," Colston asked at last, "do you believe he had a hand in Wymering's death?"

"I'm afraid I'm not in a position to tell you anything at all," Wells said discouragingly.

Butters went out and hired a car at Parhams' garage to take him to The Grey House. By keeping his ears open, he had gained an impression that the case had possibilities from the Allday angle, and decided that he ought to go and view the scene of the crime, to work up an atmosphere. It was, as he would have phrased it, a dud job, for Marvel had been formally charged before a magistrate that morning, and remanded for seven days after Superintendent Wadden had given evidence of arrest: had there been any other news worth the name, the agency would give such a case as this hardly any prominence. But Bletherby wanted something—anything!—to provide sensations.

"Bricks without straw," Butters told himself. "That's what it is, bricks without straw. Damn it, he's got all the story there is!"

Not very far from Cardington, a replica of Mr. Napoleon Marvel at his worst sat on the parapet of a hump-backed bridge, gazing alternately at a farm cart approaching along the road, and at the copse, divided from the road by a barbed-wire fence, which he faced as he sat. He knew from experience that the barbed wire demanded careful negotiation; he had been sitting here for twenty minutes, bestowing curses on cars, pedestrians, and now this blinkin' 'earse, as he termed it, all of which had prevented him from getting on with the job. For a large sign just beyond the barbed wire announced that trespassers would be prosecuted, and Mr. Bismarck Marvel knew quite well that any excuse for prosecuting him was valid. Meanwhile, brother Nap was languishing in captivity, and the letter which brother Bismarck had picked up at a certain low pub earlier that morning stated that the sanguinary rag, which Bismarck believed was still in the copse, would help to release him. Brotherly affection demanded that he take action to recover the rag: also, brother Nap had intimated in his letter that the quid reward for finding the car was still on offer.

"Thass right!" said Bismarck bitterly. "Keep on a fillin' up the ruddy road! I'll be here till dark, like this!"

For two cars in succession appeared, and, as they passed over the bridge, their occupants sized up the disreputable figure sitting there, and the young man in the little sports car remarked to his girl friend that tramps seemed to be on the increase, for this was the second one he had seen within a week. In that he was wrong, for he had seen the same tramp twice. Bismarck found the country villages hereabouts worth working, and, equally important, the beer of the district was good.

Eventually the farm cart passed, and now the road was clear in both directions. Bismarck got down from the parapet, crossed the road, and—sat down on the grass verge to let another car pass. Then he worked at the loose sand beneath the wire, where sundry rabbit holes had already made a depression, and, seeing that the road was still untenanted, wriggled through on his stomach and gained the shelter of an ancient oak in time to avoid observation by a constable on a bicycle. When the constable had passed from view, Bismarck felt very much relieved. The man was probably looking for him, and, when he had bivouacked here for the night, he had had to dispose of the feathers in darkness. He believed he had burned them all, but might have dropped a few, and that evidence, together with his own presence in the copse, might have meant anything up to three months if the policeman had spotted him. Old Nap, he reflected, wasn't 'arf puttin' him on a fizzer, but you couldn't stand by while your own brother got 'ung. Especially since Joe Baggs and some others knew that that brother had appealed to him, Bismarck, for aid. The shrunken fraternity of the road had its own code; members must stand by each other, pass on warnings and render assistance when called on; else, the police would soon round up so many that life for the rest would become impossible.

The copse was thick with undergrowth, but Bismarck knew his way to the spot where he had cooked his succulent fowl in his tin billy—poulet en casserole—two nights ago, and made his way to the tiny, foliage-hidden hollow without difficulty. The ash of the cooking fire he had made was covered with dead leaves, and all traces of his having slept there had been carefully erased before he left, for this was a good camping-place for summer nights, and he was wiser than to leave evidence of having used it. And the rag he had retrieved from the bed of the tiny stream that trickled feebly, at this time of year, under the hump-backed bridge, he found where he had placed it after a brief scrutiny which had convinced him that it was useless, securely hidden in a rotted cavity among the roots of an ancient elm.

He pulled the thing out; it was stained with mud from the bed of the stream, where the man in the big black car had thrown it. But now, with his brother's message in his mind, Bismarck was far more interested in other, reddish-brown stains in the fabric, big, blotchy discolorations. He shivered a little as he gazed at them, but not through cold: at that moment, he was visualising the deed that had put those stains on this crumpled thing.

From his coat pocket he produced a folded sheet of coarse brown paper, and a length of string, both of which he had obtained for this purpose at the pub he patronised. Unfolding the paper, he placed his find in it, and packed it as a moderately tidy parcel. And then he looked at the result of his labours and scratched his head.

"I dunno why he want it, or how he want it," he mused. "All I do know is, he gotter have it, an' you couldn't shove a thing like that into a post office. Yerss, old Nap's put me on a fizzer, for sure."

Using due precaution, he regained the road and retrieved the bundle of kit which he had left behind the parapet of the bridge while he went into the copse. Then, bearing both bundle and parcel, he turned northward and slouched on at tramp's pace. Not that he meant to cover many miles on foot, for he knew a steep hill which reduced two lorries out of three to crawling on low gear, before they reached the top. He could snooze in a ditch near the top of the hill till nightfall, and then jump a tailboard unsuspected by the driver: it would not be the first time he had used this means of transport.

It was a stinkin' nuisance, but old Nap was in the soup, and, Bismarck knew, old Nap would do as much for him.

Chapter XIV
Inference, But No More

SINCE Byrne had to attend to his own affairs in the morning, Head went alone to the Carshalton garage, where he made the acquaintance of Barker, who, on sight of the inspector's warrant card and mention of Byrne's name, expressed himself as anxious to oblige his visitor in any way he could. They retreated into the little glass box by the garage doorway: the garage itself presented a far different scene from that of the preceding evening; there were chauffeurs running up their engines to warm them, chauffeurs driving in, and chauffeurs driving out, and four men attending to the calls for petrol, oil, and water for radiators. Through the glazed sides of his retreat, Barker could survey all this activity, and his underlings came and went all the time, taking out cards, inscribing purchases on cards, and placing cards in a long index drawer.

"About this card system of yours, first," Head explained. "The man on duty last night gave me some idea, but it seems to me that the system might admit of substitution, or fraud of some kind."

Barker smiled as he shook his head. "Our people are not that sort," he said. "Nineteen out of twenty of the cars that come in here are chauffeur run, and the people who stay at the hotel are swindlers in thousands, if at all—big financial sharks, and that sort. They reckon a car about as much worth stealing as I should reckon a bicycle."

"We'll say somebody comes to the hotel, and wants to garage here," Barker explained. "He asks for the garage when he's booking in, of course. He's given a slip, and there's a line on it to tell the chauffeur that slip has to be handed in when he comes round to the garage, and of course we see that it is handed in. While he's putting the car away in its place, we make out a card for him with the number of the car on it, and when he goes out he takes that card with him. Whenever he wants the car out, he has to hand the card in here—he can't take the car till he's handed in the card. If he wants petrol, or a tyre repaired or replaced, or anything, it's booked to the number of the car, and entered on the card when he hands it in. If his employer is leaving, that card has to be stamped account paid, in the hotel office before he can have the car—they ring through here and tell us immediately notice is given at the desk, and there's the people leaving to-day, so far, up there." He pointed at a list of car numbers on a slip of paper pinned on the wall beside him.

"Must, or they wouldn't keep it up," Barker responded. "You see, sir, you're not dealing with small fry, when you come to the people who use the Carshalton. Car thieves take a big risk, and I doubt whether they make a hundred pounds on any car they try to get rid of after stealing it. The people at our hotel think in thousands, and most of 'em use cars that are unstealable. You couldn't get rid of a Rolls if you did steal it, nor a Hispano. Too distinctive."

"I see. One point, though. Your men, apparently, work on numbers. Car numbers, I mean. They don't trouble about the identity of the cars, as long as the numbers are right. Is that the case?"

"That is so, sir. Our little lot is changing all the time, here to-day and gone to-morrow, as you might say. If I or my men tried to memorise every car that comes in here, we'd go dotty. Chap comes in for a car, one of us takes his card. We see him out and check the number of the car and then enter up his time out. When he comes back, we enter up his time in, and in the meantime, if he's bought anything, it's been entered on the card ready to go on his boss's account. As he goes out of here after putting the car away, he takes his card from here, and he cannot have that car again without producing the card. We've always got one or the other till that account is paid at the office, and I assure you the system works all right."

For a minute or more Head sat silent, watching the working of the garage. He saw these cards handed in and taken out, and noted that the garage men consulted the cards in order to check the numbers of the cars to which they referred. And, far back inside the garage and standing by themselves, now, he saw the small Bugatti and the black Rolls-Royce saloon belonging to Matari and his secretary.

"You've got some reason for asking all this," Barker suggested at last. "What particular car are you interested in, might I ask?"

Barker went to the index drawer and sought among the cards there. Then he consulted his book, closed it, and looked up again.

"It's in," he said. "The card is out, so the car must be in. Belongs to a foreign gentleman, I see by the book."

"Yes," Head said, "it's in. It went out early in the evening of the day before yesterday, and came in again at about ten yesterday morning, I understand. Apparently it hasn't been out again since."

"Early in the evening." Barker reflected awhile. "That would be the day shift, most likely. Just half a second, sir."

He went out, and returned with a small man to whom Head took an instant dislike, a being whose closely-set eyes denoted low cunning, as did his whole demeanour. He regarded Head suspiciously.

"This gentleman is inquiring about a car," Barker informed the man for Head to hear. "Belonging to a foreign gentleman of the name of"—he consulted his book—"Afifi. Went out about six the night before last, I understand. Do you know anything about it? You'd be on duty then, the day before yesterday."

"I don't remember, Mr. Barker," the man answered. "There's a lot comin' an' goin' about that time, an' some one o' the others might have checked him out. I know the gentleman you mean."

"Arthur Smith, that is," Head suggested, and saw the gleam of surprise in the man's eyes. "Well, Smith, the car I'm inquiring about is one you'd probably remember, for there's nothing else like it in the whole garage. A small Bugatti, owner driven."

"I don't remember anything about it," Smith insisted, and the unnecessary emphasis he put into the statement convinced Head that he was lying. "About it goin' out, I mean."

"Then you were here yesterday morning when that car was brought back—driven back, I should say—by Mr. Afifi?"

"I s'pose I would be, but I don't remember that particular car comin' in. They're all comin' in an' goin' out, about this time."

It was then about ten o'clock, and Head had evidence of the truth of this statement before him. But practically all the cars in movement, out and in, were big, costly things: it appeared in the last degree unlikely that the little, rather aged Bugatti would either enter or leave the garage unnoticed among them.

The man nodded after a pause, probably realising that he would be tripped up if he lied about this. "Yes, I did," he answered.

"He came an' told me the number, an' I got him the card with that number on it. He took it an' went out."

"Has that car had any repairs or anything of the sort while it has been here, do you know?" Head persisted.

Barker opened his book while the man stood hesitant, and ran a finger down a page. "Wash and polish, day before yesterday, sir," he announced. "When he hands in the card again, I can tell who did it by the entry—by the handwriting on the card, that is."

"If you don't mind, Mr. Barker, we will now go and look at that car," Head suggested. "I think Smith had better come, too."

The three went out from the glazed enclosure to the main floor of the garage, and, as they crossed to where the Bugatti stood, Smith hung back as if reluctant to go yet fearful of refusing. The morning rush of departing chauffeurs was slackening, now, and not more than a third of the stalls in the garage were occupied.

"Oh, we're always fairly full," Barker answered, "but most of 'em are out, this time of day. Half-past nine to ten, six to seven, and when the theatres turn out are our busy hours, mainly."

They reached the stall in which the Bugatti fronted them, and Smith kept well in rear of the other two to avoid questioning, if possible: Head reflected that the man made a bad accomplice for any criminal. Then he turned his own attention to the Bugatti, and walked round it, followed by Barker, who was plainly interested in this inquiry, of the nature of which he had no inkling, as yet.

"Washed and polished, and then out from six in the evening till ten in the morning," Head remarked as he came back to face the radiator. "What do you think of it, Mr. Barker?"

"Looks like no run at all, to me," Barker said with decision. "Is there a petrol gauge—yes, on the tank, here. Full. Did you fill it up when you washed and polished it?" He turned to Smith with the query.

The man nodded assent. He would be compelled to enter up the petrol on the card, Head realised, and so could not lie, even if he wished, since it would be easy to check his statement.

"That's a big dose for an engine like this," Barker commented. He unfastened and lifted the bonnet, and then took out the dip-rod from the sump and examined it. "Up to the top notch," he announced.

"If that sump needs a quart of oil at a time," Barker answered, "it means that whoever took it out filled up again with both oil and petrol just before coming in here at ten o'clock yesterday morning. And if he used a whole tankful of petrol and had to get another supply of oil, he must have had the car washed and polished while it was out, because he couldn't run out all that petrol and oil and come back without even a speck of dust on the wheel rims."

Barker gave him a questioning look, as if to ascertain the ulterior meaning in the remark. But, without explaining it, Head went slowly toward the back of the Bugatti, between it and the black Rolls in the next stall. Apparently he was giving the Bugatti another examination, but, in reality, his attention was concentrated on the Rolls. Its back rims were thick with dust, and the joint of the folding grid at the back had picked up a head of rye-grass which still stuck between the two metal bars. The body, too, was dusty, and the grid streaked—as, Head knew, the long grass in the opening from the old coach road might have streaked it. Afifi, or whoever had taken out the Rolls, had been so sure of himself and the success of his venture that he had not even ordered a wash and polish for this car.

But, Head reflected, he already had one man under arrest and charged with the murder of Bernard Wymering. If he let that man go, and then for lack of utterly conclusive evidence had to let go those whom he believed had committed the murder, he would be giving himself a bad day to no purpose. So far, he had the doubtful evidence of a tramp that a black Rolls had stood in the opening from the coach road at the time that the murder had been committed: he had the number of the Bugatti, not of the Rolls, at second hand from another presumable tramp whom, up to the present, he had not even located, and he had the knowledge that it was possible to detach the number plates from the Bugatti and put them on the Rolls, concealing its legitimate plates. But he had no real proof that Afifi was even implicated in this substitution, nor even evidence that the Rolls standing here was the one Marvel said he had seen backed away from the coach road on the night of the murder. He had belief, but no evidence whatever, that the man Smith knew far more about the movements of these two cars, and the number plates they had borne during the past two days, than he had told or wished to tell. Altogether, inferences on which to work up a case, but nothing to connect Afifi or anyone else with The Grey House tragedy.

"Nothing," Head said, returning from his inspection. "I think I shall have to look elsewhere—this must be the wrong car."

The look of relief on Smith's face was clearly evident as he heard the reply. He made a very bad accomplice indeed.

"It's not the number, but the type of car," Head prevaricated, and saw that Smith looked almost happy at the statement. "A grey sports Bugatti—but there are plenty of them about. No, I'm afraid I must look elsewhere, Mr. Barker. Many thanks for giving up your time like this to no purpose, and all through my mistake."

"Not at all, sir—not at all. Sorry you've had all this trouble for nothing, and even now I've no idea what it's about."

"Oh, merely the theft of a car," Head lied cheerfully, "but I can find nothing to connect this one with the affair."

Above all, now, he wanted to convince Smith that he was no longer interested in the Bugatti, for, if the man had been concerned in the transfer of number plates from one car to another—and Head felt certain that he had—it was essential to prevent him from suspecting that the substitution had been detected, or that the Rolls had come under scrutiny of any kind. Barker dismissed Smith to his ordinary work with a word or two, and accompanied Head to the garage doorway.

"Well, sir, you might give Mr. Byrne my best respects when you see him again. I'm pleased to do anything I can for a friend of his."

"Strictly between ourselves, Mr. Barker," Head told him, "I may see you again. Also strictly between ourselves—this man Smith. Has he been employed here for any length of time?"

"I see. Well, I think that's all for the present, Mr. Barker, except that I'd rather you kept any impressions you may have to yourself till I see you again, if I do. And I feel fairly sure I shall."

They shook hands, and Head went off and, hailing a taxi, directed the driver to the Caravanserai Club, under the impression that Martin Colston was calling there for letters at eleven o'clock. But, at ten minutes to eleven, the hall porter informed him that Mr. Colston had called and gone again, over an hour ago.

"Gone where, do you know?" Head inquired, concealing his disappointment. But the hall porter shook his head with a smile.

"Not even on that, sir," the man said firmly but respectfully, as he scrutinised the card. "I'm sorry, but it's the rule of the club. If a gentleman happens to get himself into a scrape, and happens to be a member here, it's our business to protect him, not to help the police to catch him. Some of our members are hot stuff, I can tell you."

"Not having met Mr. Colston yet, I don't know whether he's hot stuff or cold stuff," Head persisted. "If I give you my word that he isn't in any scrape, and tell you that I'm looking for the man who killed his friend Bernard Wymering, will that make any difference?"

"But—but—" the hall porter stammered in his excitement—"I read all about that this morning. They've got the man!"

"Quite probably not the only man," Head admitted. "He has a brother, which perhaps you may not know."

"Well, well! The Forrest case—I never forgot that. Bless my soul! of course! That happened at Westingborough, too."

"Thanks," Head said drily. "That's good enough. And remember, you haven't told me anything."

"I mean I haven't told you anything either. About that tramp's brother, or anything of the sort. You might ruin the whole case, if you talked and it got into the papers by any chance."

He had judged his man rightly, a "fan" who would gloat over sharing a mystery with him. The hall porter's smile was a thing memorable.

"You can trust me, Mr. Head. My job is to see all, hear all, and never own that any woman's husband is in the club—or out of it. Not a word, sir—not a word. And the way you got that out of me is something I'm not going to forget in a hurry."

"Then perhaps you wouldn't mind letting a stranger see an A.B.C.," Head suggested. "To save me time—I haven't too much."

The time table was instantly forthcoming, and Head ascertained that—as he had anticipated—the first train worth catching for Westingborough did not leave till ten minutes to two; there was a slow train which would get him to his destination ten minutes earlier, but he might find a better use in London for the intervening hour than that of brooding over his case in the train.

"Thanks very much," he said, as he handed the volume back. "Now you haven't told me anything, and I haven't told you anything. Is it a deal?"

"You're a oner, you are, sir, if you don't mind my saying so. A regular oner! And mum's the word—I'm used to that, here."

As he went out, Head reflected that this man was safe as regards others than Marvel being connected with the murder at The Grey House. He was not quite so sure of Barker, and far less sure of Arthur Smith. Possibly he himself had been a trifle indiscreet.

Chapter XV
Films

WITHOUT appearing to regard his visitor too closely, Superintendent Wadden took minute stock of the man who was ushered into his office and announced as Mr. Colston. He noted the evidences of dyed hair and eyebrows, and also, judging by Colston's face and demeanour, decided that there had been purpose other than vanity in this alteration: it looked very much as if Colston had had cause to disguise himself up to a month or two ago, and now cared not who knew that he had used hair dye. Wadden decided that this was a man of fairly good position, and apparently of average honesty: further points would probably reveal themselves in course of conversation.

"Take a seat, Mr. Colston," he invited gravely, and, glancing again at the card that had been handed him, observed that it bore no address. "Mr. Martin Colston," he added, accenting the first name.

"A friend of the late Mr. Bernard Wymering, and also of a Mrs. Allday, resident near here," Wadden pursued, still with thoughtful gravity.

"I don't know where you get your information, but it is quite correct," Colston answered rather acidly. Inwardly, he was wondering how much more this fat man knew, rather than how he knew what he did.

"I conclude," Colston answered, rapidly beginning to dislike his interlocutor, "that the police are in charge of Wymering's cottage—The Grey House—at present. Certain things in that cottage are as much my property as his, and I should like permission to see if they are safe. Not to take anything away, but merely to assure myself."

Wadden shook his head. "I can assure you there are no films anywhere in The Grey House," he said. "We have given it a very thorough examination. You mean photographic films, I take it?"

Wadden laced his fingers together as his hands lay on his desk. "Cinema films, to the best of my knowledge, are wound on japanned metal spools, Mr. Colston," he said judicially, "and those spools are practically indestructible—as far as fire is concerned, that is. If there had been any films in the place, there would have been spools as well, surely. And not only are there no films, but no spools."

Colston's face took on an expression of alarm. "Fire?" he echoed. "Do you mean to say those films have been burnt, Superintendent?"

"Oh, the spools!" Colston sounded irritated over it. "Wymering was interested in a new type of spool, papier mâché or something of the sort, and they were wound on them. So, if they got burned, the spools would burn too. But do you mean to tell me—?" He broke off, then.

"Fourteen flat metal boxes in the scullery," Wadden said, "all opened, and all burnt out, and fourteen lids in a heap in the sink."

"So you see," Wadden pursued, "it's not much use going to The Grey House to look for films. And they were partly your property, you say?"

Through what seemed a long interval, Colston sat without replying. Then he stood up and shook his head decidedly.

"I'm afraid I can't tell you, Superintendent," he said slowly. "I shall have to think this out a bit, since—since they're gone."

"A man named Wymering has also gone," Wadden reminded him grimly. "If you withhold information which may bear on this murder, you render yourself an accessory after the fact, and liable to arrest in consequence. I feel that I ought to remind you of this."

"I can't help it," Colston said inflexibly. "I'm sorry, but—this is bigger than you think, superintendent. Not only that, but if I'm not careful, I may be the next to go—as Wymering went."

"You mean"—Wadden took no heed of the final statement—"you refuse to disclose your knowledge of these films—of the venture, as you call it, that resulted in their being taken?"

"First"—Colston went off at a tangent—"let me tell you that the tramp you arrested for the murder is no more guilty than I am."

"I don't know yet that you're not," Wadden pointed out. "This is not the place to pay visits for the sake of concealing things, Mr. Colston. Sit down again and back up what you've said so far. Obviously you know something that we don't, and it may help us."

"But I've given my word not to disclose what you ask," Colston explained. "Both Wymering and I promised. And that's how I know your tramp is innocent, and probably every word he told at the inquest is true. Your telling me about those films being burned is convincing."

He remained on his feet. Wadden, gazing up at him, assessed him again, this time as one whom no threat of arrest would move from his decision: the superintendent knew a stubborn man when he saw one.

"I wouldn't worry too much about that tramp, if I were you," he said quietly. "You didn't come here for his sake, did you?"

"Now sit down and spill the rest of the beans!" In his irritation Wadden blew a heavy gale, momentarily, a proceeding that startled Colston to some extent.

"Quite unnecessary. You put me in, and inside an hour you'll get an order from the Foreign Office to let me out. I'll tell you that much. Wymering and I both gave our word there, and until I get permission, I'm not going to tell you anything about those films, although they no longer exist. Now arrest me, if you feel like it."

"I don't," he said. "But just in case you're talking hot air, have you any evidence to back your fairy tale?"

Colston felt in his pocket and produced the letter he had picked up at the Caravanserai Club before leaving London. He took the official-looking slip out from its envelope, and handed it to Wadden.

In reply to your letter of the 15th. inst., I note that you have given a private view of your film to a representative of Travelogue Studios, an American distributing Company. I have to inform you that, although we have no control over the productions sponsored by American film companies, we should make the strongest possible representations to prevent any public exhibition of this film, which, if shown, might cause very grave disturbances, and even lead to war, in British Eastern possessions. As I have already informed you, no British producing or distributing company will be permitted to rent or contract for the exhibition of your film. At the same time I have to inform you that you and Mr. Bernard Wymering's suggestions as to compensation for the outlay you have incurred can under no circumstances be considered.

"Umm-m!" Wadden breathed, as he refolded the document and handed it back. "Obedient servant—genuine official production—Foreign Office paper, too. Going back to London, Mr. Colston?"

"Not yet awhile," Colston answered, and put the letter inside its envelope, which he restored to his pocket. "I've booked a room at that hotel across the road, and if you want me—for arrest, or anything else of the sort—you can find me there. But before I talk as you want me to talk, I've got to get permission. You realise that."

"Didn't it strike you that the name or nature of the film isn't even indicated in that letter?" Colston asked irritably.

Wadden blew gently, and rocked backward and forward as he stood, thinking over the situation and wishing Head were at hand to deal with this man. Then an idea occurred to him.

"You mean you'll feel the loss of him? This murder has a real personal significance for you, apart from those films?"

"Well," Wadden said thoughtfully, "you won't talk, and apparently I can't make you talk in any way that might be useful to us. We're holding that tramp on an inquest verdict, but Head—Inspector Head, and you may have heard of him somewhere—he said from the first that the tramp was telling the truth, and now we're only holding the man as a blind, to make the real murderers feel safe while we get busy. Head has got quite a few disconnected facts already, and he's busy linking 'em up—I expect him back some time this afternoon, unless he sends word that he's got on a line which means delay."

"Means," Wadden said frankly, "that with that letter you showed me I'm taking you at face value. To put that differently, you don't seem like a liar to me, and I don't care much whether you filmed the Shah of Persia in his bath or caught the Emperor of Abyssinia stealing coppers out of an automatic machine. You've got something either dirty or political, I can see, and I want to get you so that you want to talk to us—ache to talk to us, in fact. We want everything on it."

Wadden went to the hat stand in the corner and took down his uniform cap. "Means that I propose you take a look at the corpse of your friend," he said. "If that doesn't make you ache to start telling us everything, I'm a bad judge of character. Let's go."

Wadden blew a heavy gust. "Oh, to the infant class at the elementary school!" he retorted. "Where the hell do you think we keep corpses, except at the mortuary? I do hate fool questions."

"Y'see," Wadden explained as they went, "we're simple country rozzers down here. We can't take a microscope and build a case on one hair or the dust in the dead man's pocket, and whoever murdered Wymering didn't leave as much as a cigarette end for analysis, if we rule out that tramp and his knife. Head—it's his case, did I tell you?—he's made a bit of a reputation for himself, but he's made it by building up what I might call a structure of unassailable facts. You're holding back on facts, and I'm willing to bet my Sunday shirt they'll be useful to him. You've made it pretty plain that Wymering's death hits you fairly hard, as much by your manner as by what you said."

"Well, I'm taking you along to make it hit you harder," Wadden told him. "I want you to feel just as keen as Head does over this—to make you ache to spill all you know, Foreign Office or no Foreign Office, though I know quite well that they wouldn't want you to hold back on us if the case were put to them. Still, it'd take time for me to make representations, and it's Head's case, not mine, so if you see enough to convince you it's your business to talk, maybe you'll talk. I'd hate to get all tied up trying to convince a Government department that I want something out of them in a hurry. I've had that, over foot-and-mouth disease, and know what they are."

Trailing them, went Percy Butters, who had driven out to The Grey House, got his atmosphere by merely looking at it from the garden gate, since the man of weight prevented him from making any closer investigation, and had returned in time to see the pair leave the police station as he himself stood in the entrance to the Duke of York. He followed all the way to the main entrance of the local hospital, and, when Wadden and Colston had gone round to the mortuary, went in and had a few words with the porter on duty. Then he waited, patiently.

After a time his patience was rewarded by sight of the Superintendent and Colston returning. Wadden looked as impassive as ever, but the other man's face was grey, and in his eyes was a reminiscence of the horror that had shocked him when Wadden had drawn down the sheet which covered the body of his dead friend.

"Just half a sec., Mr. Wadden." Butters planted himself fairly in the way of the advancing pair. "I've been having a talk to the hall porter—Butters, you know, Universal Agency—and he told me I'd have to ask you when I told him I wanted a squint at the corpse. Could you let me tell him I've got your permission to view it?"

"I'd see you in hell, first, you ghoul!" Colston grated out before Wadden could answer the question.

"If I were you, Butters," Wadden added softly, "I'd go while the going's good, and I'll oppose any charge of assault you care to bring against my friend here, even if he half kills you."

Only slightly abashed at the reception accorded to his request, the pressman faded gently away, while the other two pursued their course toward the town. They had covered half the distance when Colston spoke: Wadden had scarcely uttered a word, apart from the remarks he had addressed to Butters, since they had set out.

"It's the first time I've heard the request, since the old custom of compelling a jury to view the body was discontinued," Wadden said.

"I don't see why he should. Our doctor wouldn't talk, and certainly nobody at the hospital would, about a thing like that. It would be too dangerous for them, if talk were traced back to them—as in a place like this it would be. No, I think he merely wants to get somebody to talk, and used that as an excuse, though a mighty bad one."

"Well," Colston said resolutely, "I'm going to get at a telephone, Superintendent, and get permission to talk. I don't know if it will help you, but I do know it won't do any harm, and after what you've just shown me, I don't rest till the devils who killed Wymering are brought to account. And devils is the right word—utter devils."

"I haven't the slightest idea," and there was that in Colston's manner of answering which went to show that he was speaking truth.

"Hot," he observed, "but a bit of exercise is good for the figure. That is, for anyone who happens to have any figure left."

"No," Colston said, after another silent hundred yards or so, pursuing his own line of thought. "I don't know who killed him, but I do know why he was killed, which is why I'm getting on a telephone."

"That, I think, is the full lay-out of the case as far as I have carried it," Head concluded the account he had been giving Byrne. "As you see, there's barely a scrap of real evidence, so far."

"I could show you two murderers, walking about to-day," Byrne observed thoughtfully. "We know they're murderers, but bringing a case against either of them—well! Unless something gives us a line of evidence, they'll simply go on walking about."

"But this case," Head pointed out, "isn't two days old, yet. I see no reason why I shouldn't get my men—and woman, probably."

"Afifi, for one. I don't know who the other one is, yet. Apparently not El Hag Matari, since he was certainly at a dinner here in London while Wymering was being killed."

"May be the moving spirit in it, though," Byrne observed. You say it's his Rolls, and seem sure it was used for the run."

"But quite possibly without his knowledge," Head said, and frowned over the indefiniteness of his case as he spoke. That man Arthur Smith, at the garage, knows something—I'm more than half convinced that Afifi got him to put the Bugatti number plates on the Rolls, but I don't want him going to Afifi to tell him the car is under suspicion in any way. And it is only suspicion. I can't say that car went to Wymering's place because of a coating of dust and a blade of grass."

"Well, it being the quiet season, with all the mugs gone to Cowes and elsewhere, and sharpening up their guns for the twelfth, I might," Byrne admitted. "That is, if you can justify borrowing him, and don't want him for too long a time. What is the idea?"

"Shadowing Afifi. You see, I don't know why Wymering was killed, or whether they contemplate wiping out anyone else, or if they mean to get out of the country, at the first opportunity—"

"Supposing they do?" Byrne interrupted. "If Wymering and his tin boxes were all they were after, it would be the best thing for them."

"I know, but it seems to me that if they had contemplated going, they would have gone instantly after putting an end to Wymering. This is the second day after the crime, Afifi is still where he was before committing it—and don't forget we have a man under arrest for the murder. They may think there's no reason for going."

"Finding what contacts he makes, and whether either he or Matari has any interest besides this obvious one of trade in antiques. I may be able to give a more definite line after seeing this man Colston. He's almost certainly at Westingborough now. For the present, I can't begin to see the motive for it. Revenge for—what? Blackmail pictures—if they were pictures, which Wadden doubts. Yet they were inflammable stuff, and it looks like burnt celluloid."

"Not having viewed the wreckage, I can't say," Byrne remarked. "You seem to have discarded all suspicion of your friend Allday, by the way, in spite of what you told me about his wife and Wymering."

"Well, that torturing you told me about—here's something to think over, Jerry. Marvel's three villains got there and tortured the key of the safe out of Wymering, got the boxes out and set fire to them, and bolted. Allday came along, cut Wymering's throat, and left—no, though, because in that case the three Marvel talked about wouldn't have wanted to push him into the house as a scapegoat for your man Vane to find. So that won't do. But I don't like dismissing Allday."

"Might—but I don't think I'm likely to tie him up to Afifi by putting a man on shadowing for you at this end. Then the woman. I think Marvel must have been mistaken about her."

"He was absolutely positive, Terry. Tall and slim, and dressed all in white. He wouldn't mistake a man in white flannels for a woman to the extent of describing her as he did."

"But he went as far as to suggest that she was dark-haired," Head countered. "And summer nights in the country are never quite dark."

"Still, I don't see a woman in it—unless, of course, it's a case of hell having no fury. Jerry, you sure are up a tree."

"And if I stay any longer, I shall miss that train, which might involve missing this man Colston. Can I leave it to you to get Afifi shadowed for a day or two?"

"It shall be done, Jerry. My regards to his bulkiness—Wadden, I mean. And if your Chief Constable decides to call in Scotland Yard to save you from hanging that tramp, I'll see if I can get the case. My brains added to yours ought to be able to solve it."

With a smile and a handshake Head went off to catch his train, and, after he had gone, Byrne thought awhile and then summoned one of his men, a keen youngster whom he had proved in work of the kind he wanted done now.

"Carshalton, Bill," he announced. "Here are the names. El Hag Khalil Said El Matari and Mohamed Tewfik Afifi, secretary and I believe also acting as chauffeur to the Hag, who speaks no English at all. All particulars as to hobbies, friends, enemies, hours they keep, where they go—everything, in fact. Especially Afifi."

"Part of the name, my lad—it's a male hag, this time. A report every evening until I take you off it, and interim reports during the day if justified. And you can get on to it just as soon as you like."

Chapter XVI
Films Explained

"WHAT sort of man is he?" Wadden, seated in his office, echoed the question Head had just put to him. "Well, I wanted to tell him he had a mule among his ancestors, but thought I'd better not. He knows something that might be more than useful to you, and won't talk."

"Man, I threatened him with arrest as an accessory after, for holding out on me, and did he bat an eyelid? Sir, he did not."

"What would you have done—turned him upside down and rattled him? He told me at the finish that he was going to get permission from the Foreign Office, and then he'd talk. But not before."

"Foreign Office, eh?" Head surmised plans of fortifications or something of the kind as contents of the metal boxes. Aerial photographs, perhaps. "Where is he now—do you know?"

"Over at the Duke of York—he said he'd booked a room there." He turned in his seat as a knock sounded on the door. "Yes, Wells?"

"A man giving his name as Skidmore wants to see you, sir, about the Wymering case," the sergeant explained. "Here's his card."

Wadden took the card and scrutinised it. "One of the family, apparently," he observed. "Skidmore, Skidmore, Skidmore, and Skidmore. It sounds like a busy time for car repairers. Do you want him, Head?"

"Since you say Colston is staying in the town, I may as well hear what this man has to tell you," Head answered.

"Right. Show him in here, Wells. He's after the body, most likely, but may be able to give us a line on the dead man."

A tall, middle-aged, evidently short-sighted man entered the room, and peered first at Wadden and then at Head. Wadden rose to his feet.

Mr. Skidmore seated himself heavily, with the air of one afflicted with sciatica. "About the late Mr. Bernard Wymering," he announced. "I saw the—er—the news of his unfortunate death in my newspaper. I am the—er—his—er—legal representative. I—er—presume I may make the—er—arrangements for the funeral?"

"Photographs from every possible angle," Head answered. "Yes. I see no reason why we should delay this gentleman in any way."

"The—er—the fact that I wish to see the deceased gentleman creditably interred," the solicitor answered, with a hint of resentment at the question. "In this locality—he left no instructions for the disposal of his remains, so I see no need to remove them."

"At the same time," Wadden persisted, "you have some documentary evidence that you do represent Mr. Wymering, I hope?"

"There is his will, of course," Skidmore said, very resentfully indeed. "Do you—er—wish to peruse that document, sir?"

"You may be irregular, for all I know," Wadden told him grimly. "It happens to be a case of murder, and we're taking no chances in any way whatever. This card of yours—I could have had one like it printed here, if I'd wanted. I'm not actually doubting your standing, sir," he added, as he noted the solicitor's heavy frown of displeasure, "but you, if anyone, ought to know the meaning of professional caution."

With a heavy sigh Skidmore opened the small attaché case he had brought with him, and extracted a pink-taped document which he handed over. Wadden untied the tape and unfolded the document, inside which was another bearing the inscription—"Schedule of the Estate of Bernard Walton Wymering, Esq.", of which Wadden took no heed, for the time. Unfolding the will itself, he noted that it was as brief as possible, leaving all of which the testator died possessed to Brenda Isabel Allday, resident at Allday's Farm, and that it had been executed less than nine months previously. He refolded it and handed both it and the schedule back to the solicitor, who replaced them in his case.

"That's enough for us," he said. "Have you any idea of the value of this estate, Mr. Skidmore?"

Wadden blew, very gently, and glanced up at Head, who, unseen by the solicitor, nodded gravely at his Chief.

"A comfortable little sum," Wadden observed. "With that, now, why did this Wymering go sky-hooting off in a way that led to his being killed. Have you any idea, Mr. Skidmore?"

He saw Head's frown of disapproval, and realised what he had implied by the query, too late. Skidmore looked surprised.

"I fail to understand you," he said. "I understand that the murderer had already been arrested, and that the crime was entirely unconnected with the deceased gentleman's personal affairs."

"Sky-hooting off to a lonely cottage where he was open to an attack of this kind, I mean," Wadden explained, hastening to repair his slip. "He might have rented a mansion and staff, with that amount of money."

"Well, you can make your arrangements, as far as we are concerned," Wadden told him. "We have no further interest in the corpse."

"Er—thank you. And now, might I inquire how best to find my way to a place called Allday's Farm—in this locality, I understand?"

"If you're looking for Mrs. Allday," Wadden said, "you'll find her at the Duke of York, the hotel a little way down toward the station on the other side of the street. She's staying there."

"Thank you, sir," and Skidmore rose, taking up his case. He left without further ceremony, apparently not too pleased with the reception he had experienced, and, when he had gone, Wadden grimaced at Head.

"Very nearly," Head confirmed him. "And she inherits everything. I could see over your shoulder as you looked at it."

"Everything," Wadden confirmed him. "Alters things a bit, doesn't it? From your point of view, I mean."

For he thought of Marvel's insistence on a woman all in white, and Mrs. Allday, in white too. Yet that theory was fantastic, on what he had already seen of Mrs. Allday. A third woman in white?

"I'll go and see if I can get an interview with this Colston," he said. "You say he regarded Wymering as his closest friend, so much so that he may be able to give me a definite line. I'm sick of theories!"

He found Colston with no difficulty at all, in the lounge of the Duke of York, and introduced himself. Since it was already well past six o'clock, the big room had a number of occupants, including the usual group at the bar, and among these last Head saw and recognised Percy Butters, who nodded affably at him.

"Glad you're back, Mr. Head. Your Superintendent doesn't like me overmuch. Can you give me any line on this Wymering affair?"

"The accused man was remanded after evidence of arrest," Head told him gravely. "You might do an article on the menace of tramps."

"By Gosh, that's an idea!" Butters said. "The darned case is a complete wash-out, and Bletherby's almost certain to recall me to-morrow. I'll push him in a column or two on it. Thanks very much."

Head made his way to where Colston sat alone, then—Little Nell had pointed him out from the doorway—and reflected that Mr. Marvel would have little love for the suggestion on which the pressman had seized so avidly. But Head himself had little love for tramps: they plagued the district during the summer months, when sleeping out in the woods was no hardship to their kind, and Napoleon, for one, was an old offender whose face was well known to Westingborough magistrates, while others of his type, adepts at theft of feathers and fur, took yearly toll until winter conditions drove them off the roads.

"Inspector Head—yes," Colston said. "I thought it would be you, when I saw that infernal newspaper man stop you on your way to me. Perish all newspaper men, say I, and especially that one."

"Well, shall we say the Foreign Office angle of this affair?" Head suggested, and watched his man to see how the query would be taken.

"So you've seen your Superintendent?" Colston observed. "Yes. I told him, though, that I wanted permission to talk, and I haven't got it yet. The man who might give it me won't be available till to-morrow. I rang through, but was too late to catch him."

"I don't mind, thanks." Colston looked slightly surprised as he assented. This, his expression implied, was not a police officer of the usual type. Head signed to a waiter and gave the order.

"You've been East quite a bit, I believe," he remarked casually, as the waiter went to procure the drinks.

"And there," Head pursued, "the sanctity of human life is far less regarded than in this country, I understand from hearsay."

Head watched the waiter put down the drinks on a little table which he dragged in between the chairs the two men occupied. He paid the waiter, took up his glass, and regarded its contents thoughtfully.

"It appears to me," he said, "that you haven't got our point of view fully. I've not had much to do with the Foreign Office, but I feel perfectly certain that no objection would be raised there to your communicating to us anything that might help us over Wymering's death."

"It would help, I think," Colston said, after a few seconds in which he sat reflecting. "And therefore, I suppose—but you see, Inspector, that fat Superintendent of yours talked about arresting me as an accessory. It's true he was friendly enough afterward, and when he showed me what he did I very nearly changed my mind about telling him everything. Very nearly, but not quite. Threats irritate me."

"Yours, too," and Colston imitated him. "Of course, you're right," he added as he put the glass down, "but there's one hell of a difference between being browbeaten in a police station and talked to reasonably, like this. Also, I've thought over what I saw at the mortuary, and if you want me to risk talking without permission—" He paused, as if still a little doubtful over it.

"I do," Head said. "Time is of value, I feel sure. Especially after learning certain things earlier to-day."

"Well, I'll tell you just what we did, as we did it, and I warn you I'm a bad hand at a tale of any kind. You can draw your own conclusions, and I'll tell you just what I know, and no more."

Head nodded, and, looking across in the direction of the bar, saw Butters eyeing them. He knew the pressman was aching to get within hearing distance of this stranger who knew Mrs. Allday.

"I wonder," Colston said by way of beginning, "if you ever heard of a place called Hadramut, down on the Persian Gulf?"

"No," Colston said, and smiled slightly. "I didn't think you had. Wymering and I got there—let me see! Nearly two years ago, and a pilgrim ship came in. That gave him the initial idea."

"Carrying Arab pilgrims for Mecca. The good Mohammedan makes the pilgrimage, and after he's been to Mecca he's entitled to call himself 'Haj' or 'Hag,' according to locality, and wear the green turban—"

"That's lower Egypt," Colston explained. "Arabic varies according to locality—a man from Aden would find it as difficult to understand an Alexandrine Arab as a northern Scot would find a Somersetshire man talking his dialect. Egyptian Arabic is very hard and guttural, and the Haj of the softer dialects becomes Hag. That's by the way, though it has a bearing on what we did."

"Wymering first suggested it, and I agreed—to go to Mecca. I believe Lawrence was the only man who ever went there without professing the Mohammedan faith and going as a pilgrim, and I believe, too, that Sir Richard Burton was the first Englishman who ever got there at all—and got away again. You see, discovery that you're not a pukka Mohammedan means death—nobody else has any business in Mecca."

"Went," Colston amended, "but not then—not when the pilgrim ship gave us the idea. We both speak Arabic—I do and Wymering did, poor chap—just as we speak English. He was born in Egypt, and I went to Cairo when I was seven and lived there for fifteen years—my father was in the education department. And the pilgrims to Mecca are a terribly mixed lot. You get Mohammedans from India and the farther East, and Syrians from the Lebanon, Egyptians, men from Tangier and Algiers and the Sahara—they all speak Arabic, but there are as many variations of Arabic as there are Mohammedan sects, if not more. We decided to pose as Egyptian Arabs—and we let that pilgrim steamer go."

"Oh, we went!" Colston assented, "but not then. We came up through the Red Sea and all the way up the canal and the coast to Alexandretta. And in the spring we came back to England, and Wymering had the camera made—a film camera—at a cost of over four hundred pounds. It took a minute film, smaller than the ordinary cine film that amateurs make, but perfect enough to stand any enlargement. It was a perfect instrument in miniature, and we both practised using it till we were good operators. We took the camera and about ten thousand feet of film, and turned ourselves into Syrian Arabs for landing at Beirout—Wymering got us all the necessary papers through Arab friends of his who could be trusted to keep their mouths shut."

"I'm coming to that. We went down the coast from Beirout, and down the canal. We got to Hadramut again, and waited till a pilgrim ship came in. Then we took passages, and in the end got to Mecca. The crowd on board was polyglot—all speaking Arabic, but I couldn't understand half of them to any extent, because the dialects vary so, and we two posing as Syrians and knowing nearly all there is to know about their ways of life were not suspected as other than we seemed to be. I'd had to dye my hair black, but Wymering was dark enough without any dyeing. And we did the pilgrimage and all the rites like good Mohammedans—and took our shots as we could. Any suspicion that we were doing it, of course, would have meant death at once, and probably horrible death at that, but there was no suspicion. Wymering fitted the camera in a holster under his arm—it was a wonderful tool, that camera, and while we were there we got perfect pictures of everything."

"Well, the Kaaba, the black stone, the holy carpet, and all the ceremonies that pilgrimage to Mecca involves. Inviolable secrets, from the Mohammedan point of view—it had never been photographed before, even in ordinary snapshots, and never will be again, I think. We got a complete cinematographic record, and brought it away."

"In Cairo—we went there"—Colston pursued—"Wymering determined to develop the film, after we'd changed ourselves back to Europeans. We did, and made a positive—you know, just as you print from ordinary photographic plates or films. Not only that, but off the tiny positive we made a full-sized film negative, and then took a positive off that and ran it through a projector to see what we had. And it was as nearly perfect as a film can be. At the time—I worked the projector for our private view—at the time, we believed nobody but ourselves knew what we had done or that such a thing as the film was in existence, but two nights later the camera was gone, together with the original small negative and positive. I don't know how they went. Wymering had them in a locked trunk in his room, and when he looked he had to unlock the trunk—he was going to take some shots of the mosque by the Citadel, interior views, which that camera would take as no other I've ever seen. The thief must have been an expert, for nothing seemed to have been disturbed, but the camera and those original films had gone, as I said. And we didn't report the loss, either, for we both knew we might be in for very bad trouble, if we stayed there."

"Don't you, though?" Colston asked rather derisively. "The film gave away the secret, holy places of Mohammedanism. It would destroy the sanctity of the green turban—the headgear that may only be worn by a Moslem who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca—if it were generally shown. We'd lost our original, but fortunately we still had the enlarged negative and positive, and we got out for Port Said the night after the originals had been stolen, and didn't count ourselves quite safe till we were on board an Orient liner and headed for home. We got home, and Wymering had two more positives made from our negative, and began to see what could be done with distributing companies. The first one we tried was wildly enthusiastic, at first, but suddenly they shut down on us and refused to give any explanation of their change of attitude—just didn't want it at any price. And the second—we gave a director of theirs a private view—told us what was wrong, and what we'd find wrong everywhere. To show that film would set the whole Mohammedan world in an uproar, and might even provoke a new Jehad—a religious war—against the infidels for having outraged their religion, made a cheap show of the things they regard as holy."

"Oh, we knew a film of the kind would be a bit contentious," Colston assented, "but the excitement of getting it appealed to both of us. I didn't realise, and I don't think Wymering realised either, how big the outcry would be. It was on his third attempt at interesting a distributing company that the Foreign Office got wind of it, and warned us that no English-owned company would be permitted to contract to show it. On that, I said we ought to be satisfied with having done the pilgrimage and got the thing, but he was absolutely mulish over it. He was like that—opposition always hardened him in pursuit of whatever he was after. There was an American director over here, and Wymering gave him a private view—I'd fallen out, seeing that the thing was taking on a political aspect, but hadn't taken any steps to dissociate myself from the project, beyond telling him that I wouldn't do anything more toward getting it shown. That was why I got a letter from the Foreign Office only this morning, telling me that they'd make representations to prevent exhibition if any American firm tried to take it up. And the man who wrote that letter told me personally that it hadn't merely an international significance, but went farther—it was racially dangerous, and might cause an upheaval all over the East. And I gave him my word to say nothing of its existence to anyone. He was going to get hold of Wymering, put the whole case to him, and tell him that it could never be shown, but Wymering came down here, and now he's dead. And I think you know, now, why he's dead."

"I believe I do," Head said thoughtfully. "One point, Mr. Colston. You say you took three complete positives, altogether. Fourteen boxes of film were destroyed at The Grey House. What about the other two?"

"Imperfect—we scrapped them," Colston explained. "Wymering was going to get those two reels reprinted from the negative. And now—"

"And now"—Head repeated in the pause—"nothing remains except the burned-out boxes. Which means there are no copies left, eh?"

"All that's left," Colston said soberly, "is my right to wear a green turban and call myself Haj or Hag, if I feel like it. And I don't. It doesn't interest me."

Chapter XVI
Butters is Useful

FOR awhile, the two men sat silent, and Percy Butters, still standing by the bar, eyed them morosely from time to time.

"According to that tramp's tale, two men and a woman, concerned in one of the foulest murders ever committed."

"Yes," Head agreed thoughtfully. "By what you tell me, though, he brought it on himself. Have you any idea who they are?"

"Not the slightest. I'm not so sure he did bring it all on himself. I'm perfectly certain, if it were all because of the film—if they had killed him for what they consider religious motives—there wouldn't have been a woman in it. Even in these days the Moslem does not admit his women to things of that kind. Yet I believe that tramp told the truth, and if you admit any of his tale you must admit it all. You can't wash out that bit—disregard it."

"And yet, apparently, he was killed for religious motives," Head pointed out. "Else, why the destruction of the films, and the torture they inflicted on him, presumably to get at them?"

"Could I go and look over that place—The Grey House?" Colston asked abruptly. "I want to get the—call it the sense of what exactly happened. I suppose you still have it in charge of your men?"

For a minute or more Head did not answer, but sat gazing thoughtfully at the rather disconsolate pressman by the bar.

"I think I'll go with you," he said at last, "and we'll take that journalist with us. Butters, his name is, and he's—"

"But don't you see I've given my word to secrecy?" Colston interrupted. "Surely he's the very last man to let know anything?"

"Promised secrecy as to the actual character of the film," Head pointed out. "Mr. Colston, taking the tramp's tale as genuine—and I take it so, having heard him tell it before he had time to invent lies to go with it—taking it so, it appears that two men and a woman have done all they set out to do, destroyed the film and the man who made it. Do you agree that it seems so, on the face of it?"

"Frankly, I'm trying to fit Allday into this," Colston confessed. "I suppose you know his wife has left him, finally."

"Well, she was going to leave him because of Wymering, and I don't blame her for it. He might have thought that with Wymering out of the way she wouldn't think it worth her while to leave him."

"She doesn't actually come in, but I can't fit her in at all with the two religious fanatics out to destroy the film and the man who made it, and she might fit in some way if you consider Allday long enough."

"Well, leave that for the present," Head suggested. "And assume that those three believe they have accomplished their errand. But supposing we could spoil that belief? Supposing we could make them think that another copy of the film still exists? I have it in mind that they may get out of the country in a hurry, if they're sure their task is done, while if they feel that there's more to do I may have a chance of locating and catching them. Do you see?"

Colston sat reflecting over it, without replying. Then, beyond the open double doorway of the lounge, he saw Brenda Allday go toward the hotel entrance with a man, and Head, following his gaze, recognised the man as Skidmore, evidently leaving after an interview with Wymering's heiress. Returning, she paused just outside the lounge, and Colston rose without apology and hurried across to speak to her.

At that, Head beckoned to Percy Butters, who obeyed the gesture and came with hope in his eyes to where the Inspector sat.

"Go on holding up the bar a bit longer, Butters," Head advised. "I may have something for you before long. Not much, but something."

"If you can give me any story at all, I'll love you for ever," Butters promised. "This is the worst dud show I've ever tackled."

"Well, hold on a little longer, and it may not be so dud. Don't stay here with me, though. I'll talk to these people, first."

He stood up, and Butters retired to the bar again, as Colston and Mrs. Allday approached.

"It appears that the cottage—or the lease of it, rather, belongs to Mrs. Allday now, Inspector," Colston said. "She tells me she doesn't mind my going to look over it, if you don't."

For just a moment Head had it in mind to tell them both that, until the police had finished with the cottage, her permission counted for nothing at all, but he restrained the impulse.

"I'll get my car out, then," he said. "The sooner we go, in connection with the idea I outlined to you, the better."

He signed to Butters to follow him out from the lounge as he passed the bar, and, out in the street, turned to the pressman.

"Splash it," Butters answered without hesitation. "If you read your daily rag this morning, Mr. Head, you'll have seen how that man Marvel's yarn caught on—they all give it in full. There's nothing doing anywhere, that's the trouble, and two good, gory columns would be a godsend to me. I could do with three thousand words of it."

"We will see what can be done," Head promised. "Wait here a minute or so, while I get my car out. I'm taking Mr. Martin Colston, the murdered man's close friend, out to have a look at the scene of the crime, and you can come too, if you like."

He appeared quite content to go in the dickey of the two-seater, and to wait placidly while Head, leaving the car outside the hotel, went in to apprise Colston that he was ready to start. By this time the sun had set, and twilight would have begun by the time they reached The Grey House. Mrs. Allday and Colston were still talking in the lounge as Head entered, and they turned at sight of him.

"Mr. Colston has been telling me a little, Inspector," Mrs. Allday said, rather nervously. "I may have—may have something to tell you, when you come back. What he told me reminded me of something."

"I don't know—it may be nothing," she answered slowly. "And yet I think—it was one day last week—on Friday, I believe. A dark man with a little car, talking at the gateway of the farm."

With that he dismissed the subject, and took Colston out to the car. They drove through serene summer stillness along the London Road, past Condor Grange, and, turning on to the coach road, came under the trees that intensified the beginning of the twilight. Head pulled in and stopped by the gateway of The Grey House, squat, unlighted, mysterious in the gloom. A bulky figure, appearing from beyond the corner of the house as Head, followed by the other two, got down from the car and approached the gate, declared itself as that of P.C. Hawker, Wadden's "man of weight." He saluted as he recognised the Inspector.

"Three chaps photographin' the place this afternoon, sir," Hawker answered, and a few standin' in the road lookin' at it. I wouldn't let any of 'em come into the garden. And Mr. Allday—I told him I'd report him for it—I caught him round at the back tryin' to see if he could get one of the windows open. He went when I ordered him off."

"Through a gap in the fence, and across his meadows sir," Hawker answered. "I asked him what he wanted here, but he didn't tell me."

"Caught attempting to force an entry, eh?" Head said reflectively. "Yes, Butters, you can have that as part of your story, if you like. How did he take it, Hawker? Did he strike you as upset?"

"I don't know about upset, sir. He got all excited and wanted to argue, and I thought he looked a bit threatenin', so I just drew my truncheon and waggled it in my hand, and then he went."

"And that's all?" Head inquired, after a few seconds of reflection in which he tried to divine Allday's object in attempting to enter the empty house. Was there some indication of the nature of the crime, something that would connect Allday with it, that he himself had overlooked? He recollected that he had left the search of the dining-room to Wadden, but knew the Superintendent was as thorough as himself at tasks of the kind.

Head led the way in, then, and lighted the incandescent paraffin lamp after ascertaining by the aid of his torch that it still contained enough oil. The light showed the lounge entrance hall as unchanged since he had last seen it, except for the altered position of the rug with which Wadden had covered the bloodstains. Head drew the rug back to its original position, and pointed Butters' attention to the stains, dull brown smudges on the parquet, now.

"Gosh!" Butters exclaimed. "Every drop of blood in the man's body, by the look of it." He stood over the stains, gazing down at them.

"Well," Head observed, "you can have a good look round this room, if it's any use to you. This was what you wanted to see, I think, Mr. Colston." He gestured meaningly at the door of the study. "No—just a minute, Butters. I want to show Mr. Colston round here alone, first."

They entered the study. There was a smaller, ordinary-type paraffin lamp at the corner of the mantel, and Head lighted it and then closed the door, shutting himself and Colston away from hearing by the pressman. The lamp gave only a dim light, and the stillness of the room was eerie, having in it the semblance of a threat. As if, Colston felt, death were still not very far from this lonely place.

"You said, convince them they had not done all they set out to do," he remarked at last, and gazed at the open safe.

Head pointed at the safe. "See that," he urged. "Remember what they did to him to get the key, so that they could destroy the films. Supposing there were one copy left, and you decided to keep it here?"

"By the way you got that film, you don't usually shirk danger," Head pointed out, "and I'd see that you are in no danger here."

"I don't know—frankly, I don't see yet where he comes into it, except for that talking to the man with the car last Friday—I know where that car is garaged, and who owns it. He wanted to search the place before—wanted his wife's letters, he said. Whether he wants them still more now, to bring pressure on her or as evidence for a divorce action, or whether he wants something else, is more than I can tell you at present. He may be in it or he may not, but you know as well as I do that he wouldn't have troubled about the films."

"A newspaper story, as Butters would call it, with you in it. You deciding to take over the cottage and live in it—and if you agree, I'd like you to go to London tonight and come back with four boxes tomorrow. Film boxes, like the fourteen that held the copies of your picture of the holy places, and they can be empty, as long as you have them prominently displayed. If Butters gets his screed away tonight, you should be rather a famous man tomorrow."

"Your word not to disclose the existence of a film that might make bad trouble if it were shown," Head amended. "But we can cook up a tale for Butters without giving the religious significance of the film."

"Why not?" Head demanded. "As far as they know, they're not even suspected of being connected with the murder. From their point of view, we've got the man who did it, and the knife he used has been produced at the coroner's court. And if they believe you're here with another copy of the film, they'll try to complete their work."

"Why let them?" Colston asked protestingly. "Why not get them now, without waiting for any further attempt on their part?"

"Because I have only suspicion of one of the three, and not the faintest idea, so far, as to where to find the other two or who they are," Head pointed out patiently. "Also, when a murderer takes his place in the dock, the case against him has got to be a stonewaller, and although I suspect one man of those three—of those two men and a woman—I have no direct evidence whatever to connect him with The Grey House. Enough to clear Marvel, perhaps, given a good counsel to defend him, but not enough to put anyone else in his place."

"It's too darned ghostly for me, alone here," he half-apologised. "The place gives me the creeps. May I come in here?"

"What do you say, Mr. Colston?" Head asked—not, as Colston knew, in any connection with Butters' request.

"Yes," Colston assented gravely. "Perhaps you'd better tell him, though. I might get the story wrong, or say more than you wish."

"As long as it's got some bearing on it, I can give 'em a good half-column on this eerie old house," Butters said. "They'll eat anything with plenty of blood in it, just now. You can't fill a paper with bathing fatalities and statistics of road accidents, so what have you? Give me only a bare bone, and I'll put the meat on it."

"The bone," Head told him gravely, "is that Mr. Colston is coming to live here. Going to London tonight to fetch his belongings, and arriving here tomorrow to take over the cottage."

He saw Butters' jaw drop more and more as he made the explanation, and, at its end, the pressman let out an awestruck—"Wha-at?"

"Well, not exactly." Head took the lighted lamp off the mantel. "You can call it that, if you like—call it anything you like. Now, as part of your story, I'll show you something, if you care to see it."

"Lead on by all means," Butters assented. "The fact of a man volunteering to live in a cottage where another has just been murdered—and the blood not cleaned off the floor, yet—is a story in itself."

"I think I can show you another," Head promised, and led the way through the entrance lounge and kitchen to the doorway of the scullery, where, holding the light aloft, he revealed the charred metal cases on the floor. Thanks to the guard over the cottage, they, like everything else, remained as on the night of the murder.

"Gee-whiz!" Butters said. "Did that tramp try to set fire to the place with these?" He gazed past Head at the scullery floor.

"It appears, from what Mr. Colston has told me, that the tramp had nothing to do with this," Head explained. "That being so, the obvious conclusion is—" He paused, invitingly.

"You see, Mr. Wymering and Mr. Colston had a disagreement about this film," Head explained. "Mr. Wymering brought his copies here—"

"All I can tell you, in view of the fact that Mr. Colston has not destroyed the copy in his possession—that is so, I think, Mr. Colston?" He turned with the question to Colston behind them both.

"I thought not. Well, Butters, all I can tell you is that the film is one that Mr. Wymering and Mr. Colston made together, and you may call it a unique production. Not a story, not a piece of fiction, but something that might affect the whole of civilisation when it is produced. Mr. Wymering may have destroyed his copies in a fit of temper, may have done it for any reason or no reason at all—you see there is plenty of evidence that the copies in his possession have been destroyed, and that wreckage is as we found it, not yet cold, on the night of the murder. You can draw your own conclusions."

"Watch me!" Butters exclaimed. "If I did, they wouldn't publish it, with the swine only on his first remand. No, but this looks like a real story, to me. Mr. Colston, what is this film of yours?"

"My lips are sealed, until production," Colston answered with dramatic solemnity. "As Mr. Head has told you, it might affect the whole of civilisation. Beyond that I can say nothing."

"Just as well, maybe," Butters said. "Get 'em guessing, and they guess a whole lot more than the truth. Tell 'em everything, and they lose interest. But you've got a copy, you say, so he didn't do any good by setting fire to this lot. And you really mean to say you're coming to live in this ghastly, lonely place?"

"If you happen to be in this direction tomorrow," Colston said, fully entering into the spirit of Head's plan, now, "you will see me arrive here with my belongings to take up residence—"

"Why not? Wymering lived here alone, and the tramp they caught and returned a verdict of murder against is under lock and key. Why shouldn't I live here alone, if I choose?"

"And the film? What are you going to do about that?" Butters asked. "I suppose you're the sole owner of the rights, now?"

"You'll see among my baggage—if you're here tomorrow, four boxes just like those on the floor there," Colston answered.

"Why not?" Colston asked in reply. "You can see for yourself that Wymering chose to keep his copies with him—until they were destroyed, that is—as one always likes to keep a thing of great value within sight and reach. Why shouldn't I do the same?"

"What's the good of stealing it? While I'm in a position to prove ownership, nobody else can exhibit it, and it's of no value till it's exhibited. Therefore, why shouldn't I keep it with me?"

"And you won't tell me what it is, even in confidence?" Butters asked. "I mean, for myself, and not for publication."

"Something that might affect the whole of civilisation," Butters ruminated, and cast another glance at the burned-out boxes.

"You're fishing," Colston said, with a note of irritation. "I'll go so far as to tell you the film was not made in this country, but in the East, and I rely on you not to enlarge on that."

"Righto," Butters assented cheerfully. "Mysterious film taken by intrepid adventurers, may have world-shaking results when shown, story told by survivor of the two on the spot where his friend was murdered, fierce quarrel between the two results in burning of films being the last act of the murdered man before his death, his friend determines to live at the actual scene of the murder, lonely cottage in woods gives sense of haunting horror, bloodstains on floor show spot where the murdered man breathed his last, weird silence of the place—"

"Save it up, man," Head advised. "I shall have nothing to read tomorrow morning if you go on like that."

"And if you put it like that, people will get the idea that I killed him," Colston added. "You needn't harp on the quarrel, which was no more than a disagreement between us, as a matter of fact."

"I'll put it right, you'll see," Butters promised cheerfully. "I think, though, if I'm to get my script in to catch the morning papers, I ought to be getting to the end of a wire, Mr. Head. You see, I've got to build the story, really, and there's not so much actual fact about it, when you come to think. I've got to put the meat on the bones and pad the whole thing out, if it's to go over."

"Then we'll go. I'll give you a pass to show whatever man is on duty when you arrive here tomorrow, telling him you're coming in and we shall not keep guard over the place any longer."

They went off, leaving the man of weight in charge until his relief should arrive to take over for the rest of the night. Butters asked to be set down at the post office, where he entered the telephone exchange to transmit his message to headquarters, and, having got rid of him, Head drove on toward the Duke of York with Colston. It was then about half-past nine, and darkness had fallen: Colston thought of the lonely house among the trees.

"Take up nearly any morning paper you like, rule out the childish stuff you find in it, and you'll see you've got precious little left," Head said with conviction.

"Quite so. But—you said you were taking your man off when I get there. Does that mean you're leaving me there alone?"

"Not for one minute. In fact, when you get there, you'll be surprised, Mr. Colston, at the care we intend to take of you."

He waited for Colston to get down from the car, and then drove off in quest of his long overdue evening meal.

Chapter XVIII
Ants' Eggs

ONE of the waiters in the lounge of the Duke of York produced a time-table which assured Colston that, having missed the nine twenty-five up train, he had to wait for the ten-fifty, a leisurely sort of conveyance which would deposit him at the London terminus at ten minutes past four in the morning. But he had agreed to Head's scheme, and decided to take that train, collect the rest of his baggage and four flat metal film boxes, and return on the following day. It might be that the assassins who had put an end to Wymering would be on the watch for him too, and, in the event of that being so, he would keep the film boxes prominently displayed among his baggage—take them into his compartment and put them up in the rack—and so leave a plain trail of that last, (non-existent) copy of the film that had cost Wymering his life. He began to believe that the killers might follow the trail, though, so far, he had little confidence in Butters' ability to get such a childish story into any newspaper. From his—Colston's—point of view, there was far too much fantasy and far too little fact in the story. No newspaper, he told himself, would consider it.

"Beg pardon, sir, but Mrs. Allday asked to be told when you came back. Shall I send up and let her know?"

"At once," Colston confirmed him. "And get me something to eat in the dining-room—cold meat, anything, I'm not staying to-night after all, but going up to London by the last train. Bring a meal, and my account."

He moved to the table in the window bay at which he and Brenda Allday had lunched, and there she joined him before the waiter had had time to bring the meal he had ordered. She looked her dismay at his announcement that he was going back to London.

"Only for the night," he assured her, "and I'm coming back to the cottage—The Grey House—tomorrow. In the afternoon, probably."

"I won't let you," she said resolutely. "It's mine, now, and I won't let you, Martin, after what you told me."

"Because of that," he explained. "It's Head's idea. I'm to go there as inducement for whoever killed Wymering to come to kill me."

"Wait!" she interrupted. "I can tell you what I couldn't tell the Inspector. Martin, do you know why I left Jack?"

She shook her head. "Because he convinced me—not by anything he said, but by his manner—convinced me that he was concerned in Bernard's death. Listen!" She looked round, to assure herself that nobody could overhear her words. "He was not in the house that night—in the farmhouse—when I came back from seeing Bernard. And after Jim Vane had telephoned about catching the tramp there, when Jack came to my room and talked to me—Martin, you won't do any good by going to The Grey House, nobody will come to attack you. I tell you this, but as a secret. It wasn't what you think—Bernard may have destroyed the film you told me about, done it himself. He wasn't killed because of that." She broke off as the waiter approached and put Colston's meal before him, and, when the man had gone, resumed emphatically. "I tell you, I know! It isn't as you think."

Colston looked at the cold beef and salad, and took up his knife and fork. He remembered, a contradiction of her belief, the torture marks Wadden had shown him on the dead man: Allday would never have inflicted the agonies that had made those marks.

"I've got to go through with it, Brenda," he said, soberly. "You see, I promised Head I would, and can't let him down."

She propped her head on her hands, her elbows on the table, and made no reply. Colston, glancing at the clock, saw that he had yet an hour before he need leave the hotel to catch his train.

"While you were out, the Superintendent telephoned me here," she answered indirectly. "He told me I shall be required as a witness at the trial, so I shall stay here as long as they want me."

"Well?" she asked, with irony in the query. "What of it. Do you expect me to creep into a hole and hide? I don't care, Martin! I don't care what becomes of me, what happens to me, and I'm perfectly certain nobody else cares. Bernard left me—what was it? stocks and shares worth thirty thousand pounds, double as much as Jack Allday persuaded out of me to save his property for him, and now I feel myself poorer than that tramp who sits in a cell waiting to be tried for a crime he didn't commit. But I'm going to stare everyone in the face and make them realise that I don't need pity, don't need justification for what I've done—don't need anything! They'll say—'That's the woman who ran away from her husband and lost her lover,' and I shall know myself quite alone. But I'll face it—face it through!"

She shook two suddenly-risen tears from her eyes. "Oh, Martin, I know you!" she said shakily. "But you can't afford it. You can't keep friendship with me and your normal friendships too. I'm soiled, Martin—it's not for me to say that Jack killed Bernard, however much I might know, for I should be damned for ever in the eyes of the whole world if I said one word—damned in your eyes too—"

"Nothing said, but don't you know guilt in a man's face when you see it? I saw it in his face, the night Bernard was killed. It was because he knew I knew that I have on me now the bruises he made."

"Impasse," he said thoughtfully. "Well, Brenda, just forget about what you call my normal friendships, for they don't exist—I haven't spent enough time in England these last few years to make any new ones or keep up the old ones. And if you care to count yourself not quite alone till you find your feet—till you get out of this present muddle and begin some sort of life that will compensate for what you've lost and given up—well, I'm here. You see, Bernard was my friend, too."

"By merely sitting here, you are accepting it." He smiled at her as he made the statement. "You've a hard road to travel, for a while. I may be able to help you over the worst bits, if you'll let me."

"Because he'd wish it. From the material point of view, you've made a most unholy muddle of things, whatever inner justification you may have, and I know enough from what he told me and what I've seen of you to realise that the justification is there. Meanwhile, won't it mean a bit to you if you know it isn't necessary to stare me in the face and defy condemnation? One man out of the crowd?"

"Well, that's that," he said quietly. "We can't have heroics over a hotel dining table, Brenda, and I can see you're all strung up and ready to break down at any moment. Now supposing you go off to bed, and I pack my little suit case and pay my bill and catch my train, and you feel when you wake up in the morning that I'm here to help and advise if you need either? Will it make any difference?"

"The difference that—that I don't feel alone, now," she said tremulously. "Oh, all the difference in the world!"

"That's all I want to know, for to-night." He pushed back his chair and stood up. "I shall see you tomorrow—in the afternoon, probably, but just now it looks as if a good rest is the thing you need most. While you have it, remember—I'm here."

He led her to the doorway of the room and there bade her goodnight. Then, returning to his table, he thought over her certainty that Allday had been concerned in the murder at The Grey House, tried to fit into it a woman dressed all in white, and questioned whether Marvel had made up his story of the three with knives who had frightened him into the house. It was a puzzle of which no piece would fit, but he, Colston, had promised Head that he would carry through the attempt at luring the possible murderers back to the cottage.

He got his bill, paid it, and went off to catch the train. And, getting a compartment to himself, he tried to sleep, but found himself brooding, instead, over the aspects of Wymering's death. The more he thought over the puzzle, the less capable of solution did it appear.

In the very beginnings of the next day's dawn, a goods train from the south pulled to a standstill some quarter of a mile short of Crandon railway station, with much bumping of buffers. Toward the rear end of the train the tarpaulin covering of a truck was lifted cautiously, and presently there descended into the six-foot-way beside the trunk an untidy paper parcel, after which came Mr. Bismarck Marvel, bearing his regulation bundle of personal possessions. Both the guard and driver of the train, he knew, would be watching the signal on the other side, just ahead of the engine, and in that knowledge he picked up the paper parcel, scurried across the vacant pair of rails, and was soon on the other side of the fence bounding the line, and lost to sight in a clump of osiers.

There he slapped coal dust off his clothes, for, though he had travelled among cases of agricultural machinery consigned to Crandon, the truck had previously been used for the conveyance of coal, and had not been thoroughly brushed out before reloading. He had hoped to do the trip in lorries, but had been unlucky. A brother of the road to whom he had confided his need to get to Westingborough had given him a rail route, and, in fact, had proved a perfect Bradshaw concerning trains that never appear in that estimable publication. Bismarck, said the brother of the road, had only to get to a big main line junction by a certain hour, make his way into the goods yard, and look along a train of which the engine would have steam up ready for departure until he found a truck—probably near the back end of the train—labelled for Crandon. Just outside Crandon that train would stop to let a passenger train pass, and then—well, where are you?

In a clump of osiers, still with eight miles separating him from his destination, was the answer in Bismarck's mind, for, like his brother Napoleon, he knew this district perfectly: the pair had worked it together until some five summers ago, when Bismarck had incurred so much attention from the police that he had thought it best to find a new pitch in another county. He hoped, now, to encounter only new men in blue, who would not recognise him, and, being very hungry, hoped too that Squire Hastings of Tolston Hall still preserved pheasants in the old way, since procuring chickens in daylight was next to impossible, and he, Bismarck, wanted a good square feed before traversing all the eight miles which still separated him from brother Nap.

He gained the road, plodded through Crandon—it was still so early that the town yielded up only two people to stare at the disreputable visitor—and took the Westingborough road, branching off to the old coach road when he came to its junction with the fine new concreted way that eased the crossing of Condor Hill. Presently he came to a meadow from which the hay had been cut and carried, and, climbing through a gap in the hedge, sought along the bank until he came on what he had hoped to find, an ants' nest.

A length of stick, cut out of the hedge with the knife Bismarck always carried, served to grub out a big section of the nest and reveal a mass of little white blobs rather like grains of rice: the scurrying ants tried to carry these things into safety, swarming round and over them, but Bismarck, spreading a dirty little piece of paper on the grass beside the nest, managed to scoop up a little pile, which he placed on his bit of paper. He picked off the ants which had clung to their eggs, whisked up his paper over the find, and put it carefully away in the bundle. Then he took to the road again.

About an hour after sunrise, with dew still glittering on the foliage and grass as promise of another sweltering summer day, he came over the crest of the hill and saw the woods clothing the slope on the Westingborough side, extending down before him almost as far as the marshes fringing the river Idleburn. Far off and small, too, he saw Westingborough itself, whence brother Nap had sent the message that had brought him all the way from his stamping grounds. Then, as he began the descent, the overarching trees cut off the view, promising him a refreshing coolness for the journey down the hill. And he knew of a hollow in those woods where one might light a cooking fire with little fear of discovery, and where, too, was a pool of clear water even in the driest of summers. But it was useless to think of lighting a cooking fire until he had something to cook.

"Aaa-h-h!" Bismarck breathed, with awe and longing blended in the exclamation. For, not twenty yards ahead of him, a gorgeously-plumaged cock pheasant crossed the road with the insouciance of one for whom beaters and guns have no existence. Evidently Squire Hastings preserved as of old, and here, or a little farther down, one might get something to justify lighting that cooking fire in the hollow that would afford concealment from keepers, policemen, and any other interfering busybodies who might be abroad at such an hour as this.

By the look of things, though, and by the soundlessness—apart from the cooing of wood-pigeons—which rewarded his attempt at listening, nobody but himself was awake in this part of the world. He passed the gateway at the end of the drive leading to Tolston Hall, and, some hundred yards farther down the hill, saw another cock pheasant strut easily across the road. At that he climbed the gravelly bank, deposited his paper parcel well out of sight in a breast-high growth of bracken between two noble ash trees, and, retaining his bundle of personal property, seated himself so that the bole of one of the trees concealed him from possible travellers along the road.

Opening the bundle, he took out his wispy little packet of ants' eggs, together with a large reel of stout carpet thread, into which was stuck a small fish-hook. He tied the hook securely on the end of the thread, and then baited it with ants' eggs, using meticulous care in getting them on to the hook. This completed, and leaving his opened bundle under the ash tree, he went back to the gravel bank beside the road and strewed the remainder of his ants' eggs carefully over the slope, so that they were scattered over an area of a dozen square yards or more. In that area, well up toward the top of the bank, he laid his fish-hook, and, retreating carefully, unwound the carpet thread loosely from the reel, so as not to disturb the hook from its position. Reaching the tree again, he sat down by his bundle. From that point he could see the bank on the far side of the road, and a little more than half of the road itself, though not the bank on which he had scattered his ground bait. Presently, he hoped, another pheasant would cross, and espy the ants' eggs laid out ready for consumption. By noon, well-filled with roast pheasant, he calculated on being in Westingborough and discharging the brotherly mission on which he had come in response to brother Nap's urgent summons.

But his calculation, naturally, omitted all consideration of Constable Vane, whom the sergeant at Carden, angry over a message he had received from Squire Hastings concerning the disappearance of his pheasants, had bidden spend the whole blessed night in the old fool's woods, just to see if there were such a thing as a poacher anywhere round there. Vane had kept conscientious watch till the first beginnings of dawn, and then had repaired to The Grey House, where he knew he could share and had shared some mugs of early tea with the man stationed there to keep watch over the empty house. They had drunk tea and talked well into the sunrise, and now Vane was on his way to the top of the hill, whence he would take the footpath down into Carden and, after his night out, take the greater part of the day off.

Silent-footed, he came easily along the grassy verge of the road, knowing that all good poachers would have gone home to bed, hours ago, if any such had visited these woods in the night hours. And fate so arranged things that a pheasant, possibly one of the two that Mr. Bismarck Marvel had already seen, strutted out from the bracken under the trees and, coming to the bank, espied the ants' eggs laid out there. With a joyous rush he started pecking at them, and Vane paused to admire his sheeny plumage from a distance of thirty yards or less.

Pecking, busily and happily, the bird worked its way to where four or five of the white grains lay in a heap, and gobbled them up with the rest. From under the ash tree Bismarck saw the farther end of his thread line become agitated, and at that he hauled in rapidly. Vane saw the bird suddenly cant forward involuntarily, and then go with fluttering, protesting wings up over the top of the bank, where it disappeared from his sight. Then he ran forward, sprang up the bank, and came on Bismarck just after that worthy had wrung the pheasant's neck.

"Good enough," said Vane, with triumph in his voice. "Will you pack that filthy lot of stuff and bring it with you, or shall we leave it here? All I really want is the bird and you."

"Guv'nor," said Bismarck, and managed to display a haughty coldness that he was far from feeling, "this 'ere pheasant jest dropped down dead alongside me 'ere as I was a takin' a rest. I reckon someone's been around these 'ere woods pizenin' the birds."

"I don't," Vane said decidedly. "Stop that! I'll knock your block off if you try to cut that thread!" He took up the still quivering carcase of the bird by its neck, picked up the thread reel, and wound in the loose line. "Now pack your traps and bring them along, and if you make one move at getting away you'll wonder what hit you."

"I ain't been doing nuthin' at all," Bismarck protested sadly, far more through habit than in any hope of being believed. "I jest set here, an' that poor bird come a runnin' along with the cotton in 'is beak, an' fell down dead right 'ere. Jest as if he come to me for protection, like a hare with a weasel arter it."

"Pack that bundle!" Vane ordered sharply. "Tie it up—anyhow, as long as you leave nothing behind. Come on—get a move on!"

Some five minutes later, since Bismarck's conception of a move was akin to cinematographic slow motion, the pair went up the hill, Vane a little in the rear of his captive. He carried the pheasant and reel of thread in his left hand, and his truncheon drawn in his right—this latter to disabuse any idea Bismarck might entertain as to the possibility of getting away. When they came to the stile that marked the beginning of the footpath to Carden, Vane issued an order to take to the path, and a warning, emphasised by a jab in Bismarck's back with the end of the truncheon, that any larks might lead to disastrous results. At that, Bismarck got wearily over the stile, and even waited humbly while Vane in turn climbed over.

"It's a fair cop," he admitted, "an' I'll go quiet. Me feet ain't in good state for 'oppin' it, anyhow. Guv'nor, whaddye reckon I'll get for this? Are the beaks 'ere still 'ard on a man?"

"You'll get twenty-eight days hard for a certainty, at the least," Vane assured him. "If they remand you for the sessions, you'll get more than that. And damned well deserve it, too."

"Blimey!" Bismarck lamented. "An' all for tryin' to be kind to a dead bird! It's—blimey!"

With that second exclamation he stopped dead, suddenly remembering the paper package he had left hidden in the bracken. Up to that moment, occupied with his own troubles, he had forgotten it.

"Here, you get along, unless you want a whack on the sconce to help you!" Vane admonished, lifting the truncheon suggestively.

Bismarck got along. The rag in the package, he reflected, was badly bloodstained, and by what he had learned from brother Napoleon had some connection with a murder as well. He might get himself into even worse trouble if he owned to it as part of the baggage he had brought with him on this unlucky trip.

Silently he resumed his march toward Carden police station. From what he remembered of the bracken patch, the package would still be hidden in it when he came out from serving his twenty-eight days' sentence. Maybe brother Nap could get along without it, too.

His failure to execute his mission troubled him, but, jugged like this, what could a bloke do, anyhow?

Chapter XIX
Publicity

"I HAVE just had an interview with Mr. Martin Colston, the celebrated eastern explorer, who talked to me in the eerie gloom of the mysterious old cottage, dark with the boding sense of tragedy, in which his friend Bernard Wymering was so foully done to death, as recorded yesterday in our columns. Mr. Colston told me—"

Butters had put the meat on the bones, and, in the train on his way back to Westingborough, complete with the package of four film boxes among his light baggage, and prominently displayed on the rack over his head, Colston read the "story" with alternate amusement and wrath as his gaze passed from paragraph to still more lurid paragraph. The pressman had promised to splash it, and, as far as this particular paper was concerned, he had kept his promise. In the matter of adjectival magnificence, in fact, it was not so much a mere splash as a torrential flood. As he read, Colston wondered how on earth the man had obtained his information: he himself had not said a tenth of this stuff, he knew, and yet it was by no means wide of the truth. Heavily embellished, certainly, but not distorted beyond recognition.

There was distinct cleverness, though Colston regarded it as low cunning, in the implications concerning Mrs. Allday. By a reminder of her evidence at the inquest, that she had spent with Wymering what turned out to be the last hour of his life, and by stressing the fact that she had since left her home and gone to a hotel to live, Butters had managed to imply the definite break between her and her husband and to give the impression that, if Allday had not murdered Wymering, it was only because Marvel had got there ahead of him. All this without either a sentence or even a phrase that either of the pair could construe as libellous. It became evident to Colston that Butters had not wasted his time while he leaned against the bar in the hotel lounge: he had been listening to local gossip among other leaners, and from it had got—and used—what he termed atmosphere. He managed to convey an impression that, although he was telling a good story of the dead man and the circumstances in which he had lived at the cottage, this was only a first instalment, and there were far more thrilling chapters to come. From a journalistic point of view, he had done remarkably well with the meagre material to his hand.

The pièce de résistance of the story was the burned film. Knowing nothing of its nature, Butters—or those who had doctored his screed before publication—had made the film a world-beater. "In his interview with me, Mr. Colston declined flatly to forestall the sensation which this production will cause, or even to state when it is to be released. But he said enough to convince me that its thrilling importance cannot be over-estimated, and that it is of nation-wide significance. As the sole remaining copy will be in his possession, and as he is determined to take up residence at the scene of the murder, this lonely cottage, set in the silence of the woods, now becomes a place of absorbing interest. Seen as I saw it in the hush of the night hours, dimly lighted and with the impress of the recent ghastly tragedy still fresh upon it, it is also a place of mystery and fear, but Mr. Colston, evidently a man of iron nerve, has stated his intention to live there alone. The supernatural can have no terrors for him—"

Grinning over his own iron nerve, Colston flung the paper aside at that point, and reflected that with the holiday season just beginning he stood little chance of being lonely at the cottage while the daylight hours lasted. But he knew that Head was not interested in what might take place during the day, and that, however avid the sightseers, might be, they would not haunt the coach road by night. If the inspector's theory were correct, this plain statement of another copy of the film was more than likely to tempt Wymering's murderers to try a repetition of their plan. Butters had gone so far as to assert that Wymering himself had destroyed his copies of the film, and that he, Colston, was going to the cottage and keeping the remaining copy in his own care while he lived there.

And, Colston knew, there is no motive so powerful as religious fanaticism. If, as seemed almost certain, Wymering had been killed for the sacrilege of having taken the film, and his killers learned from this article that a copy still remained in existence, they would not rest until they had destroyed that copy too.

Not until mid-afternoon, when he reached Westingborough and entered the Duke of York, did Colston realise how much the story Butters had concocted had caught on. Leaving his taxi standing outside with all his baggage except the four film boxes—for, in order to advertise his possession of them, he carried them in his hand—he passed into the hotel, and instantly found himself confronted by five hungry-looking young men, with Butters in the lead, looking hungrier than all the rest. They massed, preventing his advance.

"Now, Mr. Colston," Butters said exultantly, "can't you give us something on this film? You can let these chaps in on it with me—they're specials sent down to cover a paper apiece. What about it?"

"Just a line or two, please! I've put you over, and we've got to keep it going somehow. Say, is that the film?" He pointed at the string-bound package of boxes that Colston carried, and one of the men with him lifted a reflex camera. Colston promptly shoved his package behind his back, out of range of the lens.

"Well, ain't that too bad!" Butters mourned, and then found himself elbowed aside by a tall, thin man who faced Colston unceremoniously, and with impatience apparent in his expression.

For reply, the thin man took a card from his vest pocket and held it out. Butters, trying to get a sight of the script on the card, grunted and recoiled as the owner of the card thrust a sharp elbow into his ribs, while Colston read the name and nodded.

Passing in—he had to shove his way through the pressmen, and the man with the camera got two pictures while he did it—Colston led through the lounge into the writing room, which chanced to be empty. The thin man followed him in, and, having closed the door, he sought for a key in the lock and found none. So he put a chair against the door, and sat on it, to ensure privacy.

"I told you it was all right, Mr. Walkley," he said. "You signed that letter I got, I remember. But it is all right. There isn't any film. Wymering destroyed the lot, as you read."

He did not," Walker said firmly. "You know who destroyed them, as well as I do, and why they were destroyed."

"Why, yes, but who, no," Colston dissented. "Do you mean to say you know the men who were in at the killing of Wymering?"

"Not who they actually are, but whose agents they are. I've had a talk with this Inspector Head. But that's all beside the point. We have had representations made to us—"

"Oh, why ask such a thing? I am here to tell you that all remaining copies of the film must be given up. This silly advertisement of them in the newspapers has clinched matters, and nothing of the kind may be exhibited under any circumstances, in any country."

"I don't like your manner, Mr. Walkley," Colston said coldly. "I don't take 'must' from anyone, over anything."

"I am not speaking personally, Mr. Colston," Walkley answered with a hint of official precision. "This is not personal, but an official affair, now, and I am speaking officially. It is not an international affair, even, but racial. From the point of view of the Mohammedan world, you are contemplating launching a sacrilege which wounds their deepest religious susceptibilities, and you will not be allowed to do it. You may not exhibit, and all copies of the film must be given up."

"That's easy," Colston said, and smiled. "Except that there aren't any. And I'm not contemplating anything of the kind."

"Open 'em up for yourself, then." With the invitation, Colston thudded his package down on the carpet, and let it roll toward where the other man stood. "I wonder Head didn't tell you, except that from my experience of him he doesn't tell much. I suppose he hopes it will become known that you came to see me in your official capacity, to increase this silly excitement about the film. Well, strictly between you and me, Mr. Walkley, there isn't any film, and if Head chews mine off for telling you that I can't help it. I'm bait, do you see?"

Walkley backed to a chair and sat down, making no reply. He sat staring at the man before him, and gradually a smile grew on his face.

"Clever," he said at last. "Oh, clever! The tramp in custody as the murderer, Wymering supposed to have destroyed only a part of the copies himself, and you—Oh, clever! And so simple, too!"

"No, I see it now. I see why Head wouldn't tell me—and you ought not to have told me, either. Well, Mr. Colston"—he stood up again, and Colston too rose to his feet—"I hope they take care of you while they use you as bait. You've given us a terrible lot of trouble, you know, but since you assure me that Mr. Wymering had all the copies there were, and they have been destroyed—"

"Not quite." Walkley smiled faintly. "You are entitled to call yourself Haj, you know. Though, if I were you, I wouldn't."

"It might be dangerous," Colston assented cheerfully. "Besides, I've no inclination that way. You're quite satisfied, or do you want to open those boxes and take a look for yourself?"

"I accept your word, Mr. Colston," Walkley said rather stiffy. "You assure me that no copies of the film remain in existence."

"I do. That being so, of course, you have no further interest in me. In fact, if they got me too you'd probably be quite cheerful over it. But if I ever do anything of the sort again, don't come and say 'must' about it. Put it rather more gently, with me."

Walkley frowned and looked at his watch. At that, Colston moved the chair away from the door, which he opened.

"I trust you will never do anything of the sort again, Mr. Colston," he said, "and I wish you good day, sir."

As he went out, Colston reflected that this type of man would always sign himself "your obedient servant," and relish the formula. Then, realising all that the incredible Press campaign had accomplished, he too began to realise that Head had been very clever indeed, in that he had not only opened a way for Wymering's murderers to return to The Grey House and repeat their crime on him, Colston, but had assured them that without such a repetition the first murder was futile, and that they were entirely unsuspected of having committed it.

"Yes," he soliloquised, "I think I take off my hat to you, Mr. Head. And now to see Brenda before I go."

Since Mr. Napoleon Marvel was the only prisoner on remand at Westingborough, he took his hour's exercise alone in the stone-paved yard at the back of the police station, and took it in a manner which suggested that he hated anything of the sort, exertion and himself being bitter enemies. The constable in charge of him for the time marched him back to his cell when the pure formality of the hour came to an end, and spoke as Napoleon entered his enforced habitation.

"Caught another Marvel," the constable explained. "Over at Carden. At least, they took him to Carden. Poaching game, it was."

"Thass me twin!" Napoleon exclaimed, with some excitement in his tone. "It's Bizzy, f'r a quid! Don't go f'r a minnit, mister. D'ye know if they found anything on 'im when they ketched 'im?"

"They did," the constable assured him. "They found a pheasant with a fishhook in his gullet, and he's not going to be any more trouble for a few weeks. The chairman of the bench here rears pheasants himself, and he'll sock it to this twin of yours."

He slumped down on his bed-boards, and the constable locked him in and went away until it should be time to feed his charge. He neither knew nor cared why Napoleon should regard the incarceration of his brother with such deep gloom. Fraternal affection might account for it, but with such a being as this it seemed unlikely.

Meanwhile Napoleon brooded heavily. Head had assured him that recovery of the bloodstained rag might help toward his freedom, and on that he had conjured Bismarck to get the rag somehow and transmit it here. He came to the conclusion that Bismarck had got it, and had been on his way with it when he had been caught—Napoleon himself knew the fishhook trick quite well, and realised that his brother had merely stopped for a meal by the way. But what had he done with the rag? Possibly it was a wisp of stuff that the constable had not considered worthy of mention: possibly he had not even heard of it.

Presently the same constable brought in Napoleon's evening meal, a simple repast designed to maintain life, but not to induce riotous vitality. Napoleon took it and put it down.

"Jest 'arf a mo', mister," he asked pleadingly. "I jest wants to arsk you sumpin', if ye don't mind. About me twin what got caught."

"Rag? Bless my soul! His sort and yours are more rag than anything else. You're nothing but packets of rag."

"A packet? What on earth are you talking about, man? What sort of rag?" The constable sounded—and was—impatient over it.

"Oh, well, if you want to use language like that, talk to the wall instead of me," the constable advised with disgust, and moved to close the cell door. "You're going balmy, by the sound of you."

"Mister, Mister 'Ead knows all about it—you tell 'im me twin's jugged, an' 'e brought the rag Mister 'Ead wanted me to get. It's about the murder—Mister 'Ead knows. Blimey, they'll think it's an old 'ankercher or sumpin' an' chuck it away, an' then I'll get 'ung! Arst Mister 'Ead if I c'n see 'im, an' tell 'im. Bizzy's brought the rag an' it's goin' to get lorst, if you don't."

There was earnest sincerity in his entreaty. The constable paused with his hand on the door-key, impressed in spite of himself.

"You mean this, Marvel?" he asked sharply. "Mind, you'll get yourself into serious trouble if you're playing the fool."

"Swelpme!" Napoleon exclaimed desperately. "Mister—oh, Lord, why was I ever borned? Carn't I make you believe me? Mister 'Ead, 'e knows all about it. Carn't yer tell 'im, before they chuck the rag away an' lose it altogether? It's me larst 'ope."

"All right. I'll report what you say, and see that Mr. Head hears about it when he comes in. And if you're fooling, heaven help you!"

But there he broke off, for he found himself talking to the locked door of the cell. His jailer thought it worth while to report the incident to Sergeant Wells before going off duty. Head, as both he and the sergeant knew, was not on the premises at the time.

"Umph!" grunted Wells, who had read both the illiterate scrawls in which Napoleon had begged his brother to save him from getting hanged by producing the bloody rag. "All right—I'll deal with it."

"About that man you've got for poaching," he explained. "Bismarck Marvel, brother to the one we've got here. Young Vane is giving evidence to support the charge, isn't he?"

"Monday morning, before the Westingborough bench," the Carden man answered. "Why—what about it?"

"Vane and I between us, of course." There was slight irritation in the reply. "That's all of us there are, here—did you think we imported a flying squad down from London to do it for us?"

"Don't get funny," Wells advised. "This may be important—not about your man, but about ours. What did you find on him?"

"What did we find on him? There was a cock pheasant with a fishhook and a reel of thread—Vane took them off him when he caught the man. The usual tin billy and cookery outfit tied up in a dirty handkerchief with the muck his sort always carry round them. Why?"

"Here, Wells, you can't talk like that on the telephone. Ten to one the girl on our exchange is listening in to us."

She was, but she did not betray the fact. Wells, knowing the girl, ignored the possibility.

"A package of rag, with blood on it," he explained calmly. "It's a feature in the Wymering case, and your Marvel might have had it."

"Well, he hadn't. I'll fetch the inventory of his stuff and read it out to you, if you like. Apart from the dirty old handkerchief or whatever it was he used to carry his stuff, and the rags he was wearing—you don't mean them by any chance?"

"No, I don't! I mean a separate piece of rag with bloodstains on it that may or may not be important in this Wymering case. You say you didn't find it on him. Can you ask him about it for me?"

"Right you are. Ask him if he knows anything about it as soon as you can, and then give me a tinkle and let me know what he says, will you? Don't frighten him—see if you can get him to talk."

He settled to his routine work while he waited the result of the Carden sergeant's investigations, and reflected that Head knew nothing, yet, of Vane's capture, having gone out to The Grey House early to make preparations for Martin Colston's arrival. It would be advisable to get this second Marvel housed over here at Westingborough: he would be wanted here to face the magistrates on Monday, and, in addition to that, the Carden sergeant had plenty to do without looking after a prisoner over the week-end. He had charge of a mere village police station, and such drunks and similar small fry as inhabited his small lock-up usually spent no more than a night there.

"Dropped it in a bracken patch—the rag you want, I expect—he dropped it in a bracken patch somewhere a bit lower down the hill than Squire Hastings' gateway. I know the man now, Wells. He used to haunt these parts a few years ago—and he knew me, too."

"Umm'm! Look here, you don't want him on your hands till Monday, do you—all the trouble of looking after him, I mean?"

"Well, turn Vane out with him—that young feller's a good deal too uppish for my liking—turn him out with your Marvel, let him take the man round by the coach road to pick up the parcel, and then march him in here. We can accommodate him. What do you say?"

"Splendid idea! I'll go and get hold of Vane—you'll have your man next his brother before dark, and the parcel of rag as well if we're lucky. I say, Wells?"

"You were quite right, it seems. He called it bloody rag, and insisted on the 'bloody.' Bloodstained, he meant."

Chapter XX
Shadow of a Coming Event

THE rush had begun, as Colston found when his taxi climbed the coach road to stop outside The Grey House. He counted eight other cars parked in the narrow lane, one of them just outside the garden gate: a pair of hikers, the girl in extremely short shorts, had settled themselves opposite the gate to empty a thermos and devour sandwiches: a shabby, elderly man and a horn-rimmed-spectacled woman were gazing over the fence, and as Colston followed his driver to the door, the man carrying his two suit cases while he himself stuck to the package of empty film boxes, he heard the woman speak—

"The spirit," she said in a loud, carrying sort of voice, "is sure to be earth-bound. There ought to be manifestations."

Colston observed a manifestation, general to them all, of intense interest in himself. The occupants of the cars gazed at him longingly, but let him go without accosting him: from that he deduced that none of them were pressmen. But, as he reached the front door, and the constable on duty in front of it grinned and saluted him, another car drew up, and Butters and another man tumbled out.

"For heaven's sake keep those Press devils away!" Colston adjured the policeman. "I've nothing whatever to say to them."

Colston entered, and found that the front door lock had not yet been repaired: without some sort of guard on the door, anyone could open it and walk in. He paid off his cabman, tipped him liberally, and closed the door on him. Then, still clinging to the film boxes, he went into the study, and there found Head and two large policemen.

"Not yet," Head answered. "This is merely window-dressing. Have you got that placard, Roberts?"

For reply, one of the policemen produced a fairly large oblong of white cardboard—it had served as the lid of a boot box or something of the sort, prior to its present use. On it was roughly scrawled in ink, the lettering heavy and quite distinct—

"Right," said Head. "That's for you, Mr. Colston—I want you to tack it on the front gate after these chaps have gone. And tell the man outside, loudly enough for those ghouls outside to hear you, that you don't want him hanging about here any longer, and he can clear off out of it. Let them hear that you want the place to yourself, and then tack the placard on the gate with these drawing pins. You two can go, now. Jeffries is down the road, you'll find, and he'll take you back to Westingborough with him. Tell him not to wait for me."

"You mean I am actually to stay here alone?" Colston asked, as the two men went out and left him alone with Head.

"I do not," Head answered, "but I want to create the impression that you are staying here alone. There's Butters, too." He looked out through the heavily-leaded, diamond-paned window as he spoke. "We can trust him to spread it. You'll be in the Sunday papers."

"Nobody saw me arrive, and nobody will see me go," Head answered. "I came by the back, and I'm going that way, too."

"It is—by my own men," Head assured him. "I'm taking no chances whatever. Now you can go and put that placard on the gate, and send the last man in uniform away. Then I'll explain—here are the drawing pins, long-shanked ones. I'm saving you all the trouble I can."

Colston went out, and pinned the placard to the gate. The sightseers watched him wonderingly, and Butters accosted him.

"Not one word!" Colston answered sharply. "I want this place to myself, and don't mind using a shot-gun to keep it so."

Turning back, he informed the policeman on watch that he had no more need of his services, at which the man went off without hesitation. Entering the house again, Colston went to the study window and looked out. The male hiker, standing up now, was corking his thermos as a probable preparation for departure.

"Through those panes? Not a thing. And that old, greenish glass distorts as well as keeping out a good deal of light."

"No. I don't think anything will happen tonight. To-morrow, or Monday night—if at all. I'm taking precautions for tonight, though!"

"You will be—well, guarded, call it. There's another car going. It's getting late, of course. You're likely to have quite a pack of them to-morrow. Sunday, their day off. The power of the Press!"

"Which is not altogether a drawback," Head reflected. "It might induce the people we want to come spying out the land in preparation for action. And you see they don't stay very late."

Watching through the window, Colston saw the pair who wanted manifestations move along the fence toward the front gate. The man laid his hand on the latch and began opening the gate, and at that Colston opened the casement window and stuck his head out.

"Shut that gate and clear out!" he called harshly. "I've got a shot gun here, and I'll use it on any trespassers!"

Reluctantly the man closed the gate and withdrew. Colston closed the window and turned back, to see Head nodding approval.

"I've just thought of something," he said. "If I'm to stay here, what about food? I brought nothing with me."

"You'll find a most worthy woman, a Mrs. Cotton, will turn up to-morrow morning and cook your breakfast for you," Head answered. "It's all there ready to be cooked. I went to see her and found out how Wymering used to be looked after, and the same procedure will apply to you. She'll come in every morning as long as you're here—my men will clear off into one of the empty rooms upstairs while she's here. You have nothing whatever to worry about, Mr. Colston."

"Potter about the garden—do what you like. I don't think it will last long, and I think it will give me—what I want."

Head smiled. "You don't know this country as we do, Mr. Colston. You're set, here, not far from the middle of four square miles of woodland, which extends down as far as the new main road toward Westingborough. There's nothing to prevent any man who knows the country from disappearing into the woods at any point—turning into Squire Hastings' drive, for instance, as if he meant to go and call at the hall, and then reappearing at your back door. And you'll find six of those appearances will happen in the next two hours. I don't mind telling you that this business is costing me a lot of men—Superintendent Wadden and I had quite an argument about it, to-day, but he gave in at the finish—and I've had to make most elaborate preparations."

"What's your own opinion about it?" Head asked in reply. "Remember why Wymering was killed, and those things you brought with you." He pointed at the film boxes which Colston had placed on the table.

"Yes, you're right." There was strong conviction in the reply. "Hate is a strong motive, and jealousy is a strong motive too—and greed is another. But not one of them is in it with religious intensity, and from their point of view those people are absolutely justified in wiping out the sacrilege."

"I'd forgotten him." Colston thought again of Brenda Allday, telling him not long ago that his going to The Grey House was quite useless, convinced that her husband had unwittingly betrayed his guilt to her. "It's such a devil of a puzzle. I don't know."

"Exactly. I heard him tell his tale when he was wrought up by the terror of what he had been through. I know one has to discount a certain amount, but at the same time he had what one might call a photographic impress of what happened when he was driven in here—those three people with knives were etched on his brain, as I see it. And since I accept his account of the three, it's no use my trying to eliminate the woman and saying he was mistaken in that particular. One has to accept all his story, or else dismiss it all as fiction."

"And on the evidence of the burned films and the hellish torture they gave Wymering, you can't dismiss it," Colston asserted.

At a sound of movement in the entrance hall, Colston took two steps to the study door and flung it open. A tall, muscular-looking individual, apparently unfamiliar with his surroundings, looked at him.

"All right, Mr. Colston—he's merely number one," Head remarked. "Come in, Spriggs. The rest of them are on the way?"

"Yes, sir, but Mr. Wadden told us all to come different ways, so I don't know when the others'll get here."

"Well, that's all right. You'll have six guests tonight—and till I call them off or there's no further need for them, Mr. Colston. They won't give you any trouble, and the only place where they may show a light after dark is the kitchen, because I've noticed that the window in there is fitted with shutters, and no light can show through into the passage. But these men know why they are here, and what they have to do. I shall see you again some time to-morrow evening, I expect. Oh, one thing, though."

"You'll find the well at the back is fitted with a force pump, and there's a tank in the attic under the roof. You'll have to pump all the water for baths and everything else, I'm afraid."

Colston laughed. "It will be good exercise," he remarked. "I had a spell of it while I was here last year."

"Six hefty men, you'll find, will make it a bigger spell, and they must not risk being seen here by going outside. That's all, as nearly as I can remember. Now I'll get back."

He went out, through the entrance hall and along the passage to the kitchen, thence to the scullery door, where, screened by the house itself from the road, it was but a couple of steps into the rank growth of currant bushes and tall weeds that had once constituted a kitchen garden. Beyond this rose the thick shelter of the woods.

"Six of you," Colston observed to the man Spriggs when he returned. "What do you think you're going to do with yourselves?"

"Well, sir, I brought a couple of packs of cards, and we can make up a hand at solo between us, I should think."

From the road in front of the old grey cottage, the man and woman with a thirst for manifestations were last to go: the others, when shadows began to gather in the narrow way, gave up hope of seeing anything. Two or three late comers read the placard on the garden gate, and made off at once. There was, in reality, nothing to see but an ill-kept cottage garden, a frontage of grey stone, and the summer green of the woods behind. No sound came from the house, no light showed at any of its windows. In the kitchen, with the window both curtained and shuttered and the door closed, Colston lost steadily at penny nap.

Half-darkness rendered indistinct the figures of two men who came down the hill, one a policeman in uniform, the other a shambling figure carrying a bundle and an untidy paper parcel. Constable James Vane, the uniformed one of the pair, was beginning to shamble a bit too. He had been out all the night before, and to-day had walked himself weary even before being told to turn out and escort this detestable tramp in quest of a parcel and then to Westingborough. The whole business, he reflected, was utterly irregular: sending him alone with the man like this—his foot turned on a loose stone, and he cursed the road and the sergeant at Carden, audibly.

"Shut up and keep going," Vane growled. "You're the cause of all this blasted trouble!"

It would be too late, he knew, to hand in his resignation when he got to Westingborough with his man, but he would make it the first thing on Monday morning, without fail! The late W. S. Gilbert, he knew now, had altogether understated the case as to the lack of happiness in a policeman's lot. Also there were openings for smart young men in the Air Force.

With Bismarck slightly in the lead, by order of his disgruntled escort, the pair went through gathering night toward Westingborough.

Sunday was still quite a new day when the sound of a car making its way uphill in low gear took Colston and one of the plain-clothed policemen to the window. It was, the policeman conjectured, somebody going on up to Allday's Farm, or to Squire Hastings' place, but, in defiance of his surmises, the car stopped outside The Grey House.

"One of Parham's hire cars, too," he observed, recognising both the vehicle and its driver. "And a woman getting out—"

"I know who it is," Colston interrupted him. "Keep out of sight, in the kitchen with the door shut, for preference. I'll talk to her."

For Brenda Allday, paying no heed to the placard on the gate, came up the path and knocked at the door. Colston opened it.

Gazing at her, he saw that she was unusually pale, and her expression indicated strain of some sort. He gestured at the study door.

"In here," he said, and, following her into the room, closed the door. Then he turned to her again. "What is it, Brenda?" he asked.

"You, and a dream," she answered. "Martin, I had to come to tell you, to warn you. Don't laugh at me—don't ignore it."

"This house. You mustn't stay here. Whatever it means, you must not stay here, Martin. Not for another night."

"But—think it selfish of me if you will. You said—I might count on you. I do—and there's nobody else at all, now. And—and if you stay here, there won't be even you. I know it was only a dream, but it was so terribly, fearfully real, Martin. So real and vivid that I rang for a car to bring me here as soon as I got down—and even then didn't know whether I should find you alive, or whether it had already happened, before I could get to you."

"Whether what had already happened?" he asked. "What was this dream? Sit down and tell me all of it, Brenda."

He put his hand on her arm to direct her to a chair, and felt that she was trembling. She obeyed his urging, and, seating herself, looked up at him as he stood beside the chair.

"In the dream, I was outside the house, and it was dark," she said. "Not altogether dark, for I could see the door, and the windows with no lights in them, and something square and white on the gate. And do you see, Martin—do you see what that means? I didn't know anything, then, about that card pinned to the gate, didn't know there was anything of the sort there. Yet I saw it in the dream."

"Yes," he said, "it sounds real. But there's some explanation for those things, among the Freudians and people of that sort—"

"Martin, there's only one explanation," she interrupted forcefully. "It was a warning, a warning I had to come and give you at once. As I have come to give it. Listen to the rest. I saw the white square on the gate, as I told you, and the door, an outline in the darkness. And there was a man standing outside the door, and he seemed to be bent as if listening. It wasn't like a dream at all, but more as if I stood looking at a picture, or at the reality—"

She shook her head. "I wanted to go nearer and see if it were you," she answered. "I was almost sure it was you, but it was too dark to see the face. And while I watched, three others went through the gateway and along the garden path—three just like the three the tramp believed he saw, two men, and another dressed all in white, a long white skirt such as a woman might wear for evening dress. In my dream I remembered the tramp's story, and knew the same three had come back, the two men and the woman. I wanted to cry out, but—"

"Brenda," Colston interrupted again, "don't you see what it was? You were enacting the killing of Wymering all over again in this dream. You were harking back, not forward."

"Was Bernard killed like that?" she asked, and shook her head in negation. "Martin, was there a square of cardboard on the gate then? You know quite well there was not. No, it was a warning."

"No. I saw these three go along the path till they reached the man standing just outside the door. He made as if to strike one of them, and I think he began to cry out, but two of them seized him and it seemed as if the cry were choked back—as if one of them put a hand over his mouth. Then the woman—the one in white, ran forward and drove a knife into his side, and the other two laid him down beside the path, dead! Dead, Martin! And I wakened and came to tell you—I couldn't rest till I knew you were alive, and had told you."

"Brenda," he said gently, reassuringly, "you've been thinking of this—of Wymering's death—and brooding over it. All that you tell me you saw—it was only a dream, you know."

"More than a dream," she dissented firmly. "I believe it is given us—some of us—to see, at times, if we—don't you understand, Martin? You were very near Bernard, his greatest friend, and very near me too. I was given that, given the opportunity to warn you. I know—I don't merely believe, but know—that if you stay here even one more night, one more darkness, it means death."

She spoke with the certainty of absolute conviction, of knowledge rather than belief. Colston looked down at her, met the gaze of her eyes and saw their pleading insistence: he knew he could not shake this belief of hers, could not influence her, though she was impelled by no more than a dream. But he knew, too, that to do what she asked, spoil Head's plan, was an impossibility.

"It's no use, Brenda," he said. "I don't—don't belittle your warning. It isn't that. But I must stay here."

"Oh, but can't you realise—?" There was desperation in the unfinished appeal, and she stood up facing him, tense with determination. "I was afraid I was too late even to-day, but—but it was given me to warn you—to save you, if you will be saved. Martin, you shall not stay here alone tonight!"

"Then I'll come and stay with you! The cottage is mine, now—I won't let you stay in it alone. It means death, I tell you."

"Brenda, there were six men here with me, and a watch was kept all night," he said. "Just such a watch will be kept tonight, and perhaps every night for a week. As long as Head thinks fit."

Frowning in the effort at comprehension, she took in the meaning of his words. "And—and they are here now?" she asked.

"Here now. As long as there is need for me to be here, they will be here too. But I've no business to tell you that—you must keep it entirely to yourself—mustn't know it—"

"And who," she interrupted bitterly, "is likely to speak to me, or ask me anything? Not that I'd tell if they did, since you ask me to keep it secret. But nobody will ask—nobody will speak—"

He laid his hands on her shoulders and shook her a little, smiling and shaking his head at her the while.

"All strung up," he said, "and that dream of yours is part of it. It won't happen, but—I'm a little worried about you, all the same. Look here, Brenda! When all this is finished, give me the chance to get you right away somewhere and restore a normal outlook for you. I think you've brooded over the muddle of things too much, the shock that smashed life for you when you saw a chance of its opening out—"

He broke off abruptly at sight of the tears in her eyes. Releasing herself from the grasp of his hands, she turned away from him.

"That's why—the dream," she said tremulously. "Why I—if it came true—for myself as much as for you. The fear—"

"Brenda"—Colston had a sudden thought—"there's a Mrs. Cotton almost due here to clean up the place for me as if I were alone, and to spread the news that I am alone, I think. I've got to go and see my half-dozen guardians upstairs out of the way before she gets here."

"I can assure you, for one thing, that I shall not be outside the house after dark, and with six men in here with me—" He broke off.

"I suppose I must leave you, then, but I shall be afraid until—as long as you're here, And you do understand—I had to warn you?"

"Of course I do! Don't fear for me, though. If I were alone here, you might, but as it is I'm quite safe."

He went with her to the door and gave her a reassuring smile. As he turned back, he noted that the rug had been pulled over those ugly stains on the floor, and felt glad that she had not seen them. And, having lived in the East, he did not altogether ignore her warning: the dream might have been induced, as he had told her, by brooding over the tragedy that had already happened here, and then again... When he went to warn his guardians of Mrs. Cotton's impending arrival, he found that they had already anticipated him, and retreated to one of the empty upstair rooms. There he found them, weighting the bare bedstead.

"If you'll get away down, sir," Spriggs suggested, "we'll lock the door and keep quiet. It wouldn't do for us to be heard when that charwoman gets here, or for you to be talking to us."

Chapter XXI
Ensanguined Rag

IT was still so early, that Sunday morning, that the Salvation Army band had not begun to parade Westingborough streets when Head, just about to enter the police station, saw the car Brenda Allday had hired from Parham's garage pull up outside the Duke of York, and saw too that Brenda herself descended from the vehicle and hurried into the hotel. Querying to himself as to whether she had been out all night, or had merely ordered the car for an early morning drive, Head entered the police station, found Sergeant Wells reading the most lurid of the Sunday papers, and motioned the sergeant to sit down again when he put down the paper and stood to attention to greet his superior.

"Constable Vane arrived from Carden late last night, sir," Wells answered. "Nine thirty-five, in fact. Escorting a man now in custody in the cells here, the one our Marvel wrote his letters to. This one is named Bismarck Marvel, and he brought the rag his brother wrote about." He proceeded to give an account of the recovery of the rag.

"Yes, and where is the said rag?" Head inquired, when he had heard all the story.

Head went out, then, to Wadden's room, and found everything locked away, there. He took off the telephone receiver and rang Wadden's home, and, being answered by Mrs. Wadden, asked for her husband.

"Oh, yes, it's me," Wadden said when he faced the transmitter. "I'm half-shaved, if you want to know. Couldn't you sleep last night?"

"Damn it, man, it's Sunday morning! And I'm having sausages and tomatoes for breakfast, when I've finished dressing."

"I put it in the cupboard behind the door in my room—threw the package in just as it was. It was late when Vane got here with it. Head, I'm going to make Sergeant Plender over at Carden wish he'd never been born, sending a prisoner here under escort of one man, and on foot at that. I'll be over in an hour or so with the key of the cupboard—"

"Chief, I don't want to wait an hour," Head interrupted. "The rag may be of vital importance. Do I break the cupboard open—"

"If you do," Wadden roared, interrupting in turn, "I'll break you open. Oh, send a man round here and I'll give him the blasted key! Sunday morning—I might have been at my prayers, for all you know! But if you think I'm coming round there before I've had my sausages and tomatoes, on a Sunday morning, it shows your brain is out of order. Blast your old rag! Send a man round for the key!"

The receiver slammed on its hook, and the clang of it hit Head in the ear. He went back to the charge room, smiling to himself.

"Send a man round to Superintendent Wadden's house, sergeant," he bade, "and tell him to ask for the key of the cupboard in the Superintendent's room. And you might let me have the keys to the cells where the two Marvels are. I'll fill in time with them till the keys arrive."

Armed with the keys, he went to the row of cells at the back of the police station, and met Constable Vane, naked from the waist up and with a towel round his neck, about to enter a cell.

"Quartered yourself here for the night, eh?" Head inquired, in friendly fashion.

"Stand to attention and put 'sir' at the end of your next sentence, Vane!" Head rasped out harshly.

"I'm sorry, sir." Vane came to attention, and put a satiric emphasis into the title which rendered it almost derisive.

Head stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned against the nearest wall, smiling. "What's wrong, Vane?" he asked, friendly again.

"Fed up, sir," Vane answered, not omitting the title this time, and speaking more easily. "Plender—that is, Sergeant Plender—has got it in for me. Because I'm not deficient in aspirates, I think. Anyhow, could I hand in my resignation to-day, or do I wait till to-morrow—sir?" He repeated the title, again with marked emphasis.

"The Superintendent will be here some time during the morning," Head answered. "You can hand it to him when he arrives. All right, Vane, you needn't continue standing to attention. I'm wondering what your father will think of this. He came for a talk with me over your joining the force here, you ought to know."

"He did, and he spoke pretty plainly," Head said, still leaning lazily against the wall, and keeping his gaze on his man. "Colonel Vane, D.S.O., was so frank as to tell me that he hadn't two sixpences to rub together, and wished his boy had chosen something better than this. But since he had chosen it, the colonel wouldn't stop him, and only hoped he'd make good. He said there wasn't much in any career, these days, and quite possibly a man who made a mark at keeping the peace in a place he knew was as good as one who went fighting among people he didn't know. He was, as I told you, quite frank about you."

"Gosh!" Vane quite forgot the 'sir', this time. "The old buffer said all that, did he?"

"Colonel Vane"—Head took his hands from his pockets, and himself almost stood to attention—"honoured me with his confidence to that extent. But about this resignation—you can write it in the charge room, and have it ready when Superintendent Wadden comes in."

"Mr. Head"—Vane spoke awkwardly—"to hell with resigning, after what you've told me. It'd be letting the old man down. I'll stick Plender, damn him—stick everything! But I've very nearly got corns on my elbows, let alone my feet, after last night."

"Plender," Head said, "is due to get it in the neck—this is in confidence, Vane—for turning out a prisoner on foot in charge of one man, and you're due to get moved in here, under my own supervision, in the course of a month or so. Quite soon, probably—unless you still want to resign, of course—you'll be able to shed that uniform and give me a hand over more important things than controlling traffic at the London Road end of Market Street. The man who went into a dark house and brought Marvel out of it with the threat of a savage dog all the time is the sort of man I want, you see."

"Here!" Head was smiling as he spoke. "You'd better stand to attention again. All right, Vane—I want to talk to these tramps."

"There was no dog," Head answered calmly. "Now I'm going to talk to a Marvel. You get dressed, in case I want you later."

He left Vane, who started whistling as he made his way toward the cell in which he had camped down for the night, and opened a cell door farther along the corridor with one of the two keys he had brought. Mr. Napoleon Marvel, glooming as he sat on his bed-boards in his shirt-sleeves—it was the new shirt that had been bought for him, and therefore he looked reasonably clean—looked up, and then slowly got on his feet and picked up his coat as if to put it on.

"You can put it down," Head told him. "You're not going out of here yet, Marvel. How are they treating you?"

"It don't matter," Napoleon answered morosely. "Look like to me as if I ain't goin' out at all. When'll they 'ang me?"

"As well be 'ung as 'ere," Mr. Marvel said with bitter emphasis. "I ain't got nuthin' on me conscience—I never done that bloke in. An' what's a 'angin', when you got nuthin' on yer mind? One click—they say it ain't painful, an' I got no use for livin' like this."

But the look in his eyes belied the brave words. Head moved forward and seated himself on the end of the bed boards.

"I wonder," he said. "Marvel, if you go out free from here, what sort of work will you do? You remember you promised to work."

"Yus, an' I been thinkin' about that, too, till I give up 'ope," Mr. Marvel said with renewed bitterness. "I takes it back. F'r I thinks to meself, there's them what likes work, an' if I took on to do any I'd only be doin' somebody outer his enjoyment. An' I ain't used to it, y'see. I got on all right nigh on fifty year without doin' any, an' if I did get out, which I don't believe I will, now, I goes back to real freedom, I do. 'Ceptin' of course, when I gets run in an' 'as to do time, which is bound to 'appen once in a while."

"So you count it real freedom to tramp the country and risk starvation, rather than work for a living?" Head suggested.

"Ho, no!" Mr. Marvel dissented vigorously. "Don't you kid yerself, Mr. 'Ead. We don't starve, us sort don't. There's 'ares an' rabbits an' dicky birds for the ketchin', an' round the villages there's lots o' people, wimmen specially, what calls us pore fellers an' coughs up the beer money. An' then"—he waxed lyrical as his vision of freedom grew clearer—"there's the places in the woods where you builds the fire an' smells the cookin', an' while you sits alongside the water waitin' f'r the feed, maybe a water rat comes out an' looks at yer, an' there's the pigeons cooin' away up in the trees when you wake up in the morning, an' the air's all fresh, like, an'—I'm chokin', dyin' a bit at a time shut up 'ere! 'Ang me an' done with it, says I! Better'n waitin' like I do all day, an' exercise in that blasted yard."

Head stood up again. "So, when we let you out, it's going to be war between us again, eh?" he asked.

"If you mean am I gonna live as I've allus lived," Napoleon said defiantly, "I says yus, I am. But d'you mean I'm a goin' out?"

"Eventually, you are going out," Head assured him. "You see, Marvel, I have reason to think I've found one of the two men who frightened you into the house that night—reason to think it, though I'm not quite sure, yet. All I've got to do now is to find the other man, and the woman, and then they come in here and you go out. But I'm still puzzled about the woman, the one all in white."

"She 'ung back," Mr. Marvel said, "an' I was all scared an' not really noticin' things properly. But she was there—take my oath on it. All in white, right down to 'er feet, an' the knife in 'er 'and just like the other two—the men. Take my solemn oath on it, I will. She 'eld the knife up as if she'd come arter me, afore I run in where that there dorg was. I must of been braver'n I thought I was, to chance the dorg like that, but I was frightened of them knives."

"Then I got a 'ope!" Mr. Marvel exclaimed with renewed bitterness. "Some 'ope, I don't think! Me as innocent as a babe, sittin' 'ere an' waitin' to be 'ung! Well, 'ang me, but do it quick. An' while you're about it, you better 'ang Bizzy too. Me twin—'e's inside too, I 'eard, f'r ketchin' 'is breakfast. 'Ang 'im too!"

He slumped down on the bed boards, wrathful and despairing. Then he looked up at Head with appeal in his eyes.

"If only I might see the road an' the trees an' smell the wind, it wouldn't be so bad," he said. "I sits 'ere an' thinks, an' there's nuthin' but the walls an' a little bit o' sky through the winder. 'Alf the time I don't know what I'm thinkin'—dreamin', sorter. Places like this is 'ell to blokes like me—it's like bein' dead while yer still alive. Walls an' a little bit o' sky, an' I thinks of the sun shinin' an' the pigeons a cooin', an' beer waitin' to be drunk. 'Ell, that's what it is. 'Ell, an' no 'ope, an' when you ain't got 'ope it is 'ell!"

Head glanced at his watch. Wadden's keys would have arrived by this time, he surmised, and talking to Marvel while the man was in this mood was of little use. But one thing remained to be said.

"When you take your exercise to-day, Marvel," he said, "I'm going to see that this brother of yours shares it with you. You and he can talk quite freely, and I want you to make him understand that you and he will both be wanted to tell your stories of what you saw on the night of the murder. Your story of the three men at the house, and his of the car he saw and how he found the rag. So talk it over him, and if he tells a plain tale I'll see what I can do toward getting his sentence reduced. You won't get any sentence—I'll see to that, whatever happens. Now be patient for a day or two longer, and take my word for it, you are going out. I can't say exactly when, but you are going out, whether we catch those three or no."

Release for Marvel, he knew, would be a long and tedious business, if the three were not caught, but there was no need to mention the possibility of the law's delays. The tramp looked up, hopeful again.

"But," Head added, "when you get out, it seems, you'll merely come back in for poaching or vagrancy or something of the sort."

"Thass me life," Napoleon explained. "Sometimes I gets away with it, an' sometimes I don't. Jest luck. But bein' 'ere when I ain't done nuthin' to deserve it like this, an' they sayin' I done a murder when I wouldn't 'urt a fly—that ain't fair. You been decent to me, Mr. 'Ead, an' I'll go on tryin' to believe what you say. An' I'll tell Bizzy to talk straight, like you want 'im to."

With a word or two of acknowledgment of the promise, Head left him and, returning to the charge room, found that Wadden's keys had arrived. Taking them from Wells, he went to Wadden's room and opened the cupboard behind the door, where the parcel he wanted lay on the bottom shelf. It was bigger and heavier than he had anticipated: he slipped off the string with which Bismarck had secured it, and shook out from the dirty wrapping paper a wisped-up bundle of white fabric, mud-stained in parts, and bearing on it, too, uglier, deep-brown splashes. Taking the thing up gingerly and shaking it out, Head released a half-dozen or so of earwigs which had been hidden in the folds: he managed to slaughter most of them, and then, getting the thing right end up, shook it out fully and held it before him.

Head faced toward him, still holding the stained, dirty garment up before himself. "It's all clear now, Chief," he said gravely.

"Is it a nightshirt?" Wadden asked. "You don't seem to have saved such a lot of time, worrying me about that key. And what's all clear? You mean—? Yes, though, I see. Yes. That was Marvel's woman."

"I think they call the thing a burnous." Head dropped it on the floor and slaughtered another scurrying earwig with his foot. "One of them used it—Gosh, but I've never heard of anything quite so cold-blooded, if I'm right! Put it on for the killing to prevent blood from splashing his clothes, just as a butcher might. Took it off in the car, and they threw it over that bridge parapet nearly a hundred miles away. Yes, it's Marvel's woman all in white."

Wadden sat down in his swivel chair. "Makes you feel a bit sickish, conjuring up how it was done," he remarked. "Devils, those three, Head. Any marks on the thing—laundry marks, or anything?"

"None," he said as he dropped it on the floor. "But I think—Colston, or somebody like him who knows the country where things like this are worn, could give us pointers to prove it a sort of garment worn out East. Not that it matters much. It's this clearing up the problem of the woman that makes it worth while."

"We store this as an exhibit," Head answered, "and to-night or to-morrow night, I hope, they'll come again. And won't go away, this time. I'll be there myself, waiting for them."

"I know," Head assented. "If it fails, I think I'll get a warrant for Afifi's arrest, search his belongings on the chance of finding a duplicate to this, and put in the stories of the two Marvel brothers about the car and my own finding of the transferable number plates. I think that garage hand, Arthur Smith, could be made to squeal, and at the worst we could smash the case against Napoleon and let him out again. Also, at the best, Afifi might give his pals away in an attempt at saving himself, and that would end the case."

"Sheer gambling," Wadden repeated. "Glory for you if it comes off, of course, but if it doesn't, you'll get hell."

At a little past seven o'clock that evening, Head came out from the police station to find Jeffries waiting with the two-seater car which he usually drove himself. He went round to the near side of the car and opened the door to take the passenger's seat.

"Stop when you get to the gateway of Condor Grange, Jeffries," he bade. "I'll get out there and take to the woods, and you can come back here with the car. I shall not need—"

"Wait a bit, Jeffries," Head bade, and, closing the car door, went back, and took the call in the charge room.

"About half an hour ago. In the Rolls, but alone. He took it out from the Carshalton garage, and—Jerry!—he's got the Bugatti numbers on it. Also, I got Barker to let me have a look at the Bugatti at four in the morning, when there was nobody else in the garage. The number plates are backed by thin tin plates with the same number on them—YO 7555. D'you see? When the proper plates are transferred to the Rolls, those tin plates make it appear that the Bugatti still has its proper plates on. The whole idea of it is that Afifi can borrow the Rolls without his boss knowing anything about it, and since the garage works on number plates rather than the actual cars, it would appear that the Rolls had not been out and the Bugatti had. Get it?"

"He turned east. It being Sunday, my man couldn't get a taxi in time to chase him and see where he really went. Alphonse tells me El Hag Khalil has got two Frenchmen dining with him to-night, so you can rule him out unless you hear further from me. I'd say look for Afifi and probably his pals as well at about eleven. That's the time he got there last visit, isn't it?"

"Or a bit earlier," Head assented. "Terry, can you take the risk of putting Arthur Smith where he has no chance to talk?"

"Cheerfully," Byrne assented. "You're quite right—he was the only one who had a chance to change the plates for Afifi. Good luck, Jerry—give me all your news to-morrow."

"Percy Butters of the Universal is down here," Head responded, "so you won't want any news from me. Many thanks, Terry—I'll get along."

He hung up and went back to Jeffries, and the two-seater went away. A quarter of an hour later, Head descended in the gateway giving access to the marshes opposite Condor Grange, unseen by anyone, and Jeffries backed the car out on to the main road and turned back to Westingborough. Then, climbing over the rail fence, Head took to the utter obscurity of a belt of beech trees which extended, parallel with the road, along the edge of the marsh land. Thus hidden from sight, he gained the woods on the slope of Condor Hill, and emerged to the back door of The Grey House, where he entered.

Within the house, daylight had so far failed that Colston had lighted the incandescent paraffin lamp in the big entrance hall, and, evidently, had invited his half-dozen guards in to share the light with him. All seven of them rose as Head appeared from the passage at the back, and Colston nodded a greeting.

"I've had a day of it," he remarked. "It's not ten minutes since I threatened the last man who tried to come in at the gate. They take no notice at all of that placard, most of them."

"One of you men had better watch the back door," Head said rather drily, "and threaten anyone who attempts entry by it. I had no difficulty over getting in, and though the woods are watched somebody might come into the garden and try to slip round to the back."

"I'll go," one of them said, while the others looked sheepish, and he went out. Head looked at Colston.

"A day of it, you say," he remarked. "Well, by the look of things, you'll have a night of it as well."

Chapter XXII
Dream Becomes Reality

AT half-past nine, Colston opened the front door of the cottage, went along the path to the gate, and returned, closing the door again.

"Not a soul in sight," he reported to Head, "and not a sound nearer than the motors on the main road, changing gear to take the hill."

"I've had word from London. The car that brought them here before left its garage at about half-past six, with only the driver in it. At the best, it's three and a half hours here from London—that's driving all out with a fast car, all the way. But as I see it, that driver has two more men to pick up, if we are to have a repetition of the night when Wymering was killed, which means he won't get on to his road and begin to travel fast until at least a quarter of an hour after starting. At the same time, we can't depend on that, so from ten o'clock, three and a half hours after he left the garage, we shall all need to be posted, and keep absolutely silent."

"A burnous, I think you call it," Head answered deliberately. "A white sort of robe, put on to prevent blood from splashing his ordinary clothes. I've got the one he used last time, and hope he puts on another to do his torturing and kill you."

Spriggs, the senior of the six men whom Head had turned out in plain clothes for this adventure, grinned at the Inspector's phrasing. But Colston did not grin. his eyes opened widely in surprise.

"In every case," Head answered indirectly, "there is an element of chance, and one utilises it. That burnous by no means makes a complete case. I have to prove that the man who wore it was one of the three in the car that night, and when you told me what your film was and would do, this appealed to me as the simplest way of proving the case—"

"D'you mean you're going to let them get hold of me and start on me?" Colston interrupted, aghast at the prospect.

"Nothing of the sort. Let them break in here tonight, then add Marvel's story to the story of the film, produce the knives or daggers or whatever they carry, get their identities, and I don't see much chance of their getting away with it. But it's time to stop talking. When we're all posted down here, I want you to put this light out, and go up to the bedroom with a candle and blow it out after a time, as if you were going to bed. Do you care to stay up there?"

"Very well, then. You can come back down and join Spriggs and Horton in the dining-room. But mind, not one sound. Not even a whisper anywhere in the house after ten o'clock."

"Get that, you chaps," Spriggs murmured to his fellows, and a general series of nods answered him.

"Lock the back door and fetch that man away from it, Spriggs," Head ordered. "We'll get to our places, now."

"A last warning," he said. "You all know why you are here, and what is expected of you. There may be—there should be—three men, all armed with knives for a certainty, and possibly with firearms too. You have truncheons only. On my word to attack, hit, and hit hard, for your own sakes. Now to your posts, and dead silence from then on."

Two men moved to the study door and stood waiting there, ready to enter as soon as the light was extinguished. Two more went to the dining-room doorway, and waited there. Head himself, and one other, placed themselves so that the front door, opening, would conceal them from anyone entering the hall from the garden.

"Because you don't hit," Head explained. "I don't wish you to take any active part tonight. Keep out of it."

"Time's up," Head announced, after a few seconds' silence. "Now, Mr. Colston, light yourself a candle, put the lamp out, and go upstairs. You'd better let your shadow show on the curtains taking your coat off as if undressing, and don't put the candle out and come down again until a good ten minutes have passed. That will make it just ten o'clock, and after that we can begin to expect our guests."

Presently Colston, carrying the candle, went up the staircase, and with the entrance hall in darkness the men who had waited opened the dining-room and study doors and took up their posts. Head and the man with him seated themselves on the settle behind the front door, and after a long age Colston came downstairs and made his silent way to the dining-room. Then followed a period of utter silence within the cottage, though, outside, the noises of woodland night went on.

They could hear, too, the noise made by cars ascending the new main road over the shoulder of Condor Hill, and once, faint by reason of distance, singing which indicated that a car or charabanc load of late travellers had been making merry before setting off homeward. In the wood nearby, a rabbit squealed. Another car changed into noisy low gear on the distant road, and its grinding indication of upward progress grew fainter as it receded uphill, and at last died out.

Waiting there in the darkness, Head questioned of himself—would the three come tonight, after all? Afifi might have gone out merely to make plans with his fellow conspirators—but, in that case, he would not have taken the Rolls, but his own smaller car, without incurring the risk involved in changing number plates. Then, would they come by the coach road from Crandon, or take the new road and turn into this old way where the two joined, to come up as far as the gateway into which they had backed the car before. If the former, then in passing the cottage to get to the gateway they would give warning of their approach, while in the latter case there would probably be no indication at all of their arrival until they opened this front door.

Was it all futile? They must have spied on the cottage with some thoroughness to know when to make their attack on Wymering, and it was possible that they suspected a trap and would not repeat the attempt. Yet Marvel was in custody charged with the murder—Head went over all that had happened and that he had done since the night of the murder, and could find only one possibility, the man Arthur Smith, to rank as a flaw in his plan. Smith might have betrayed to Afifi that his car had been examined. Yet against that was the fact that the number plates had been changed again to-day, according to Byrne's telephone message, and that could mean only one thing.

If the plan failed, he, Head, would get hell, as Wadden had told him. Already the luminous hands of his wrist watch indicated half-past ten, and, in order to get and burn the films and then make an end of Wymering, they must have arrived quite as early as this.

The latch of the gate clicked. Footsteps—one set of footsteps only—sounded on the garden path, and then came a knock at the door. Head heard the man seated beside him draw a sharp, audible breath, and reached out to put a hand on the man's arm as indication of the need for maintaining silence. The knock was repeated, this time with some hard substance—a knife handle, possibly.

Dead silence followed. Then, by the sound, this visitor drew back from the door, and passed along the front of the house—his footsteps sounded, as nearly as Head could tell, in the direction of the study window and beyond it, and died out as if he had gone round to the back. The door there, Head knew, was securely fastened, as were all windows: ingress was easy by way of the front door, impossible elsewhere, apart from actually breaking in with the aid of burglars' tools.

Silence again, except for another car grinding its way on low gear up the distant main road hill. Then into the silence came a faint murmur of voices—it was very faint, as if one or more people spoke in lowered tones—somewhere near the garden gate. Hard on this, footsteps again as of somebody returning past the study window, and then a scuffling rush, and a choked-off effort at a shout, ending in a faint moan. On that, Head stood up, and motioned to his man to do likewise. As they came to their feet the front door was opened, letting in comparative light to the absolute blackness of the entrance hall, and three figures passed in, grouped, and paused.

They spoke, but in their own language. After, Colston told Head what they had said—

Then with a shout—"Charge out, men!" Head gave the door a shove that slammed it closed, and himself, clicking on the electric torch he held in his left hand, charged out with upraised truncheon. He dropped it fairly on the temple of one of the three as the man tried to turn, and in trying fell senseless under the blow. A rush from both sides of the entrance hall, and another went down across his fellow, while the third struggled fiercely, but only for seconds, in the grip of two assailants. He too collapsed to the floor with a wild shriek as one of the two, getting his arm in a police grip, dislocated his shoulder joint, and the fray was ended.

"Tie them up," Head bade quietly, "and somebody light that lamp. Spriggs, search them for weapons. When it comes to taking them back to Westingborough, we shall find a car down the road, and I can send Jeffries here with the saloon to take what their car won't hold. Look out, for that one! He's coming round."

Then he went to the door and opened it. "I want to know what happened outside," he explained. Look after these three, Spriggs."

His electric torch showed him Allday, face upward on the garden path, lying with his left arm outflung and a knife or dagger haft protruding from his left side. The momentary agony of his death had not yet faded out from Allday's face.

"You will say, we have done murder. I know your English law, and I speak your English very well. If you wish, I will tell you everything, for I know there is no escape from your law."

Wadden, seated in his office—it was past midnight, but on Head's report of his capture he had dressed and come back to the police station—gave Head a questioning look. Before them, with Spriggs in plain clothes on his right, and a uniformed constable on his left, stood a tall, brown-faced man, probably in his forties, a well-tailored man who appeared quite at his ease, though his wrists were secured behind him by a pair of handcuffs.

"If he changes his mind, the statement will be disputed in evidence," Wadden observed.

"I think we'd better have it," Head said. "Spriggs, go and turn Potter out and tell him to bring a shorthand note-book. He needn't wait to get fully dressed—let him come in pyjamas, if he likes. Hawker, get this man a chair. You can sit down, Afifi."

The handcuffed man seated himself. Presently appeared Spriggs, and with him Potter, in pyjamas and overcoat.

"Draw a chair up to the end of the desk, Potter," Wadden bade, "and take down a statement. Take that coat off, if you like—it's a hot night, and we're all males. Now—Afifi, isn't it?"

"El Hag Mohamed Tewfik Afifi," the man said slowly, and watched Potter's pencil as the police clerk wrote the name.

"Under no compulsion, and desiring of your own free will to make this statement," Wadden warned him.

"Of my own free will," Afifi assented, "that you may know that my brother, El Hag Khalil Said el Matari, to whom I am secretary, is ignorant of all this thing. For I have used his car, and if I say nothing you may also arrest him. He knows nothing of what we have done."

"Myself, El Hag Mohamed Tewfik Afifi, and with me the Imam Ibrahim Bechir el Berkawi, whose arm is broken by your men tonight, or else the shoulder is broken, and Hag Musa Wassef, from the Tanezruft—"

"Can you spell that little lot for me?" Potter appealed, interrupting. "Get it as near English as you can."

"I write your English, as I speak it, very well, and will spell all the names," Afifi promised. "But if I might have one hand released, because of the strain on the shoulder, please?"

"Then I will spell the names," Afifi said, with cool resignation. "Then I will make the statement. Else, my brother might suffer."

He spelt out the names he had spoken, and watched the movements of Potter's pencil until it poised and the writer looked up.

"Two infidel dogs," said Afifi, and spat beside his chair for emphasis, "made pilgrimage to Mecca, making themselves as of the Faithful, so well that no man knew them for what they were. With them they took a camera, a little, concealed camera, and with it they made pictures of all the holy places. Pictures, that the things sacred to us might be a mock among the infidels of all the world, as if they spat in the face of Allah and of the Prophet himself. See, you also infidel dogs, how these of your kind would make derision of holy things. Would you that we, believers, should spit on your altars and defile the places of your faith? Such is this thing to us, and rather than that it should be I, El Hag Mohamed Tewfik Afifi, would die a hundred of your deaths and know Paradise waits me at the end!"

"We dogs will make a note of it," Wadden promised calmly. "Meanwhile, Mr. Afifi, it's very late, and we want the meat of your statement. You can save the curses till the end, if you don't mind."

"So be it," said Afifi, resuming his former coolness. "I also, at that time, was a pilgrim to the holy places, as was the Imam Ibrahim Bechir el Berkawi, whose third pilgrimage it was, while for me it was but the second kissing of the black stone. Let Allah be praised! Now since the Imam and I travelled back at the end of the pilgrimage and came to Cairo, where dwells a brother whom the Imam would see before he went back to his own place, it chanced that one of our faith, also dwelling in Cairo, heard talk of another, a man of the Ministry of Education in Cairo, yet a believer of sorts. For this other one was in the bar of the Continental hotel in Cairo one day, and he heard talk between these two dogs of the thing they had done, they telling one another that they had, so they said, made a picture that should shake the world. He told the one of our faith what he had heard, and that one told the brother of the Imam Ibrahim Bechir el Berkawi, who in turn told the Imam. And the Imam told me, asking, should such a thing as this be, or were we true followers of the Prophet and of Allah the Compassionate, the Just—"

"We want the statement," Wadden interrupted again, inexorably. "Put the praises and curses at the end, not in the middle."

"So, I know, would a dog of an infidel regard me," Afifi said, and again spat, leaning forward in his chair.

"That floor is going to be cleaned in the morning, you bloody murderer," Wadden observed with some heat. "Tell your tale, or go back to your cell, which you like. I'm getting fed up with you, and if you feel like that, I'll order a spittoon in. This is my floor."

"I said," Afifi pursued, with half a grin on his lean, dark face, "that this thing should not be. So I stole the camera, and the picture they had made. We saw it was in truth a picture of all the holy places, a thing wonderful, but accursed, for we bought a machine and showed it to ourselves, though it was a very little picture, not much more than the thickness of a cord, and we had much trouble to see it. Then we burned the accursed thing and destroyed the camera, and thought all was done, but learned after that these two dogs had made a large copy, of the sort they show in the picture houses. So it was as if we had done nothing, for while these dogs had a copy, these sons of dogs who would have defiled our faith, made us a mockery to the infidel world—"

"That comes last, I told you," Wadden interposed again, and looked at his watch. "If you keep branching off like this, I shall get no sleep at all. Tell us what you did."

"I will not tell you how we learned of this copy," Afifi resumed, with no resentment at the interruption, "lest others should suffer. In the end, it was agreed between me, and the Imam Ibrahim Bechir el Berkawi, and Hag Musa Wassef, that we should spend our substance to follow these two and, if it might be, destroy the picture. Also, kill them both, for the sacrilege they had done in the holy places. All of it I will not tell you, but since the man Allday who wanted the letters is dead, this I will tell you. There was a man, Allday, who hated the one named Wymering. This I found out, and went to the man named Allday. He gave me word by telephone when Wymering would be here and alone. To-day, before I set out, I spoke to him by telephone and asked him if the other, Colston, would be at the house ready to be killed—but I did not say ready to be killed. He said the man would be there, but that we must not come there any more. I think he went to warn the man Colston tonight, but among ourselves we said he must not leave the place alive, having seen us. So we killed him, lest he should say he had seen us when we came to kill the man Colston. I killed him. Musa and the Imam held him, and I drove in the knife."

Afifi watched Potter's pencil travel over the paper, and then hang poised over it, He smiled, rather a happy smile.

"The rest is for you to tell," he said. "As for me, and for the Imam, and Hag Musa Wassef, we would die content if we had but destroyed the last copy of the picture that was in the hands of this man Colston. Even though we have not done this, we die in the hope that some other may come to destroy it, and, dogs all, know that we die in the certainty that we go from your gallows to Paradise, as surely as warriors of the Crescent have always gone. For we have striven for the Faith, worked for the Faith, and our reward is sure. Question, torture, hang, dogs as you all are, for our reward is sure as our Faith, and ecstasy awaits us in the halls of Paradise."

Again Potter's pencil travelled to record every word, and again it stopped. Wadden unfastened the collar of his uniform coat, and sat back in his swivel chair, facing the brown man.

"Merely as a spot of preliminary ecstasy. Gosh, but it's hot tonight!" he broke off to exclaim. "I'll tell you, Mr. Afifi, that you needn't have bothered to come down here again. You destroyed all the copies there were on your first visit. This second lot is merely four empty boxes, and we worked up all the newspaper agitation to get you down here again. So Inspector Head worked up this little plant—and it came off! You fell for it. By the way, is this your shirt?" He held up a snowy-white burnous that had lain beside his chair as a heap of linen.

"My burnous," Afifi said. "Allah the Merciful be praised! There is one God, the Just, the Compassionate! If the last picture is destroyed, the work is done, and our reward is sure!"

"Dead sure," Wadden confirmed his surmise. "And if that shirt is yours, you're the one who did the killings, eh?"

"Why should I deny it?" Afifi asked in reply. "Paradise is but a step, since all the work is done."

"Well," and Wadden blew, very gently, "before you start for there, Potter here will transcribe this little lot, and we'll read it over to you when we've got the typescript and get you to sign it. Till then"—he stood up—"Hawker and Spriggs, you'd better take him a step on his way to Paradise—back to his cell. Don't take the handcuffs off till you've got him inside. Get off and take two carbons when you type that statement, Potter, and Mr. Head and I will wait till you've done it. Then we'll have our friend back here, read it over to him, and get his signature on it."

Afifi, at a gesture from Spriggs, rose to his feet, and the two men took him out. Wadden looked at Head as Potter followed the three.

"That," he said, "makes it as simple as falling off a log. Cool, wasn't he? But, you know, I never believed it would come off like this. You must have a—what do they call it—a psychological twist about you, somehow."

"Call it a gambling instinct, Chief," Head said, and smiled. "It sounds simpler, and amounts to precisely the same thing."

"There were other ways," Head told him, "but this seemed the easiest. I gambled on religious fanaticism, and won."

Brief Epilogue

LATE autumn, and the day was luminous and serene; there was bluish haze veiling all the valley of the River Idleburn, and softening the riot of autumn colouring that painted the woods on the slope of Condor Hill. St. Martins' little summer was giving a warmth almost like that of July, but it was a kinder, mellower sunshine than that of high summer that bathed the valley and tinted the foliage on the hill.

Two men leaned on a gate that prevented free access to a meadow beside the road, some distance beyond Condor Grange, and quite near the point at which the old coach road forked away from the new highway. The Brass Gridiron, their favourite house of call in Westingborough, had rejoiced in their custom until afternoon closing time—the proprietor, shy of their kind as a rule, had literally rejoiced on this occasion, for the brothers Marvel, fresh from the murder trial at the assizes, had proved a draw for all and sundry and he had done a roaring trade. Meanwhile both Napoleon and Bismarck had made good use of their popularity: neither of them had bought a single drink, but they had tanked up to capacity at the expense of news-hungry patrons of the Gridiron, and now, having walked off the effects of much beer, rested awhile by the gate, gazing at the landscape.

"So we're finished wi' the pleece," Bismarck observed after a silence in which he somnolently enjoyed the scenery.

"F'r the present," Napoleon dissented, with a hint of reproof. "I don't reckon we're done with 'em f'r long. Times ain't what they was. What wi' these chaps on bicycles nosin' round everywhere, an' all of 'em down on us before we can move, as yer might say, the roads are gettin' jest terrible. Thass what they are, Bizzy—terrible!"

"Times is not what they was," Bismarck agreed solemnly. I dunno whether to go back round Bedford way, or whether to stop round here.

"Might work the villages t'other side Crandon till it's time to go inter quarters f'r the winter," Napoleon suggested. "This here weather ain't a goin' to last much longer, I reckon."

"No-o," Bismarck said thoughtfully. "Best thing about our sorter life, there ain't never no hurry about makin' up yer mind."

On this they meditated awhile. Then Napoleon said—"Blimey!" very softly, and his brother turned his head inquiringly.

"Thinkin' about that trial," Napoleon explained. "It warn't 'arf solemn when the bloke puts the black patch on the judge's wig—"

"That was the one all in red, the judge?" Bismarck interrupted to ask. "It warn't a bit like the court where they give us time when they ketch us, an' with all them black gowns an' wigs an' things—"

"The judge," Napoleon interrupted in turn, with a hint of impatience, "was the one in red. An' as I says, it arn't 'arf solemn when 'e says—'To be 'anged by the neck till you're dead.' All three of 'em, Bizzy. It sent a shiver down my back, I c'n tell yer."

"They didn't seem to shiver," Bismarck said. "I was a watchin' of 'em. As calm, they was, as if 'e was askin' whether they'd like a drink if 'e stood 'em one. But d'jer see that woman, that Mrs. Allday what was mixed up in it somehow? She was near on faintin', I thought."

"I didn't see 'er then," Napoleon confessed, "but when we all come out she was jest in front o' me, along o' that bloke—Colston, 'is name is. I 'ears 'im say to 'er—'Now, it's all over,' 'e says, 'you got to come right away an' forgit about it.' An' she says—'Where'll I go?' she says. An' 'e says—'You leave it all to me,' 'e says, an' I sees 'im take 'er arm an' 'old it. An' then I ketches sight of 'er face as she looks at 'im, an' I reckons she ain't got nuthin' to worry about, by the way 'e looked back at 'er. Proper little roomance it looked, an' then along comes Mr. 'Ead a lookin' f'r me, jest as they went off together in a car, like a—like a pair o' turtle doves."

"That there Mr. 'Ead"—Napoleon pursued his own line of thought—"'e ain't arf a decent sort, 'e ain't. I reckon I'd do a lot f'r 'im, nearly anything 'e asked me—except work, of course. But 'e coughed up what I asked over gettin' the number o' that car, like 'e said 'e would. That'll be a quid f'r Jos Baggs, an' three quid f'r me, an' three f'r you, Bizzy—I got it on me. An' there's another four quid in it I'm keepin' against the winter, an' if you stop up this way a bit o' that might pass inter your 'ands. Oh, we ain't doin' so bad."

"Meantersay this Mr. 'Ead coughed up eleven quid?" Bismarck asked incredulously.

"'E kept 'is promise," Napoleon answered, having received sixteen pounds altogether. The five for which he had not accounted in his statement he considered due to himself, and not to be mentioned.

"But 'e says to me—'Mind,' 'e says, 'if I ketch you,' 'e says, 'or any o' my men ketch you,' 'e says, 'poachin' or anything o' the sort round these parts,' 'e says, 'we shall sock it to you,' 'e says. 'I offered to find you work o' some sort,' 'e says, 'an' if you changes your mind,' 'e says, 'the offer's open,' 'e says. An' I told 'im work an' me'd been strangers so long, we'd most likely quarrel if we got together. An' 'e larfed an' said I was 'opeless—a 'opeless case. But you can't be 'opeless, a day like this."

"Pheasant shootin' don't start f'r weeks, yet," Napoleon observed with only apparent irrelevance. "Them birds up in the woods there'll be as tame as anything."

"Dry, an' not too cold, yet," Napoleon assented. "Bizzy, I got some fish-hooks, an' plenty thread."

"Reckon we'd find one down under this hedge, if we go along the medder. Whitethorn hedge—there's sure to be a nants' nest down under it. Put the bundles jest inside the gate while we look. Whassay?"

"Sure. Let that car git past, an' then we'll go arter it. That beer we 'ad at the Gridiron tickled up my appetite somethin' awful, an' them pheasants are jest waitin' f'r us, Bizzy! We got the hooks an' we got the thread. All we want is a nants' nest."

They waited until the one car on the road had disappeared round a bend, and then climbed over the gate into the meadow.

THE END

E. CHARLES VIVIAN

TRAMP'S EVIDENCE (THE BARKING DOG MURDER CASE)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I The Grey House

Chapter II No Dog

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Chapter III A Black Man, and a White Woman

Chapter IV Two Women, Both in White

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Chapter V One Mystery Solved

Chapter VI Why There Was No Dog

Chapter VII A Letter

Chapter VIII Allday

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Chapter IX Getting Busy

Chapter X Inquest

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Chapter XI Mainly Marital

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Chapter XII Alibi for El Hag Khalil

Chapter XIII Martin Colston

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Chapter XIV Inference, But No More

Chapter XV Films

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Chapter XVI Films Explained

Chapter XVI Butters is Useful

Chapter XVIII Ants' Eggs

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Chapter XIX Publicity

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Chapter XX Shadow of a Coming Event

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Chapter XXI Ensanguined Rag

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Chapter XXII Dream Becomes Reality

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