TEMPLE TOWER [Part 2]

CHAPTER VIII

In Which Victor Matthews Ends His Story

“I was afraid you might find the story a little long,” said Matthews, as the butler brought out the tray.

“Long be blowed,” cried Hugh. “It is the most extraordinary yarn I ever listened to. Sounds like a book.”

“Truth is stranger, Captain Drummond. The old tag. I think that beer looks very promising.”

He took the glass, and raised his hand in a toast.

“I’m just trying to think,” he went on after a while, “of the best way of telling you the remainder. I think perhaps I shall make it most interesting if I first of all give you the story as it was told us on our arrival at the Château du Lac Noir by the guests who had been detained there by the local police pending our coming.

“There were fourteen of them in all—eight women, and six men. And their condition, as you can imagine, was pretty bad. In addition to this appalling affair, which in itself was sufficient to upset anyone, the whole lot of them had been extremely drunk the night before. And they looked like it.

“However, by dint of questioning and piecing together their various stories, we managed to arrive at a fairly accurate account of what had happened. They had arrived by the train which reached Châteaudun at four o’clock the previous day. As usual they had been met at the station by the Prince’s private carriages, and taken straight to the château, where the Prince received them. Champagne and caviar had at once been served, which sent them all upstairs to change for dinner in an expansive mood.

Dinner itself started at eight-thirty and was preceded by more rounds of a special aperitif known only to the Prince, so that even at the beginning of the meal several of them were talking out of their turn. And by eleven o’clock most of them were riotously tight. Two girls from the Folies Bergères were dancing on the table: in fact, an extra special debauch was in full swing. The hours went on: more drink arrived, and yet more drink, until many of the guests were frankly and unashamedly asleep. Only the Prince remained his normal self, though he was drinking level with them all.

“Now it was his custom to hold these carousals in the huge old banqueting-hall. It was a lofty room with a broad staircase at one end leading up to the musicians’ gallery. They had long since faded away, completely worn out, and in the general din probably no one even noticed that they had ceased playing. And so you can visualise the scene. The candles guttering on the table around which sprawled the drunken guests; and sitting at one end, with a look of scornful weariness already beginning to show on his face, their host. The staircase was behind his left shoulder, the top half of it in semi-darkness, as were the portraits of the Prince’s ancestors which stared down on the revellers from the walls.

“Suddenly one of the men who was singing some maudlin song broke off abruptly and leaned forward rubbing his eyes. What on earth was that strange object on the staircase? Was it really there—or was the great black shadow his imagination? Then it moved and he lurched to his feet. Grim reality struggled through the fumes of alcohol, and he hiccoughed out a warning.

“The others looked up: a woman screamed. And cold as ice the Prince turned round to find himself facing a masked hunchback. There was a moment of dead silence—then he rose to his feet. And even as he did so a solitary shot rang out from the stairs, and the Prince pitched forward on his face—stone dead.

“The guests, sobered by this utterly unexpected tragedy, huddled together like sheep. ‘Le Bossu Masqué’ passed from lip to lip in fearful whispers. And still this monstrous figure stood there motionless, his revolver still in his hand. Suddenly the door from the servants’ quarters opened and five men came in. Save for the fact that they were masked they might have been five of the guests, because they too were dressed as Apaches. Two of them advanced to the terrified guests, and each of them carried a revolver. No word was spoken; evidently the whole thing had been planned beforehand. While the two of them guarded the guests, and the sinister masked hunchback stood in silence on the stairs the other three systematically looted the place. They smashed in cabinets and wrenched open drawers, while the man whose collection they were taking lay dead by his own table.

“It lasted nearly an hour so we are told. The stuff was carried out through the front door, the looters returning each time for more. And then at length they finished, and the three men who had been removing the stuff disappeared. There was the sound, and of this they were one and all quite positive, of a motor-car driving away—then silence. Slowly the two men who had been covering them the whole time backed to the door and disappeared also. And with that pandemonium broke loose.

“As mysteriously as he had come le Bossu Masqué had vanished. The thing was over and finished; only broken cabinets and a dead man, who stared at the ceiling, remained to prove that it was ghastly reality and not a drunken dream. Completely sobered by now the men of the party dashed round the house, only to find that every servant had been bound and gagged. So they did the only thing there was to be done and sent for the local police.

“Well, that was the situation that confronted us on our arrival. Two things were established at once. Le Bossu Masqué had added yet another murder to the long list already to his credit; and the fact that a motor-car had been used, and that there were five Apaches in the raid, made it practically certain that the gang involved was le Rossignol’s. So the first thing obviously to do was to try and lay that gang by the heels, which should have proved an easy matter. They have their invariable haunts to which they always return sooner or later, and we anticipated no difficulty whatever in catching them. But two days went past; three; a week; and still there was no sign of them. And it became increasingly obvious to me that the reason was simply and solely that they were acting under orders from le Bossu Masqué himself: it was his brain we were contending against—not theirs.

“Then came a new development. In a wood not far from Chartres a shepherd found a deserted motor-car. It had been forced in through some undergrowth, and was completely hidden from the road. Indeed, but for the fact that he thought he had seen a snake, and had gone into the bushes after it, the car might have remained there for months without being discovered. Of the gang, however, there was still no trace, nor of the loot they had taken—loot which, on the Prince’s cousin’s valuation, was worth, at a conservative estimate, half a million pounds.

“And then at last came the final development of all. The telephone bell rang in our office, and a voice came over the wire. It was disguised, but not quite sufficiently. Before he had said a sentence I knew it was the Toad speaking, though I didn’t let on that I knew. And his information was to the effect that le Rossignol’s gang were lying up in a wood halfway between Mamers and Alençon. He was speaking from a public telephone call office so it was hopeless to try and track him through that. But I passed on the word that the Toad was back in Paris, and sat down to think it out.

“If you look at the map you will see that the wood mentioned by the Toad is some sixty miles west of Châteaudun, while the wood where the car was found is about twenty miles due north. That seemed peculiar in the first place. In the second, what had caused the Toad to split? That it was quite in keeping with his nature I knew, but the Toad never did anything without a reason. And what was the reason in this case? Why had he turned traitor? Was he doing it on his own account, or was he doing it under orders from le Bossu Masqué? Had that gentleman decided that now the cat had pulled the chestnut out of the fire for him, its services could very well be dispensed with?

“However, the first thing to be done was to verify the Toad’s information. The wood he mentioned was surrounded by a cordon of armed police, who gradually closed in on the centre. And what he had told us proved correct. The gang was there; at least, three of them were. Who fired the first shot I don’t know, but men’s fingers are quick on the trigger in cases like that. Sufficient to say that two of the police were killed, and two were wounded, before the three bandits fell riddled with bullets. Finding themselves cornered, half starving, dirty, and unkempt, the Snipe, the Butcher, and the man called Robert fought like rats in a trap and died. But of the Nightingale there was no trace. Nor, again, was there any sign of the stolen property, though we searched the wood with a fine-tooth comb. And so there we were up against a brick wall once again. It was true that three of the gang were dead, but they were the three least important ones. Le Bossu Masqué had completely vanished: so had both the Nightingale and the Toad. Had they split up the loot between them, or what had they done with it? Were they hanging together or had they fallen out? Those were the questions we constantly asked one another, and as constantly failed to answer.

“And then, one day about a fortnight after the fight in the wood, we caught the Nightingale. With his voice and terrible appearance he was altogether too conspicuous a character to escape notice. And the police found him hiding in a back slum in Rouen, and promptly despatched him to us in Paris, where he first of all told us that part of his story that I have already told you.

“If you remember, we left him and his gang at Châteaudun putting up in the two hotels of the town, and having arrived there on the day of the Prince’s party. They were completely in the dark as to what their further orders were to be: all they had to do was to sit and wait. Their instructions came to them at eight o’clock that night, and were simple in the extreme. They were to wait until eleven, and were then to proceed by car to the Château du Lac Noir. The motor was to be left in the shadow of some trees a hundred metres from the front door, and they were to remain hidden in the trees, also, until they saw a light flash twice from the bedroom window over the front door. They were then to proceed to the back door, where they would again receive instructions.

“They waited until, at two-thirty, they saw the light. When they got to the back door they found it open, and confronting them in the darkness of the passage the dim black figure of the Bossu Masqué, who ordered them to pick up some coils of rope and follow him.

“They obeyed: as le Rossignol said—’Messieurs, we dared not do otherwise. We were more frightened of le Bossu Masqué than of all the fiends in hell.’

“Suddenly he flung open the door into a lighted room, and there confronting them they saw the four men-servants, who, following the example of those upstairs, were a bit fuddled themselves. Incidentally, of course, we knew all this part of the story already. But confirmation is always valuable, and we thought it a good thing to let him tell the yarn in his own way. They trussed the servants up, and then they received their final instructions. When they heard a shot they were to go straight into the banqueting-hall: the Snipe and he were to cover the guests, the other three were to loot the place. And he told us then exactly the same story as we had already heard from the guests.

“So far, so good—but what we wanted to know was still to come.

“‘Be very careful now, Rossignol,’ said Grodin sternly. ‘You have spoken the truth up to date: see that you continue doing so.’

“‘By the Holy Virgin, M’sieur,’ he exclaimed passionately, ‘no word but the truth shall pass my lips. And if it does then may I be stricken dead, and have to forego my revenge on that festering sore le Crapeau.’

“Grodin glanced at me—that was a bit of news. But he merely told le Rossignol curtly to continue.

“It appeared, then, that the Snipe, the Butcher, and Robert were to find their way by cross-country trains to Mamers, from which place they were to go to a wood between there and Alençon.

“‘And of those three, Messieurs, I can tell you no more. I saw in the paper that they were dead. How, if I may ask, did you find them?’

“‘The Toad gave them away,’ I said quietly, and for a moment we thought he was going to have an apoplectic fit. The veins stood out on his forehead, and a flood of the most filthy blasphemy poured out of his lips. We let him finish: as far as his feelings about the Toad were concerned, we had a certain sympathy with him.

“At last he pulled himself together and continued. His orders and the Toad’s were to take the car, with the loot inside it, on the road towards Chartres. After they had gone twenty kilometres, they would find a track leading off to the right. They would know it, because there were three tall trees at the junction. They were to proceed along this track for two kilometres, where they would find a disused quarry. In the quarry was a shed, and in that shed they were to put the car. Under no circumstances were they to move out of the quarry, or light a fire, or attract attention to themselves in any way. But if, by any chance, they were discovered by some wandering pedestrian, the pedestrian was to wander no more. And they would receive further instructions in due course.

“Now I may say at once that we subsequently verified this statement. We found the track, and the quarry, and the actual wheelmarks of the car in the shed.

“Well, it appeared that they sat there the whole of the next day. They had the bread and cheese and wine which le Bossu Masqué had ordered them to put in the car, so they were not hungry. And, incidentally, it struck me, even at the time, what astounding attention to detail that little fact showed. For if there is one thing that will overcome fear it is hunger, and but for having given them food one or other of them would most certainly have gone to the nearest village to get it.

“I will now try and continue in the Nightingale’s own words.

“‘It was about six o’clock, M’sieurs, that it happened. The sun was just setting, so I know the time. I had risen and was standing in the door of the shed, wondering what we should next be told to do. Suddenly I received the most terrible blow in the back of the neck, and I knew no more.’

“We looked at his neck, and there was an ugly looking scar about two inches long. In fact, anyone except an abnormality like the Nightingale would never have known any more.

“‘When I recovered consciousness,’ he went on, ‘it was dark. At first I didn’t know where I was, everything was a blank. And then, little by little, memory came back to me. The quarry—the affair at the château—the car. Mon Dieu! M’sieurs—sick and faint, I raised myself on my elbow. The car had gone: so had le Crapeau. I was alone in the shed. How long I had lain there I knew not: some hours, because the sky was studded with stars. And then there came a voice out of the darkness, and I nearly fainted with horror.

“‘“Rossignol,’” it said, “where is the car?”

“‘I was not alone: le Bossu Masqué was there too.

“‘“M’sieur,” I cried, “I do not know. That accursed traitor le Crapeau struck me from behind with what must have been a spanner. See—I am wet with blood.”’

“‘And, in truth, I was, gentlemen—soaked with it—my coat, my shirt, everything.’

“‘“Accursed fool,” went on the voice, and I could dimly see le Bossu’s outline in the gloom. “Blundering idiot. Do I plan with my great brain this wonderful coup in order that you should allow yourself to be sandbagged like an English tourist? And by le Crapeau of all people.”

“‘“M’sieur,” I pleaded, “I did not suspect him. I was standing in the door wondering what our next instructions would be when he crept on me from behind.”

“‘Be silent, worm,” he said. “It is well for you, Rossignol, that your shirt is soaked with blood. Were it otherwise I might be tempted to think that this was a put-up job between you.”

“‘“By the blood of the Virgin, M’sieur,” I cried, “I swear to you—”

“‘“Be silent,” he snarled. “I said it was well for you that he hit so hard. It proves to me that you are only a fool and not a traitor. Were you the second, Rossignol, I would strangle you here and now with my own hands. As it is, your punishment is sufficient.”

“‘“But, M’sieur,” I cried, “what am I to do?”

“‘There was no answer, le Bossu Masqué had gone. I was alone now, in very truth—miles from anywhere.’

“So did the Nightingale ramble on. We let him talk, but there was obviously nothing more that he could tell us. He was very incoherent as to dates and times, and I think he undoubtedly remained in that shed in a semi-delirious state for three or four days. How he finally arrived at Rouen we never found out: he hardly seemed to know himself. Anyway, the point was not important.

“He was brought up on a charge of robbery with violence, and sentenced to twenty-one years’ imprisonment in Devil’s Island. And with that we can leave him for the present. And with that also my story of the quarter of a century ago is practically finished. Le Rossignol, with a characteristic outburst of frenzied invective against the Toad, disappeared from the dock into twenty-one years of hell.

“And now, gentlemen, we pass out of the region of certain fact into the region of guess-work. To take the Toad first. I do not think there can be any doubt as to what he did. Overcome by the thought of so much loot, he determined to try and get it all for himself. He laid out the Nightingale, and went off in the car. What happened then we can only surmise. Perhaps he found that he couldn’t manage the car: perhaps he lost his nerve. But somewhere in that area of country he hid the stolen stuff. Probably he put in his pocket sufficient jewellery to keep him in comfort for many a long day. But the bulk of the stuff he must have hidden, intending to go back for it when the hue and cry was over. Then he ran the car into a wood, hid it as well as he could, and disappeared. And it is a fact that he did disappear. Years passed by: the war came, but never a trace of the Toad did we see. He vanished from the underworld of Paris as completely as a stone vanishes in the sea. Many people thought he was dead, though, personally, I never agreed with them. But at last the whole thing was forgotten: even the search for the treasure was abandoned. That had really been hopeless from the first, unless we could lay our hands on the Toad and make him lead us to it.

“As to what happened to le Bossu Masqué we are equally in doubt. Many people believed that he had caught the Toad, and had murdered him for his treachery, first compelling him to reveal the hiding-place of the loot. There was a great deal to be said for the theory, though, somehow, I never believed it myself. No body was ever found anywhere which could possibly have been the Toad’s. And I felt tolerably certain that a big man like le Bossu would never have taken the trouble to follow an object of that sort out of the country merely to kill him. It was the loot he was after—not the Toad. We still felt his activities in Paris, though, as years went by, they seemed to grow less and less. And there are strange stories told of incredible deeds of heroism performed in the war by a masked hunchback, who appeared suddenly in different parts of the line. Fiction, of course, but le poilu likes his little bit of mystery—just as your Tommy does.

“And so we come to the present moment, and this strange reunion of the principals in that drama of nearly thirty years ago. As a matter of fact, you will see that it is not quite so strange as it would appear at first sight, but a perfectly logical affair.

“It starts with the release of the Nightingale from Devil’s Island five years ago. I was then working with the police in New York, but not because I had to. I happen to be of independent means, and I work for the love of the thing, not for the salary. And the case of all others that intrigued me most during my whole career was the one I have just told you. It was unsolved: I felt I had been beaten.

Now I have a fairly good knowledge of the criminal nature. And quite by chance I happened to learn that an uncle of le Rossignol’s had died leaving his money to his nephew. So I gambled on the result that twenty-one years in Devil’s Island would produce on a man like the Nightingale, believing, as he did, that he was there principally because of the Toad’s treachery. I chucked up my job, and got on the heels of the Nightingale.

“Well, my guess proved right. He was now, for a man in his position, comparatively affluent, which enabled him to be free from the necessity of working. And, as I thought would prove the case, he was obsessed with one idea, to the exclusion of everything else. And that idea was revenge on the Toad. While le Crapeau was still alive he was going to find him.

“Gentlemen, these past few years may seem to you to have been dull: to me they have been fascinating. Backwards and forwards, searching and ferreting, the Nightingale has chased his man. Old companions of twenty years previously have been interrogated: clues have been followed up, only to be discarded. And all the time, unknown to him, I have been sitting on his heels, patiently waiting. I knew that no one was better qualified to find the Toad than he was. He had access to information that I could never have got: in addition it was the sole driving force of his life.

“It is true, I admit, that at one period, when for months he seemed completely defeated, I very nearly gave it up. And then, quite suddenly out of the blue, there came the message that gave me the greatest thrill of my life. It was proof of what I had always thought in days gone by. Just an envelope handed to me by a gamin as I sat outside a cafe in Paris.

“‘Keep out of this.’ That was all that was written on the paper: that—and the drawing I hadn’t seen for so many years. So le Bossu Masqué was not dead: le Bossu Masqué was on the trail, too. He also was following the Nightingale: he also was working on the same lines as myself. A strange situation as you will agree: I and that greatest of criminals both using the same dog to hunt our man, and the dog quite unconscious of the fact that he was being so used. It added zest to it, I can assure you. It meant sleeping with one eye permanently open: it meant that the whole time it was necessary to look in every direction, not only at the Nightingale. Several times I sensed his presence near me: how, I can’t tell you. And remember the terrible handicap that I was working under. He knew me, but I didn’t know him.

“However, that is neither here nor there. Just as the obsession of le Rossignol’s life was to lay hands on the Toad, so the obsession of mine became the desire to catch le Bossu Masqué. It had turned into a duel between him and me. And that duel is now approaching its end.”

For a moment or two Victor Matthews fell silent, his eyes fixed on the little drawing still pinned to the tree above my head. And we, enthralled though we were, let him take his own time.

“The rest,” he continued after a while, “is fairly soon told. Little by little, from a clue here and a clue there, it became increasingly certain that the Toad had left France. But where had he gone, and had he taken the loot with him? And then came a sudden and astounding stroke of luck. The Nightingale, in the course of his search, had reached Boulogne, and one evening he was sitting in a small wine-shop on the Quai Gambetta. At the next table to him was a French ouvrier, and I venture to think that not even the Bossu Masqué himself would have recognised me in that excellent workman. The cafe was fairly empty, and I was on the point of going when two French fishermen came in. They were both a little tight, and their conversation was clearly audible. But what principally attracted my attention was the fact that they obviously were full of money.

“At first I listened idly, and then a stray sentence struck my ear.

“‘Le moulin à Bonneval.’

“The mill at Bonneval, and Bonneval was the name of a village between Châteaudun and Chartres. Moreover, it was the nearest village to the quarry where the motor-car had been hidden during the day. Isn’t it an astounding fact how sometimes, after months and years of fruitless labour, a stray remark casually overheard may provide a clue? As it stood, of course, there was nothing in it—but the coincidence attracted my attention. It was well it did so: amazing though it seems that a chance remark was destined to end our search.

“I stole a glance at the Nightingale: he, too, had caught the phrase, and was listening intently. And after a while, as the full significance of their conversation sank into his mind, he began to quiver like a terrier when it sees a rat. Sometimes the men lowered their voices, but for the most part what they said was clearly audible. And one fact was soon established definitely. These two sailors owned the ketch Rose Marie, and they had recently smuggled over a cargo consisting of three large wooden cases, which had been landed on Romney Marsh somewhere between Rye and Dungeness. Further, that these cases had something to do with the mill at Bonneval.

“I give you my word that by this time I was almost as excited as the Nightingale himself. I remembered that there was an old disused mill, standing a little back from the road, about a kilometre north of Bonneval.

“Was it possible that that was the hiding-place which we had searched for in vain? And if so, who was the recipient of the cases on Romney Marsh?

“Then another thought struck me: was le Bossu Masqué present? I glanced round the room: there were only some fisher-folk and a pale youth who looked as if he served in some shop. Honestly I could not think he was there, and yet—”

He waved his hand at the tree behind me.

“However,” he continued, “it may be that he wasn’t. The Nightingale is an easy man to track, and that may easily account for it. To return to that evening. The two sailors didn’t say much more, but what they had said was quite enough to send the Nightingale flying over to England. He has one gift which you probably noticed the night before last—he speaks English fluently. And that was a considerable help to him. It was impossible for him to tell, of course, if the cases had been landed on Romney Marsh because the Toad was near at hand, or simply because it is an admirably situated locality for smuggling.”

“Hold hard a moment,” said Hugh. “How long ago did you overhear this conversation in the wine shop?”

“About six weeks,” answered Matthews. “Rather more. Well, I can’t tell you when the Nightingale first discovered that the man he wanted was your next-door neighbour. He’s no fool, and presumably his suspicions at once fell on a house fortified like Temple Tower. So did mine. But the Toad is a secretive gentleman, and suspicion is not proof. Personally, I have not seen the man who now calls himself Granger, though I’ve lain up for hours waiting for him. I assume that the Nightingale has; at any rate, he has satisfied himself somehow that Granger is the Toad. And so his quest is ended: he has found his enemy. Theatrical as all those people are, he has flashed his warning across the Marsh—red and blue lights, the colours of the gang. For years that man—ever since le Rossignol was liberated from Devil’s Island—has lived in fear of being found. And now he has been.”

Young Freckles took a deep breath.

“I say, chaps,” he remarked,” we are having a jolly party, aren’t we? And how do the Beaver and the girl come in?”

“I was just coming to them,” said Matthews. “Paul Vandali is one of those men, well-known to the police to be criminals, who have yet succeeded in steering clear of trouble. The only commandment they keep is the eleventh—thou shalt not be found out. The lady has not, I think, ever been united to Vandali in the holy bonds of matrimony, but she has been his inseparable companion for three years.”

“I suppose he is not the Bossu Masqué?” I asked.

Matthews shook his head.

“Quite impossible,” he said. “He is not old enough. Vandali is a man of only about thirty-five. So that rules him out. Oh, no! He comes in in a very different way. I have mentioned, if you remember, the Prince’s cousin, who chose his parties for him. Now that cousin is also the Prince’s heir, and he is alive today in Paris. He inherited all the Prince’s money, and so is an extremely wealthy man. After the affair at the Château du Lac Noir, he offered an enormous reward for the recovery of the stolen property—no less than fifty thousand pounds. Naturally he, years ago, gave up all hope of getting it back, though the reward still stood. And then Vandali and the lady appeared on the scene. You have seen them, and you will realise that they are people who are quite at home in the highest society. At any rate, they met Count Vladimir—that is the cousin—at supper one night not very long ago. And the conversation came round to the affair at the Château du Lac Noir. My informant was the waiter—who was not a waiter. To be more explicit, the Paris police were after Vandali over a little matter at Nice. They had no proof, but they were trying to trap him in an unguarded moment. And the waiter was really a detective.

“Well, he got nothing from the meal which helped him over the Nice business, but what he did get was that Vladimir most categorically stated that the reward of fifty thousand pounds still held good. He said it with a laugh, almost as if he implied that it might just as well be a million for the good it would do. But the detective caught a very significant glance that passed between the two. And here they are.

“How they spotted this place I can’t tell you. It may be that they, too, through friends in the underworld, have kept themselves posted in the Nightingale’s movements, realising, as I did, that in him lay their best chance of being led to the treasure. At any rate, they are here.”

Matthews paused and lit a cigarette.

“Well, gentlemen, so much for the past, and the original causes that have led up to the situation as it stands today. Of my doings since I have been here there is little to say. I have told you that the main obsession of my life is to lay hands on the man who nearly murdered me tonight. And I have been lying up in a small place in Rye, watching and waiting for what I knew must happen, sooner or later—his arrival. I have kept my eye on le Rossignol: you saw me the other night when I very foolishly got caught in the light. But until tonight I did not know le Bossu was here. I don’t know quite what took me up there—restlessness, perhaps, or something deeper. It sounds strange, I know,” his voice grew almost solemn, “but I veritably believe, though I have never seen him until tonight, that there is some channel of communication between him and me which cannot be explained by any natural means. Gentlemen, I have felt him near me in Paris: I know it. And tonight an overmastering impulse took me to Temple Tower, You know with what result. Suddenly I saw him—looming out of the darkness—right on top of me. And although I had half expected it, the shock at the moment was almost paralysing. I even forgot to draw my gun till it was too late: he had gone.”

He paused, and a dreamy look came into his eyes.

“But he is here, and I am here, and this time it is the end, one way or the other.”

For a moment or two no one spoke: there was something almost awe-inspiring in the quiet finality of his words. Just as at Spragge’s Farm, the soft melodious voice of le Rossignol had seemed to ring Granger’s death knell, so, now, did this second deadly hatred promise a fight to the finish.

“Enough, gentlemen,” he went on in his normal voice. “No good has ever come of dreaming. Will you now return the compliment, and tell me what has happened to you? Then we will draw up a plan of campaign and decide what to do.”

We told him everything: about the chimney-pot episode, the sparking plugs, the stolen map, and Miss Verney’s letter. And when we had finished, he smoked a complete cigarette before he spoke.

“Captain Drummond,” he said quietly, “I congratulate you. I think your deductions are absolutely correct. Whether he meant to kill you with the chimney-pot, or only put you out of the way temporarily, is immaterial—but that was his first idea. And I think your appearance on the scene has changed all his plans. He has only just arrived, of that I am sure. He came expecting to find le Rossignol and me: instead, he finds all of you, to say nothing of the Vandalis.”

He rose and began pacing up and down, his face working eagerly as he emphasised each point.

“What is the result? Merely that time becomes all important. He hears of the map belonging to Sir John: he steals it. Not knowing of the verse behind, he thinks that he has solved the method of getting in to Temple Tower. And he was looking for the entrance tonight when the dog found him. Probably alarmed by the din the animal made, he hid for a while near by, and it was then that Gaspard stumbled on him, only to be strangled. Who knows why he did that? It is possible he did not know you were in the grounds, and thought he might gain access to the house by pretending to be Gaspard: it is possible he had no alternative. But of one thing, gentlemen, I am very sure: time is now even more all important to le Bossu than it was a few hours ago.

“In view of the fact that he did not gain access to the house, the killing of Gaspard was an error—a bad error. But it is done and cannot be undone. And of another thing I am very sure, too.” His voice grew grave, and he stared over the Marsh thoughtfully. “If you heard the Vandalis’ programme, Mr. Darrell, so did he. And I do not think it would find favour in his eyes—far from it. I hold no brief for either of them, but “

He said no more, but the little shrug of his shoulders filled in the silence more ominously than any spoken word.

“Had he got into the house tonight, the Vandalis would not have mattered. But he didn’t, and now they do. However, they can look after themselves: the point we have to decide is what we are going to do. Shall we call in the police, or shall we not? There are, it seems to me, two main objections. The first is this: What are we going to tell them? Nothing that we can do can bring the man Gaspard back to life, and if we tell them anything, we must tell them all. And frankly, gentlemen, though you are, of course, the best judges of that, I think an account of your recent doings, told in cold blood at a police station, might prove a little awkward.”

“I know the Inspector pretty well,” said Hugh, “but perhaps you are right.”

“The other objection,” went on Matthews, “is this. And to me it is a far bigger one. If we tell the police, and they take the matter up, we drop out, or at any rate you do. And”—he thumped his fist into his open palm—”for the local police to try and tackle le Bossu is about equivalent to asking a board school child to explain Einstein’s Theory. They are naturally trammelled by the law, and le Bossu would laugh at them. No, gentlemen, the only way of catching him, if you are prepared to do it, is for us to join forces and act outside the law on our own. Keep the police out of it, and we will catch him. Let them in, and our hands are tied.”

“My dear fellow,” said Hugh with a grin, “no one loathes the idea of letting the police in more than I do. But do not forget there is a lady involved.”

“I don’t,” remarked Matthews gravely, and turned to young Freckles. “I quite appreciate your position, Mr. Scott. But I am going to say something which I hope you will not consider impertinent. There is a reward of fifty thousand pounds at stake. Wait, please”—he held up his hand, as Freckles started to speak—”and then bite me afterwards. Captain Drummond, if I may say so, hardly seems to be a gentleman in need of money. I am in this show for one reason only—to get to grips with le Bossu. If between us we find that property, we get fifty thousand pounds. And do not be under any delusion. Count Vladimir can pay that sum without feeling it. Which brings me to my point. Your fiancee can be of invaluable assistance to us in finding it, and as a natural result would be entitled to the whole reward. Please understand me, Mr. Scott,” he continued with a smile, which robbed his words of any offence. “But young ladies do not as a general rule take on jobs of that sort if their future husbands are wealthy.”

“My dear old lad,” laughed Freckles, “we haven’t got a blinking bean between us, if that is what you mean.”

Then here is an unprecedented opportunity of getting fifty thousand of the best,” said Matthews.

“Be a bit more explicit,” said Hugh after a pause.

“Le Bossu will return to Temple Tower,” said Matthews quietly. “You disturbed him last night, but there is no power in Heaven or Hell that will deter that man from doing what he has come here to do. He may or may not kill le Crapeau, according to the mood he is in: but he has come to get the stuff stolen twenty-five years ago—the stuff which, as Captain Drummond says, Miss Verney has been engaged to sell. Well, gentlemen, my suggestion is this. Let us lie up and wait for him. In the past we have always laboured under the disadvantage of not knowing where he would turn up: this time that disadvantage is gone. We know exactly, and all we have to do is to wait for him. And this time,” he added softly, “we are going to catch him. What do you say?”

Hugh glanced round at all of us.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that Scott must decide.”

“Well, old birds,” answered Freckles, “it seems to me that if five of us can’t tackle this bloke, the addition of a couple of policemen isn’t going to help much. I’m all for Mr. Matthews’ suggestion.”

“Good,” cried Hugh. “Then that’s that. What do you want, Denny?”

The butler had come out of the house in an obvious state of suppressed excitement.

“Have you heard sir, what they’ve found in the wood opposite Temple Tower?”

“No,” said Hugh quietly. “What?”

“A dead man, sir. Hidden in the bushes. A terrible looking thing he was, so the postman told me—more like a great monkey than a man. They say that he has been stopping at Spragge’s Farm.”

For a moment or two there was silence: then Victor Matthews spoke.

“How was he killed?” he asked.

And I think we all knew the answer before it came.

“Murdered, sir, so I hear. From the marks round his neck they say he was strangled.”

CHAPTER IX

In Which I Meet “Le Bossu Masqué”

So le Rossignol had been there after all. His dead body must have been quite close to us during the hour we had lain up waiting, before we found that the ladder had gone. And horrible and repulsive though he had been, I could not help feeling a twinge of pity for the poor brute. I could imagine him there in the darkness of the wood searching for the rope ladder he had made so laboriously, and then suddenly feeling the grip of the silent strangler on his throat. Perhaps that same choking cry that Gaspard had given—and then silence.

“Your friend,” said Hugh grimly, when the butler had gone, “is evidently no believer in half measures.”

Matthews was silent: this new development seemed to have nonplussed him. He paced up and down with quick, nervous steps, and a look of frowning concentration on his face,

“This alters things, gentlemen,” he said at length. “Now the police must come into the affair.”

“True,” remarked Hugh. “At the same time, I don’t see why we should run round telling them what we know. In fact, it makes it even more difficult to do so, because we lay ourselves open to grave blame for not having informed them about what we knew of the Nightingale’s intentions.”

“That is so,” said Matthews thoughtfully. “And as a matter of fact, it is even worse for me. Strictly speaking, if only as a matter of courtesy, I should have informed them of my presence here, and what I was doing. Instead of that, I am passing as an ordinary tourist. You are right. Captain Drummond. We must still say nothing about it. And there, going along the road, if I’m not mistaken, is the local inspector.”

Hugh started to his feet.

“I’ll get him in,” he exclaimed, going towards the gate.

“Please don’t mention who I am,” called Matthews after him, and Hugh nodded in answer.

“Hullo! Inspector,” he hailed, “what’s this I hear about someone being murdered?”

“Quite right, sir,” said the other gravely, halting by the gate. “Just come from there myself.”

“Come in and have a spot of ale,” said Hugh, “and tell us all about it. I think you know Sir John, don’t you? And these are three other friends of mine.”

“A bad business, gentlemen,” said the Inspector, putting down his glass. “Very bad. And as far as I can see at present, there is no trace of a clue.”

“What happened?” asked Hugh. “I’ve heard vaguely from my butler, who had heard vaguely from the postman.”

“It was Joe Mellor that found him, sir—him that keeps the dairy farm along the road there. Found him quite by accident, he did: or rather, not him, but his dog. He was walking past Temple Tower, and his dog was in the wood opposite. Suddenly it began to bark and make a rare blather, and Joe went in to see what was happening. He found the dog standing by some bushes, and, when he looked closer, he saw a man’s leg sticking out. The rest of the body was carefully covered, and Joe tells me that he’d never have seen it but for the dog. He gives a pull on the leg and hauls out the body. Well, gentlemen, in the course of my life I’ve run across some pretty queer customers, but I give you my word that the dead man is the queerest. He don’t look like a man at all: he looks like a great ape. A terrible face he’s got, and not improved by the manner of his death. He was strangled, and the face is all red and puffy.”

“You’ve got no clue at all?” asked Hugh. “No idea who the man is?”

“None at present, sir,” answered the Inspector. “But I shall soon. Bill Matcham, who works down on the Marsh, happened to be passing, and the instant he saw him he recognised him as a man who had been lodging at Spragge’s place. Maybe you know the farm, sir?”

“Vaguely,” said Hugh casually. “Somewhere down there, isn’t it?”

He waved a comprehensive hand at the Marsh.

“That’s right, sir. And Spragge himself is a queer customer. Well, I don’t mind if I do, sir.” He took the refilled glass from Hugh. “Hot work this morning.”

“By the way,” said Matthews speaking for the first time, “for how long had this man been dead?”

“The doctor said somewhere about twelve hours, sir,” answered the Inspector.

“So it happened last night,” cried Hugh, in affected surprise.

“That’s right, sir; last night sometime round about ten o’clock this man was strangled and his body hidden in the wood by Temple Tower.”

“You’ve got something in your mind, Inspector,” said Hugh quietly.

“Well, sir, we’re all of us entitled to our thoughts, and maybe I have mine. Ever see anything of Mr. Granger, sir?”

Hugh smiled slightly.

“So that’s how it is, is it? I can’t say I do, Inspector. I’ve met him out walking once or twice, that’s all.”

“A queer gentleman, sir: very queer. Who ever heard before of a man coming to live in a place like this and fortifying his house with all them steel spikes and things, to say nothing of the bars all over the windows?”

The worthy officer put down his glass and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

“Well, gentlemen, I must be going. This affair is going to keep me busy.”

“But surely you don’t suspect that Mr. Granger had anything to do with it?” said Hugh.

“I don’t suspect no one, sir,” answered the other. “All I say is that Mr. Granger is a queer customer, and this is a queer affair.”

“A most sapient conclusion,” remarked Matthews with a faint smile as the gate shut behind the Inspector. “One wonders what the worthy man would think if he knew that a precisely similar corpse lay inside the fortifications.”

“One also wonders,” said Hugh quietly, “what steps our Mr. Granger is going to take over that similar corpse.”

But any surmises on that point proved unnecessary, for at that moment who should appear at the gate but Miss Verney. Even at that distance one could see that she was in a state of great agitation, and she had left Temple Tower in such a hurry that she had come without a hat. And as she stood there for a moment the Inspector returned and joined her. Then they both came towards us.

“She’s found Gaspard’s body,” said Matthews with quiet conviction. “Be very careful what all of you say.”

And he proved to be right. It appeared that, going out after breakfast, the first thing that had struck her was that the dog’s kennel was empty. And then, in the distance, she had seen the brute lying asleep as she thought. For a time she had watched it, ready to dart back to the house if it moved. But after a while it had struck her that from its attitude it couldn’t be asleep: one hind leg was sticking straight up in the air, and she had approached it cautiously to find that it was dead,

“I was so amazed,” she went on, “that for a moment or two I just stood there staring at it. There was no sign of blood, or of any wound, and so I guessed it must have been poisoned. But who by? I had heard it baying furiously in the middle of the night, and then it suddenly stopped and there wasn’t another sound. Still trying to puzzle it out, I walked on into the undergrowth. And there I found “—she grew a little white at the recollection, and her voice trembled—”the body of the servant Gaspard. He looked too awful, with his face all red and terrible. And I simply lost my head and flew to the gate and came here.”

“An extraordinarily wise proceeding, Miss Verney,” said Hugh quietly.

“May I ask who this young lady is?” said the Inspector.

“Miss Verney was engaged to do secretarial work for Mr. Granger,” answered Freckles. “And her engagement is now terminated,” he concluded firmly.

“This is most extraordinary,” said the Inspector, scratching his head with a pencil. “I must go back there at once. One inside and—”

“Quite so. Inspector,” interrupted Hugh with a warning sign. “But Miss Verney is a bit tired at the moment. I’ll stroll with you to the gate. Come along, Peter, There is no good upsetting her any more,” he went on as we got out of ear-shot, “by telling her about the other.”

“What do you make of it, sir?” said the Inspector as we came to the road.

“Well, from what Miss Verney said,” remarked Hugh, “it would appear as if the servant Gaspard had also been strangled. And if that is so, the strong presumption is that the same man did both murders, and poisoned the dog.”

The Inspector nodded portentiously, and then lowered his voice impressively.

“What did I tell you, sir; what did I tell you? Mr. Granger is a queer customer.”

“Queer customer he may be,” answered Hugh. “But one thing is as certain as that gate in front of us. He had nothing to do with the two murders. With his physique, he could no more have strangled Gaspard than he could have strangled me.”

“I don’t say he did it, sir,” said the other, “but you mark my words, he could tell a lot about it if he chose to.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re not right,” said Hugh gravely. “Drop in on your way back and let us know if you find out anything.”

For a while we stood leaning over the gate, watching his retreating back.

“What do you make of it, Peter?” said Hugh suddenly.

“It is one of the most extraordinary affairs I’ve ever heard of,” I answered. “Even with Matthews’ explanation it’s amazing enough: without it, as the Inspector is, no wonder he is scratching his head. It’s a mighty lucky thing that le Bossu missed him.”

“Mighty lucky,” he agreed, lighting a cigarette. “He strikes me as being an extraordinarily sound sort of bloke. Extraordinarily sound,” he repeated, as we started to walk back to the house. “In fact, I was proposing to ask him to come and stay here.”

“Not at all a bad idea,” I agreed. “Then we’re all on the spot together.”

We found him alone with John, the other two having disappeared somewhere, and Hugh at once proposed it.

“That’s very good of you. Captain Drummond,” he said. “But, frankly speaking, I don’t think there will be much staying.”

“What do you mean?” said Hugh, looking puzzled.

“Simply that matters have come to a head,” he answered. “I am as certain as I can be of anything that le Bossu never intended to be in Rye today. He murdered le Rossignol, and then got into the grounds by the ladder, believing that, once he was inside. Sir John’s plan would enable him to find the secret entrance. It didn’t. Then the dog came for him and disturbed the household. Then Gaspard came, and he murdered him, once again believing that he would be able to get into the house—this time by the front door. And what defeated him was your sudden appearance. I know I’ve said much the same before, but when one is dealing with a man of his calibre there’s no harm in being clear in one’s head. He didn’t mind in the slightest if these two murders were discovered after he had settled things with the Toad: but now the discovery has been made before the settlement. And that is why I say matters have come to a head and there won’t be much staying before the end comes. We are going to find things moving at breakneck speed, and the only comfort is that even le Bossu can’t do anything by day. But I think you can dismiss the idea of sleep at night for the next day or two.”

“That’s not likely to worry us,” said Hugh. “And I quite see your point. Still, the offer holds if you care to make this house your headquarters.”

“Thank you again,” answered Matthews. “I won’t bother to move my kit here, but if I may drop in when I want to I shall greatly appreciate it. And if I may stay now for a little lunch I should be most grateful.”

“Of course, my dear fellow,” cried Hugh,

And in view of our rather erratic time-table and hours at the moment, I’m rather in favour of a bit of food at once. It’s twelve o’clock.”

He shouted for Denny, who, accustomed as he was to Hugh’s vagaries, betrayed no astonishment. And then, whilst we waited, we went on discussing from every angle what was likely to be the next move. With his previous knowledge of le Bossu, it was only natural that Victor Matthews should take the lead, but even he confessed himself beaten. How was the silent strangler to rectify his mistake?

“Le Bossu knows,” he said, “as every other criminal knows, that the English police, once they get their teeth into a thing, never let it go. They may chew slowly, but they chew surely. And he must know that the discovery of these two murders is going to make the police swarm round Temple Tower, which is the last place he wants them at. So what is he going to do? Because he’ll do something: of that you can rest assured.”

And it is safe to say that not one of us there, in our wildest dreams, would have guessed what le Bossu did do that very afternoon—so staggering was it in its simplicity, so incredible in its ferocity. But of that in its proper place.

Lunch was over, and the first problem to be settled was what the girl was to do. She, on hearing the whole story, was as keen as mustard on helping, but Freckles—in fact, all of us—were absolutely opposed to her returning to Temple Tower. She already knew, at any rate, one of the secret hiding-places of the stolen jewels, and though she offered to go back, we vetoed it unanimously. And, finally, it was decided that she should stop at Hugh’s house for the present at any rate, with Freckles as her guard, an arrangement which seemed to satisfy everybody concerned. John had decided to motor back to Laidley Towers, returning again in the evening, and as soon as he heard that, Victor Matthews asked for a lift to Rye. He was of the opinion that developments might take place there in connection with the two murders, and he had decided, if necessary, to tell the police something, if not all, of what he had told us that morning. Later, John might pick him up on his way back.

“What are you going to do, Hugh?” I said.

“I dunno, old lad,” he answered. “Don’t you worry about me.”

And sure enough he disappeared soon after lunch and I was left to my own resources.

At first I tried to sleep, but I soon gave up the attempt. Sleep simply would not come, and after a while I decided to go for a walk. I gathered from Denny that there was a short cut over the fields which led to Rye, and with the idea of possibly getting a lift back in John’s car I struck out along it. There was always a chance, I thought, of finding out something, and if not, Rye was a town well worth exploring.

It was a drowsily warm afternoon, and I walked slowly, my thoughts full of Matthews’ astounding story. It seemed wellnigh unbelievable that this amazing crime of a generation ago should have its denouement in such a peaceful English setting. Who was he—this sinister being—who had baffled the whole French police force? Had we seen him in the Dolphin the night before? Was he the clergyman, as Hugh had half suggested? Futile surmises: if Matthews didn’t know, it was hardly likely that I should. But the problem haunted me: I couldn’t get it out of my thoughts. And suddenly I arrived at a decision. I would stroll round Rye, and then go to the Dolphin for tea. With luck I might find the little room empty, in which case I would investigate the fireplace, and see if there was anything in Hugh’s theory. It could do no harm, and it gave me an object for the afternoon. Possibly even, I might solve the problem of the identity of le Bossu himself.

A neighbouring clock struck three, and shortly after I reached the outskirts of the town. I strolled aimlessly round, looking into old curiosity shops for about half an hour: then, striking up the hill, I made for the Dolphin. Once I thought I saw Victor Matthews in the distance, but I wasn’t sure, and I wondered how his line of inquiries was progressing.

The hall was deserted when I entered: so, fortunately, was the little room. And I made a dive at once for the fireplace. It was, as I have already said, an enormous affair, in which it was easy to stand with one’s head and shoulders up the flue. I peered upwards, but could see nothing. Evidently there was a jink in the chimney which stopped the light. At any rate there was only blackness to be seen.

“Do you require tea, sir?”

I emerged hurriedly, to find a waiter staring at me.

“Please,” I said, feeling remarkably foolish. “A wonderful fireplace, this.”

“Yes, sir. It is very famous.”

He stalked from the room, leaving me with the uncomfortable feeling that he regarded me with grave suspicion. Admittedly the beauties of the fireplace were best seen from the outside: at the same time I failed to see any reason why I shouldn’t stand inside it if I wished to. However, having satisfied himself on his return that the fireplace was still there, he thawed somewhat under the influence of a substantial tip.

“Hotel pretty full?” I said casually.

“Yes, sir. They comes and goes,” he answered. “Week-ends we’re always full up, but we’ve got some rooms now if you want one.”

His interest waned when he found I didn’t, and after a while he drifted away to some new arrivals in the hall. They were obviously American tourists motoring through, and therefore could be given a clean bill of health as far as I was concerned. Presumably, also, the waiter might be excluded, though his case was not quite so certain. I had already made up my mind that the most unlikely person would prove to be the man we wanted, and that even women must not be ruled out. After all, men had masqueraded in female clothes before now.

Other people came drifting in, and I eyed them all like a lynx. And then, after a while, the absurdity of the proceeding struck me: how could I possibly know? It was more than likely that le Bossu had already left the hotel, even assuming he had ever been there.

Suddenly my interest revived: Vandali and the girl had come into the hall. For a moment or two they seemed undecided as to where they would sit: then they turned and came into the little room. The girl swept past me as if unconscious of my existence, but Vandali gave me a curt bow.

“Been doing any more botanising?” he said sarcastically.

“Been getting the Yuletide welcome at Temple Tower again?” I returned.

He paused and stared at me, and I thought for a moment that he was going to have an actual discussion. Then apparently he thought better of it and he passed on and joined the girl. I picked up a paper and pretended to read. It was a day old but I wanted a screen from behind which I could study them. They had begun to talk in low tones, and it was impossible to hear more than an odd word or two. But it seemed to me that he was urging some line of action on her, and that she was opposed to it. What it was I had no idea, but once I distinctly heard him mention the word “police.” I strained my ears, but they were sitting too far away. Only it became increasingly obvious that there was a fundamental difference of opinion between them over something, and that neither could apparently convert the other.

I laid down the paper and lit a cigarette. There did not seem to be much object in waiting any longer. I could not move closer to them without making things obvious, and they were evidently not going to raise their voices. And I was on the point of getting up when some dirt fell down the chimney at the end of the room and lay in a little heap on the whitened hearthstone. A very ordinary phenomenon, and yet—was it? I felt my pulse begin to go a little quicker. Had that dirt fallen naturally, or had it been disturbed by something? Was the hidden listener even now at his post? And yet how could he be unless he was in the room?

The other two had noticed nothing. For about five minutes they continued their conversation: then, shrugging his shoulders irritably, the man got up and left the room, whilst the girl picked up an illustrated weekly. In a fever of impatience I waited for her to go too: I wanted to have another look up the chimney. But apparently she had no intention of following her companion’s example, and after a time she took out her cigarette-case.

I watched her out of the corner of my eye, as she began to hunt in her bag for a match. And it suddenly struck me that the opportunity was too good to miss.

“Allow me,” I said, rising and striking one for her.

She thanked me, and a little to my surprise she laid down her paper as if quite ready to talk.

“A ghastly affair,” I said, “these two murders.”

“Two!” she cried, staring at me blankly. “Two!”

“Yes,” I said. “One outside, and one inside the grounds of Temple Tower.”

And now it was obvious that not only was the information a surprise to her, but it was a very agitating surprise.

“I heard of one,” she said, “the one outside. But, tell me, who was murdered inside?”

“Mr. Granger’s servant—a man called Gaspard. It appears that both men were strangled.”

“But this is amazing,” she cried. “You’re sure it wasn’t Mr. Granger who was killed?”

“Perfectly sure,” I said. “The police are investigating both crimes now.”

A look of relief appeared on her face, though her bewilderment was still obvious, and I tried to read the situation by the light of my inside knowledge of the Vandalis’ plans. The reason for the relief was clear: it would have complicated things for them considerably if Granger had been dead.

“It is incredible,” she said once again. “Who on earth killed the man outside?”

“The same person presumably who killed the one inside,” I answered, but her remark, phrased as it was, threw a sudden ray of light on what she was thinking and the reason for her surprise at my news. Evidently she must have assumed that le Rossignol had been murdered by Gaspard. And the information that Gaspard himself was dead completely nonplussed her. So much was apparent: what was not clear was whether or not she knew of le Bossu. Her expression at the moment seemed to be that of a person who had heard an inexplicable piece of news: but surely if she knew of le Bossu the matter ceased to be inexplicable at once. And as we continued to discuss the thing, I began more and more to feel sure that she did not know of the silent strangler. Which only tended to make it more baffling.

If Hugh’s surmise was right: if our plans had been overheard by someone listening in the chimney, and if, further, the Vandalis’ room was the one overhead, something must be wrong somewhere. He had put his theory forward when the idea was that the person who had heard our plans was the very woman I was talking to. Of course, it might well be that there was no one there at the moment, and that the dirt had fallen accidentally. And even as I thought so, some more fell down the chimney and lay in a little heap on the whitened hearthstone.

“I beg your pardon,” I said, suddenly conscious that she had asked a question and was expecting an answer. “I didn’t quite catch your remark.”

“I asked if you knew anything about this man Granger?” she said.

“I fear I am only a stranger here,” I answered lightly. “He seems a man of curious disposition.”

“Is it worthwhile,” she said coldly, “lying in quite such a stupid fashion? A man does not go and conceal himself beside the road on a hot summer’s day for fun.”

“Is it worthwhile,” I answered equally coldly, “calling a man a liar until you are quite certain of your facts? The reason for my concealment, as you call it, was simple. Mr. Granger has recently engaged a secretary. She happens to be the fiancee of the youngster who was with me. And in view of the type of house it had been arranged that she should throw a letter over the wall telling him if she was all right. Hence our presence there.”

She stared at me suspiciously, but with the serene confidence of having told the truth—or very nearly—I returned the look blandly.

“You mean to say that that is all you were there for?” she cried.

“What else is there to be there for?” I countered.

“A man doesn’t fortify himself like that unless he is afraid of something,” she said.

“Some such idea had occurred to me,” I agreed.

For a while she smoked in silence: then she seemed to come to a sudden decision.

“What do you think he is afraid of?” she demanded.

“Presumably the entrance of callers,” I remarked.

“Shall we cease to beat about the bush. Monsieur?” she said quietly. “For I really cannot believe that your ignorance is quite so profound as you make out.”

“If it enabled me to talk a little longer with you, Madame,” I replied, “I would wish it were even more profound.”

She waved aside the clumsy compliment with a frown.

“You know who the man is who was found murdered in the wood.” The remark was a statement, not a question.

“Let us suppose for the moment that I do. What then?”

“Why, then you must know everything,” she cried irritably. “Why not come out into the open. Monsieur? There is plenty for all of us. And now that he is dead there is no hurry. We can take our time.”

At last her meaning was clear, and with it the absolute certainty that she was ignorant of the existence of le Bossu. She believed that, with the murder of le Rossignol, the only people left to share the reward for the stolen property were themselves and us. But one thing it seemed to me she had overlooked even from her own point of view.

“Madame,” I remarked, “we agreed, I think, that the object of the fortification was to keep out callers, and it would not appear to have been successful. Someone must have been inside the grounds last night.”

“Precisely,” she said, staring me straight in the face. “And that someone must have been a very powerful man. Almost as powerful as your friend who was in here a night or two ago.”

For a moment I did not take her meaning.

Then it suddenly dawned on me, and I burst out laughing.

“My dear lady,” I cried, “you surely are not accusing us of having pulled off a double murder, are you? That is a bit too rich altogether.”

She rose without answering, and with a feeling of relief I realised she was going. There was nothing more to be gained by prolonging the conversation, and I wanted to have another look up the chimney. It was certainly not my intention to enlighten her over le Bossu, and if she chose to pretend to me that she thought we had murdered Gaspard and le Rossignol, she was quite at liberty to do so.

I watched her step out into the hall, and stand there for a moment or two as if undecided where to go: then she turned and ascended the stairs. And I, after a swift look round to make sure I was unobserved, made a dart for the chimney. And this time it was not all darkness: Hugh was right.

About six feet above my head was a square opening through which a faint light was filtering. And even as I stared at it something moved behind it, and I saw a pair of savage eyes staring down into mine. Then they were gone, and I stepped out into the room again.

My pulse was beating a shade faster than usual, but my brain was perfectly cool. What was the next move? That those eyes had belonged to le Bossu Masqué himself I felt sure, but what was going to happen now? According to Hugh, the Vandalis’ room was above us, and Madame Vandali had just gone upstairs. So that she would be bound to find him, and what then? Because, from my reading of the case, she didn’t know of his existence.

I waited—but there was no sound. Then I took another look up the chimney, but this time all was darkness. And after a while another thought struck me. If, as I believed, the Vandalis did not know about him, would he have dared to go into their room?

I went quickly out into the hall and looked upstairs. True enough. Number 18 was over the little room where we had been talking, and so far Hugh was right. But he had not seen the position of the opening in the chimney, and I had. And I saw at once that that opening could not have been made from Number 18, but must have come from the room next it. Number 19 was le Bossu’s room—not 18. The door was shut, and for a moment I had an insane impulse to stroll casually up the stairs, open the door, and walk in. I could pretend I had come into the wrong room by mistake, and he could not do me any harm in the Dolphin.

However, I decided against it, and walked over to the Visitors’ Book. There was the entry right enough: “H. Thomas, London. No. 19.”

“I see you have a Mr. Thomas staying here,” I said to the girl. “I wonder if that is the Harold Thomas I used to play golf with? Is he a big man with a slight stoop?”

“He is a biggish man, but I don’t think he stoops,” she answered.

“Fair moustache?” I asked,

“I think he is clean shaven,” she replied. “I really couldn’t say for sure. But I expect he will be back for dinner.”

He is not in the hotel, then?” I said quietly. No. I haven’t seen him all day.”

She turned to a new arrival, and I went back into the annex. What was to be done now? That the man who called himself Thomas was in the hotel I knew. But it was manifestly impossible for me to tell the girl how I knew it. If a man lays claim to having seen eyes peering at him out of chimneys, his audience is more than likely to make rude insinuations concerning alcohol. And yet it was utterly imperative that, somehow or other, I should see inside Number 19. How to do it: that was the problem.

I wandered restlessly back into the hall: what about sitting down in a spot which commanded a view of the room? And to my amazement I found, on looking up, that the door was open. Mechanically I ordered a whisky and soda: how did that fact affect things? Did it mean that the owner of Number 19 had gone out in reality, or what?

I finished my drink, and as I laid down the glass I came to a decision. I would go up and walk straight into the room. If there was any unpleasantness I could pretend that I thought it was my mythical Harold Thomas and apologise for my intrusion. But I should have seen the man we wanted: and that, so it seemed to me, was worth a big risk.

There was no one about, and so, putting a bold face on it, I walked straight up the stairs. Then for a moment I admit I hesitated: visions of being arrested as an hotel thief floated before me. But I banished them, and with a preliminary knock on the door, I went into Number 19.

There was no one in it, and I glanced quickly round. A weather-beaten suitcase stood in one corner: on the bed lay a pair of pyjamas. A man’s toilet accessories—hair brushes, shaving gear, and the like—adorned the dressing-table. In fact, it was without exception the least suspicious looking room I have even been in. And then I suddenly became aware of a most peculiar noise. It came from the next room, and it sounded as if someone was drumming with his feet on the partition wall. It came fitfully, and then, after a while, it died away altogether, save for an occasional bump.

With its cessation I pulled myself together: there was no good my remaining there now that I had found the room empty. The bluff about Mr. Harold Thomas was all very well, but not having found him at home there was no excuse for my remaining in his room. I must go down and resume my watch in the hall.

And even as I came to that conclusion I happened to look in the glass in front of me. I could see over my shoulder the room behind me.

The door was slowly shutting. With a great effort I forced myself to look round. Evidently Mr. Thomas had returned.

But it wasn’t Mr. Thomas. Standing almost on top of me was a masked figure, that in the fading light seemed of monstrous size. In a flash I took in the hump on his back, realised it was le Bossu Masqué himself, and then his hands shot out and he got my throat. I struggled wildly, and I am not generally considered a weakling. But in that man’s hands I might have been a child. The silent strangler had got me.

Soon there came a roaring in my ears, and still the grip held. I was losing consciousness: he was throttling me. And the last thing I remember before everything went black was the look of fierce triumph in his eyes.

CHAPTER X

In Which “Le Bossu” Retrieves His Error

When I came to myself, for a moment or two I could recall nothing. Then in a wave it all came back to me. Once again I saw that terrible figure crouching over me, and felt those vicelike hands on my throat.

Feeling a little dazed and sick, I scrambled to my feet. Of my assailant, there was no sign: the room was empty. And then another thing struck me: the kit that had been lying about was no longer there. Everything had gone, including the suitcase.

For a while I sat on the bed trying to pull myself together. My neck was most infernally sore: undoubtedly le Bossu well deserved his second nickname of the Strangler. Because it was useless to blind myself to the fact that had he wished to kill me he could easily have done so. Luckily he had not so wished, and I was still alive, but it was not due to any prowess on my part. He had decided to make me unconscious whilst he packed his things and left the hotel, and had calmly proceeded to do so.

I glanced at my watch: it was seven o’clock. I had been unconscious for roughly an hour. And it was as I replaced it in my pocket that my eye was caught by a big piece of folded paper lying half under the bed. I picked it up mechanically, and opened it out. And then, for a time, I stood gazing at it, literally unable to believe my eyes. It was the actual plan of Temple Tower which had been stolen from Laidley Towers the preceding night. I turned it over: on the back were written some lines in pencil.

I crossed to the window to examine it better: then, on second thoughts, I crammed it in my pocket. There would be plenty of time to study it later: the immediate necessity was to get out of the room. I calculated that he must have dropped it inadvertently when packing, and once he discovered his loss he would almost certainly return for it. And I had no wish whatever to encounter the gentleman by myself again. True, I could accuse him of half murdering me, but who was there to prove it? A stiff neck gives no outward and visible sign of its existence; it would only be my word against his. Whereas it would be obvious to all concerned that I was in a room where I had no right to be.

I opened the door cautiously and peered out. And with a sigh of relief I saw that no one was about. Even if I was seen leaving the room I should render myself liable to suspicion, but luck was with me. And ten seconds later I was in the hall again, with the precious plan in my pocket. There was no hurry now: I could afford to take my time. And the best thing to do, it struck me, was to inquire into Mr. Thomas’ movements. So I walked over to the office.

“By the way,” I said to the girl, “has Mr. Thomas returned yet?”

She looked at me in some surprise.

“Mr. Thomas paid his bill and left half an hour ago,” she said. “He didn’t say anything about coming back.”

“I must have misunderstood his plans,” I remarked. “Did he say if he was returning to London?”

“He didn’t say anything,” said the girl. “But he can’t get back to London tonight from here. The last train has gone.”

I thanked her and let the subject drop. There was nothing more to be got out of her, and it seemed to me that she was already looking at me a little curiously. What had happened was clear. After laying me out he had calmly packed his kit and walked out of the hotel. And we were none of us any nearer knowing what he looked like than we were before. That was the sickening part of it. But I’d got the plan, and that was worth half a dozen stiff necks. I sat down in a secluded spot and ordered the largest whisky and the smallest soda that the hotel could produce. Then I pulled the precious piece of parchment out of my pocket and proceeded to examine it.

The plan itself was dated MLXXXII, which I calculated as 1532. And though my history was extremely rusty, I worked that date out as being in the reign of Henry the Eighth. It showed the original house of Temple Tower, though, of course, not under that name, and the guarding wall. It also showed another building situated about a hundred yards from the house, which I assumed must have been the now non-existent chapel. Connecting the two buildings from outside wall to outside wall, there ran the secret passage clearly marked on the plan. So that, at first sight, it appeared that once one was inside the grounds, with a tape measure, the entrance to the passage would be easy to locate.

“Good Lord! Darrell, where did you get that?”

I glanced up quickly, to find John James regarding me in amazement.

“Hullo!” I said. “Here’s your bally old plan.”

“So I see,” he cried. “I didn’t think it was a copy of the Pink ’Un. But how did you get it?”

“Sit down,” I remarked, “and order the necessary. I could do with another. And I will tell you the doings.”

“What’s stung your face, laddie?” he said. “It looks kind of fixed in position.”

“It is,” I answered. “And it’s all part of the doings.”

He sat down, and I told him briefly what had happened.

“Well, I’m damned,” he muttered, when I’d finished. “He’s a cool customer. However, let’s get back to the old plan. Turn it over, and we’ll see what is on the other side.”

The writing was crabbed and old-fashioned, and being in pencil, the words were none too easy to decipher. But at last we managed to make them out.

When tower and eastern turret come in line, a tree is found.

Thirty long paces north, and in the ground

The answer lies. But should you hear the sound

Of turning wheels—beware.

“Seems helpful,” he murmured. “The only drawback is that we’ve got to get inside the grounds to make use of it. Moreover, we’ve got to get in by day.”

For a moment or two I did not get his meaning.

“At night we probably shouldn’t be able to see the bally turret,” he explained.

“But look here,” I said, “this bit of doggerel is only a repetition of the information in the plan. There’s the passage clearly marked.”

He shook his head.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he answered positively. “The plan only shows the spot where the passage passed underneath the old outside wall. The actual entrance was somewhere inside the chapel, just as the entrance the other end is somewhere inside Temple Tower.”

“Then it seems to me,” I remarked, “that I’ve got a stiff neck for nothing. For I’m darned if I can see how we’re going to get into the place by day.”

“It’s just possible that the girl might be able to help us there,” he said thoughtfully. “Scott’s girl, I mean. She’ll have to go back for her kit, and then she ought to have no difficulty in spotting the tree, and marking it for us somehow. Anyway,” he continued after a pause, “what do we do now, sergeant-major? There doesn’t seem much good our sitting on here.”

“Let’s give it a little longer,” I said. “I feel there is a bare possibility of our friend returning to find this. And it would be a pity to miss the blighter.”

“Right ho!” he agreed. “As long as you like as far as I’m concerned. But my own opinion is that he’s not going to come back for that. Why should he? He’s read the verse at the back, and it’s not difficult to remember. So that the plan is of no more use to him now, any more than it is to us.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” I said. “Let’s give it ten minutes or so, and then we’ll push back for dinner.”

I replaced the plan in my pocket, and lit a cigarette, whilst he got up.

“I’ll wander down to the station,” he said, “and get an evening paper. Then, if you’re ready, we’ll toddle when I get back.”

He strolled out, leaving me to finish my drink. The lounge was empty, and the soft evening light slanting through the old-fashioned windows gave it a particularly peaceful aspect. Then four men, two of whom I recognised as golfers of Walker Cup repute, came in talking shop. And I wondered idly what they would think if I butted into their conversation.

“Excuse me,” I might say, “interrupting your dissertation on putting, but have you seen a masked hunchback lying about anywhere? Because I’ve just been very nearly strangled by one.”

I began to chuckle inwardly as I imagined their expressions. And yet it was true, damn it, it was true. It wasn’t a dream, and it wasn’t an attack of delirium tremens. Then the clergyman came in, with the two elderly ladies in tow, and one of the golfers, who had abandoned his hobby for the latest from the Stock Exchange, lowered his voice discreetly.

I lit another cigarette and wondered if by any chance le Bossu would return. Probably John James was right, and he wouldn’t. And even if he did, unless he actually walked into Number 19, how should I know him? I glanced upstairs once again, and as I did so I suddenly remembered that strange drumming noise that I had heard before le Bossu attacked me. It had come from Number 18, the Vandalis’ room, and I began wondering what had caused it. It had been such a peculiar noise, unlike anything that I could recall having heard before. It had sounded almost as if someone was knocking on the wall with a mallet.

Could it have been a signal of some sort? If so, it must have been intended for le Bossu himself, and that proved at once that I was wrong, and the three of them were in collusion. But then, if that were the case, why bother to signal, when all that was necessary was to walk into the room and talk?

After a while I gave it up: like so many other things in this extraordinary affair, there seemed to be a dozen different possibilities. Presumably, in time, we should arrive at some result, but at the moment I felt I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

The door swung open, and I looked up hoping it was John James. I was beginning to agree with him that there was but little object in remaining any longer. But it proved to be the Inspector, and with him a shrewd-looking red-haired young man with journalist written all over him, who paused the instant he saw me, and then came over and spoke.

“Good evening, Mr. Darrell,” he said. “You’ve forgotten me: on the Folkestone Courier. You were good enough to give me an interview when you were playing for Middlesex in the Canterbury Cricket Week two years ago. Extraordinary affair this, isn’t it?”

“Very,” I agreed. “What did you find out. Inspector? You were just going to Temple Tower when you left us this morning.”

“Ah! Of course,” he said, “you were with Captain Drummond. Just for the moment I did not recognise you. Well, sir, you’ll understand that I can’t say much. Though, to tell you the truth,” he added ruefully, “I haven’t got much to say. I’m defeated—for the moment only, of course.”

“Quite,” I agreed gravely. “You found out nothing from Mr. Granger himself?”

“Practically nothing,” he admitted. “It took me the best part of half an hour to force my way in. I rang the bell again and again, and nothing happened. Finally a woman came to the gate, and I told her that unless she opened it I would have it broken down: that a murder had been committed in the grounds, and that by law I must investigate. As soon as I said that she turned as white as a sheet, and opened the gate.

“‘A murder!’ she stammered. ‘Who’s been murdered?’

“Now, she wasn’t lying: I have enough knowledge of human nature to know that. She knew nothing about it: of that I am convinced. She shut the gate and bolted it: then she followed behind me. And when we came to the body she let out a scream and nearly fainted. I don’t blame her, for the dead man was her husband. He was strangled just like the other, and he was not a pretty sight.

“However, to cut a long story short, I left her weeping and moaning and made tracks for the house and Mr. Granger. It took me the best part of another half hour to get in there: he kept peering at me through a hole in the door. Finally, he opened it, and then bolted it again as soon as I was in.

“‘What do you want?’ he said in a whining sort of voice.

“I told him, and I’ll eat my hat if he wasn’t as surprised as the woman.

“‘Two,’ he kept on croaking. ‘Two men killed! Gaspard—and who was the other? Who was the other?’

“He clawed at my arm, as I described the other, and a look of relief came over his face.

“‘That’s one of them, at any rate,’ he muttered.

“‘Look here,’ I said sternly, ‘there’s more in this than meets the eye, Mr. Granger. And you know more about it than you are telling me. How comes it that these two men are strangled, one inside your grounds and one just outside? Somebody must have done it: do you know who?’

“But he wouldn’t say any more: Just shut up like an oyster.

“‘You’ll be subpoenaed for the inquest,’ I warned him. ‘And then you’ll be on oath, don’t forget. Someone was in your grounds last night, and that someone did the murders. Moreover, I believe you know who that someone was!’

“But he just went on muttering and mumbling to himself, and finally I left him. There wasn’t anything more to be got out of him for the moment: the man seemed half crazy to me. But we’ll make him speak at the inquest.”

“Did you go and see Spragge?” I asked as the Inspector paused.

“I did—later,” he answered. “And I did not get much out of him. He identified the body of the man in the wood as the man who had been staying with him. And all he could tell me was that yesterday, about six o’clock, a note was delivered at his farm by a small boy for the lodger—a note which threw him into a terrible state of agitation. He says he went out about eight-thirty and that is the last he’s seen of him.”

“Very strange,” said the red-haired young man. “But good copy. Dead dog: two men strangled—one inside, one out. Very strange. I suppose you are absolutely certain it couldn’t have been this man Granger himself?”

“Absolutely,” said the Inspector. “He hasn’t got the strength.”

“Then—who did it?” demanded the journalist. “That is the point.”

“Precisely,” I mildly remarked, “that is the point.”

“Has the doctor decided which was killed first?” asked the journalist.

“The one outside,” said the Inspector. “Two or three hours before the other.”

“Good!” cried the other. “Then we arrive at this conclusion, anyway.”

He talked on: he was the type of man who would talk on for ever and ever, but I hardly heard what he was saying. It seemed almost impossible to realise that I could, in a sentence, explain to them the whole baffling mystery. And not for the first time did the worrying thought return to me: were we justified in withholding our information? True, I saw the difficulties that confronted us: what were we to say without incriminating ourselves? Still, the thought kept coming back, and try as I would, I could not quite pacify my conscience.

I glanced round the hall. The four golfers had risen, and I watched them idly as they reached the top of the stairs and stood for a moment laughing and talking. They moved aside to let a maid, with a can of hot water in her hand, pass them, and I remember asking myself if it were possible to imagine a more prosaic scene. The quiet English inn—the routine unvaried for years. And I remember my thoughts because of the sudden amazing change. Tranquillity, order, peace—and then, in a second, a screaming, hysterical girl standing in the open doorway of Number 18, while the hot water dripped from the overturned can into the hall below.

For a second or two no one moved: the thing was so utterly unexpected as to be paralysing. The golfers, with their mouths open, stared at her dazedly: so did we. Then, simultaneously, the power of action returned to all of us. I dashed upstairs behind the Inspector and the journalist, a thousand wild thoughts in my head. But the wildest of those thoughts had not prepared me for the ghastly sight that met my eyes as we entered the room.

Hanging to one of the old oak beams was Vandali. A glance at his purple, swollen face was sufficient: the man was dead. His body sagged grotesquely, almost touching the wall that separated the room from Number 19. And with a sick sort of feeling, I realised that the strange drumming noise I had heard had been made by the poor devil’s heels as he died. At his feet lay an overturned chair; evidently he had stood on it, and then kicked it away from underneath him. I heard the others talking in low tones: caught snatches of what they were saying: “Poor devil,” “Hanged himself,” “Where is the woman?”: the disjointed phrases seemed to come from a long way off, and after a time I escaped downstairs.

Why had Vandali hanged himself? The question hammered at my brain. True, I knew nothing about the man: all that I could say was that! had seen him a couple of hours previously apparently quite happy and contented. What on earth had happened to make him commit suicide?

Then another thought struck me. When Madame Vandali left me she had gone upstairs. At the utmost, only a quarter of an hour had elapsed before I went to le Bossu’s room. Therefore, whatever had caused the tragedy must have taken place during that quarter of an hour, because it was impossible to think that she could have found him hanging and said nothing about it. Had they had some terrible quarrel, as a result of which she had left him and he had then committed suicide?

It seemed almost incredible that such a thing could have happened in so short a time. And yet what other conceivable solution was there? Something must have happened during that quarter of an hour to make the man kill himself, and the only person who would be able to throw any light on what that something had been was the woman.

But was she? Like a blinding flash, the thought struck me. Was she? When I had first peered up the chimney, I had stared into le Bossu’s eyes: the next time the opening was shut. And when I had gone into his room, it was empty. Where had he been during that fateful quarter of an hour? Did that supply the cause of the quarrel? Was it the eternal triangle once again?

I tried to fit a possible solution on those lines round the facts as I knew them. No one knew what le Bossu looked like: quite possibly he was a good looking, attractive man. Suppose, then, that he was an old lover of Madame Vandali, she being ignorant of the manner of man he was. Suppose he had suddenly confronted her, and she had determined at once to leave Vandali. Would that do? And honesty compelled me to admit that if it did, it was only by the barest margin. It meant that in a few minutes she had made up her mind, and left the hotel without packing, having first reduced Vandali to such a condition of hopelessness that he took his own life. Thin; altogether too thin. And yet the whole thing was so inexplicable that one could not disregard even the most wildly improbable solution.

“What on earth is all this excitement?”

I looked up to find that John James had returned and was staring up at the landing with a bewildered look on his face. I told him, and he sat down abruptly.

“Good God!” he said. “What did he do it for?”

“It is what I have been asking myself ever since it was discovered,” I answered. “The whole thing is so utterly incredible that if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I should hardly believe it. Well, Inspector, mysteries accumulate at Rye.”

“I dunno as there’s much mystery about this, sir,” he remarked, crossing the hall to us. “Just a plain case of suicide. Good-evening, Sir John.”

“’Evening, Inspector. Nothing to account for it?”

“Nothing, sir. I’ve asked the manager, and he can’t tell me anything. A charming wife, lots of money; and, apparently, not a care in the world.”

And at that moment the manager himself, looking anxious and worried, came up.

“A terrible thing. Sir John,” he cried. “I wouldn’t have had it happen in this hotel for the world. The scandal: and you know what people are. I don’t suppose I’ll be able to let that room again for months.”

“By the way,” I remarked, “I wonder if you can tell me anything about a Mr. Thomas who was staying here. The girl in the office tells me he has just gone, and I was wondering if it was a man I met a little while ago. He had Number 19.”

But he shook his head, and looked at me as if surprised that so irrelevant a detail could be introduced at such a moment.

“No, sir, I do not,” he said. “I believe I saw him when he arrived, but I don’t remember having seen him since. And, anyway, this dreadful affair has driven everything else out of my head.”

He bustled away as the doctor came down the stairs, as if he still vainly hoped to hear something that would lessen the tragedy. And then, in a feverish attempt to restore things to their normal time-table, he pealed the dinner-gong loudly. Gradually the lounge emptied, though there was only one topic of conversation to be heard on every side. And at length I was left alone with John and the doctor.

There seemed no object in staying, and yet I was loath to go. I could not help thinking that there must be some further development; that Madame Vandali must return or the man who called himself Thomas. But as the time went on and nothing more happened, it seemed useless waiting any longer. And we were on the point of going when the further development occurred. Only this time it was not an hysterical chamber-maid, but the Inspector, whitefaced, who stood on the landing outside Number 18.

“Doctor,” he called hoarsely. “For God’s sake come quick.”

The doctor ran up the stairs, and almost mechanically we followed him. What fresh horror had taken place in that ill-omened room? On the bed lay the motionless body of Vandali, covered with a sheet, but it was not at that we any of us looked. For the cupboard door was open and on the floor was the huddled-up body of a woman. It was Madame Vandali, and she, too, was dead.

But in this case there was no question of suicide: it was murder. The mark around her throat was plain to see: she had been strangled.

“Good God!” muttered John shakily, “this is a bit grim.”

“I was going through his effects,” said the Inspector, “and happened to open that door.”

“Lift her out carefully,” ordered the doctor. “Though it is obvious nothing can be done.”

He mopped his forehead, and furiously ordered away two waiters from the door, who were looking in with wide-open mouths.

As he said, it was obvious that nothing could be done. The unfortunate woman was quite dead. Her face, too, was puffed and swollen, though not quite so badly as the man’s.

“Throttled!” said the doctor shakily. “Throttled to death, poor soul.”

“Yes, but who by?” wailed the manager.

The poor little man, completely unnerved by this second tragedy, was standing by the door wringing his hands. And it was left to the red-haired journalist, who had mysteriously appeared from nowhere, to supply the answer.

“Him,” he said, pointing with dramatic suddenness to the bed.

We all turned and stared at him, and his ferret-nose was literally twitching with excitement.

“But they were a devoted couple,” stammered the manager.

Red-hair snorted contemptuously, and turned to the doctor.

“Was it you,” he asked, “who examined those two men who were found dead this morning?”

“It was,” said the doctor. “But what…”

“Man, don’t you see?” the other almost yelled. “It is the clue: it is the answer. Who murdered those two men? Why—he did, of course.”

For a moment no one spoke. I stared at John, and John stared at me: what on earth was he driving at?

“Look here,” he went on excitedly, “it is clear to me. Tell me if I’m wrong. When you find three people mysteriously strangled within twenty-four hours in the same locality—what do you assume? Why—that they were all strangled by the same person.”

The Inspector nodded portentiously.

“That’s so,” he conceded.

“Very well, then,” said the other. “If someone else murdered these three, why should that man go and hang himself? But supposing it was he who did it: supposing he was a murderer by instinct, and had some terrible quarrel with this woman. Possibly without even intending to, he seized her by the throat and strangled her. That accounts for his hanging himself. When he realised what he had done, half mad with remorse, he committed suicide.”

The Inspector scratched his head.

“Yes—but why?” he began.

But Red-hair was not to be put off.

“Find out whether this man had anything to do with Temple Tower,” he cried. “I’ll bet you he did.”

“You win your bet,” I said. “I happened to be passing Temple Tower yesterday when he and this unfortunate woman were trying to get in.”

“What did I tell you?” he said triumphantly. “There’s your murderer: there’s the solution to the whole thing. Why he did it the Lord knows—and possibly that man Granger. And neither of them are likely to split. But he did it. Damn it! is there any other solution? But for this quarrel here there was nothing at present to connect him with the two murders at Temple Tower. Now there is. Once a poisoner: always a poisoner. Once a strangler: always a strangler.”

Once again I caught John’s eye, and this time I signed to him urgently to leave the room.

“Ought I to speak?” I asked him as we went downstairs.

“How can you?” he answered. “What on earth can you say? You have got no proof. And, anyway, are you certain that that youth isn’t right?”

“How can he be right?” I cried. “I heard Vandali’s heels drumming against the wall before I was attacked myself.”

“Le Bossu or no le Bossu,” he answered obstinately, “I refuse to believe that a man can be forced to commit suicide. Come on: let’s get back to Hugh’s house. My head is simply buzzing.”

“Where is Matthews?” I asked. “Weren’t you going to pick him up?”

“He said he’d wait for me in the car,” he said. “And if he wasn’t there, I was to get along back.”

There was no sign of him, and we started off. My brain felt as if it was going round and round in circles also: as John had said, no man can be forced to commit suicide. And yet it was not Vandali who was the murderer: of that I was convinced.

We found them all at dinner—Victor Matthews included, and they listened in silence while we told our story. And the first person to speak when we had finished was Matthews.

“I suppose,” he said quietly, “that neither of you thought of asking the doctor if Vandali’ s neck was broken?”

We all stared at him: what was he driving at? And then he began to laugh quietly to himself as if enjoying some secret joke.

“Forgive me laughing,” he said, “but it is indicative of genuine admiration. What a man! What a man!” He grew serious again. “We were wondering—all of us—how le Bossu was going to retrieve his error. Now we know.”

“You think it was le Bossu?” demanded John.

“I don’t think,” answered the other, “I know.”

Then how did he make Vandali commit suicide?”

“He didn’t—for the simple reason that Vandali didn’t commit suicide.”

“But,” spluttered John, “confound it all—he did.”

“You are wrong, Sir John. Vandali was murdered: just as the others were murdered. And by that simply and kindly little act on the part of le Bossu he has not only removed from his path two people he wanted removed, but he has supplied the ready-made solution, so ably discovered by your journalistic friend, to account for everything.”

But how do you know Vandali was murdered?” insisted John.

“Know is perhaps too strong a word,” admitted Matthews. “And yet, I’m not sure that it is. Just think. If a man is hanged in the accepted sense of the word, his neck is broken, and death is instantaneous. But to obtain that result a long drop of several feet is necessary. In the case, however, of a man standing on a chair, and then kicking it away—there were one or two cases during the war of captured spies doing it—the neck is not broken. Death is not instantaneous, and is due to strangulation.

“Yes, but dash it all,” objected John again, “what’s that got to do with it?”

“Dry up, John,” said Hugh. “I see what he is driving at.”

“Strangulation, Sir John,” continued Matthews. “So that, in reality, all four deaths were due to the same cause. Which puts a very different complexion on the matter, doesn’t it? Our friend, by the simple process of hanging one of the dead bodies up, has made it appear as if only three were due to strangulation, and that the fourth was suicide. That being so, the solution to the whole affair would be exactly what the journalist got, and which le Bossu intended someone to get. I don’t blame anyone for jumping to the conclusion that has been jumped to: without the inside knowledge we possess it is the conclusion we should arrive at.”

But look here, Mr. Matthews,” I said, “there are still some pretty useful difficulties in the way. If we accept your theory we have also got to accept the fact that le Bossu walked quite openly into the Vandalis’ bedroom, and strangled them one after another without a sound being heard. Further, that Madame Vandali, who must have been killed second, came into the room to find her husband hanging to the beam, and never uttered a cry. Why, she’d have screamed the place down.”

Matthews smiled faintly.

“Agreed, Mr. Darrell,” he said. “Put as you have done, it sounds a bit difficult. Let me, however, try and reconstruct what may have happened. While the two Vandalis were talking in the little room below, le Bossu was listening. Vandali goes upstairs into his room: le Bossu leaves Number 19, and follows him in. There he strangles him and puts the body in the cupboard. Wait”—as I again started to speak—”I can guess your objection, but let me finish first. Then he goes back to his listening-post, and shortly after Madame comes up to the room. With her he repeats the process, and having killed them both, he hangs the man on the beam, and puts the woman in the cupboard. Then once again he goes back to his room, where he finds you. Now, it’s obvious he can’t kill you. To do so would be to shed the light of publicity on Number 19, and the mystical Mr. Thomas. So he renders you unconscious, packs his things and departs. Moreover, Mr. Thomas will be seen no more. He has served his purpose, and he now disappears from the cast—as Mr. Thomas.”

“How do you mean—as Mr. Thomas?” demanded Hugh.

Victor Matthews leaned forward impressively. Assuming that my account of what happened is correct, and substantially it must be so, there is still one grave difficulty—a difficulty which I think Mr. Darrell spotted. If a stranger walks into your room, for whatever purpose, there will be some conversation, and probably loud conversation. In Mr. Darrell’s case it was a little different: he was in a room where he had no right to be, and he was taken by surprise. But with the Vandalis—especially with Madame Vandali—one would have expected a scream or some cry, at any rate. And there was nothing—no sound at all. Don’t you see the almost irresistible conclusion we arrive at?”

“I’m damned if I do,” said Freckles.

“Why, that le Bossu was not a stranger to the Vandalis, He is a man, moreover, who could walk into their room without occasioning comment on their part. Jean Picot—the chauffeur: he is le Bossu Masqué.”

He almost shouted in his excitement, and we all stared at him.

“It fits,” he went on. “It must fit. He comes over as their chauffeur. All along he has meant to get rid of them sometime or other. Having arrived he takes the first opportunity of getting the room next to them, and for the purpose he disguises himself and takes the name of Thomas. So that he has two rooms in the hotel: Jean Picot’ s room, and Mr. Thomas’ room.”

He paused and lit a cigarette, looking round the table triumphantly.

“By George! laddie,” boomed Hugh, “what a brain! Picot it is, for a fiver. What shall we do? Go and push his face in? Or have a mug of port?”

CHAPTER XI

In Which We See a Face at the Window

The more one thought of it the more probable did it seem that Matthews was right. It accounted for so many little odd threads that had hitherto proved puzzling. Particularly the elusiveness of the so-called Mr. Thomas. It had struck me when I asked the girl in the office that she seemed very vague about him: the manager, too, in spite of the worry of the tragedy, might have been a little more helpful. But once one assumed that he and Picot were the same person, much of the difficulty disappeared. To a master of disguise, such as le Bossu almost certainly was, there would have been no difficulty over entering Number 19 as Mr. Thomas, and leaving it, if he so wished, as Jean Picot. His presence in that part of the hotel was easily accounted for in his role of chauffeur.

Then again the chimney-pot episode. It had seemed to me that it had caused the Vandalis so little surprise that they must be privy to it. And they probably had been, thinking it was Jean Picot who had pushed it over at Hugh. But a Jean Picot who really was their chauffeur and accomplice: not a Jean Picot who was using them to his own ends entirely.

All the way through it was the same thing, and it was impossible not to feel a certain unwilling admiration for the swine. For just so long as a person was useful to him, le Bossu employed him. Then without the smallest compunction he murdered him. Le Rossignol was allowed to make his ladder, and almost put it in position on the wall. Then—death: that hideous silent death which, had it suited him, would have been my portion.

The Vandalis had been allowed to live only as long as they served his purpose. While it had seemed possible that they might get the jewels from Granger, le Bossu was perfectly prepared to let them try. He was, in fact, a past master in letting the cat pull the chestnuts out of the fire for him.

It all fitted in, as Matthews said. On hearing of the plan he had forthwith driven off to Laidley Towers and obtained it, returning in time to hide in the shadow of the warehouse as we started off in the car. Then, later on, they were the lights of his car that we had seen on the main road—going and then coming back. And having drawn blank there, he had returned and tried the sea road till he found our car and removed the sparking-plugs.

“He’s a blinking marvel,” cried Hugh. “Equalled only by our Mr. Matthews.”

Matthews waved a deprecating hand.

“My dear sir, you must not forget that I know him. But I assure you that on the score of brain I lay no claim to be in the same street as le Bossu. However, this time, by a combination of circumstances, I think we’ve got him. And our principal asset is Sir John’s plan.”

“You think he will still go on with it?” said John doubtfully.

“A man is not going to kill four people for nothing,” answered Matthews. “And though the risk will be great, le Bossu is accustomed to risk. He must guess, of course, that we shall be there. That he knows about Miss Verney is, I should think, almost certain. And he will doubtless arrive at exactly the same conclusion as Sir John did—namely, that the best way of spotting the tree is for her to return to Temple Tower tomorrow, under the pretext of getting her luggage. Further, he will assume that once the tree is found we shall lose no time in searching for the entrance to the passage. And then he will rely on his own cunning. That is how I see it, gentlemen. Moreover, I see another thing, too. The inquest will be, I should imagine, the day after tomorrow. He, if it can possibly be done, would like to be clear of Temple Tower before the publicity, which is going to be given to Granger and all his doings, occurs. And so I believe le Bossu will be prepared to run an additional risk, if he can pull it off tomorrow night. If it was feasible he would do it tonight, but it isn’t. He does not know where the tree is.”

“And so, on your theory,” said Hugh, “we are going to be the last bunch of pussy-cats for the monkey. Supposing we refuse to play?”

“Nothing would please him more,” laughed Matthews. “Though we have the easiest method of spotting the tree, there are others. A thing like that is not going to deter le Bossu. And if we refuse to play we leave him a free hand. Besides, our friend is quite a good enough judge of human nature to know that you are not going to let me down. I’ve got to play, any way.”

“My dear fellow,” cried Hugh horrified, “I was only jesting. Why, great Scott! this is where the fun begins. We’ll dot him one all right.”

“The only point,” said Freckles doubtfully, “is this. Now that we know Picot is le Bossu, oughtn’t we to say something to the police?”

“The old, old difficulty,” answered Matthews.

The difficulty which confronts us at every stage in our career. I speak as a policeman myself. We know—or we think we know: but can we prove? And at this stage of the proceedings we lay ourselves open to very grave censure for not having spoken sooner. Catch him in the act, and it becomes a very different matter. We have a definite result to show: a tangible asset. Besides “—his voice sank a little, and the dreamy look I had seen before came on his face—” he’s my meat.”

“Your meat he shall remain, old lad,” laughed Hugh. “We’ll just come along and help in the mincing.”

And at that moment Pat Verney screamed. She was staring at the window, and as I swung round I had a momentary glimpse of Jean Picot’s face pressed against the pane. His features were distorted with rage: his eyes were fixed on Victor Matthews. For a second I saw it, and then it seemed to me that the crack of a revolver and the sound of breaking glass were simultaneous with the lights going out. A bullet went past my head with a wicked ping, and a further crash of glass showed that no one was hit.

“Le Bossu,” shouted Matthews. “After him.”

“Who put out the light?” came Hugh’s quiet voice.

“I did,” cried Matthews. “I’m by the switch now. Somebody stay with Miss Verney: come on the rest.”

“No earthly use,” said Hugh. “The night is too dark. But I wish the damned fellow wouldn’t break my glass. I think he was having a pot at you, Matthews.”

“I’m quite certain of it,” he answered.

“Good God! the door is opening,” yelled Freckles.

And even as he spoke, there came a half-strangled shout which turned into a hideous gurgling noise. It ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and then the door shut again.

“Lights,” said Hugh curtly. “And, Peter, keep your gun handy.”

But the light revealed nothing except an almost incredible sight. Victor Matthews, with his hand to his throat, and his eyes staring, was half crouching, half lying against the wall. His lips were moving, but only inarticulate sounds came from them. And on his face was a look of utter terror. Hugh sprang to the door and flung it open. The hall, which was dimly lighted, was empty, but the front door was open. And after a time he came back into the room.

“Our old pal le Bossu going all out,” he remarked thoughtfully. “Undoubtedly a gentleman of nerve.”

“Two hands—got me—by throat,” gasped Matthews, and still the terror remained on his face. He was peering fearfully round the room, as if he expected le Bossu to materialise once more, and every now and then a long shuddering sigh shook him.

“Spot of whisky?” said Hugh. “By Gad! that’s calm, you know,” he went on as he crossed to the sideboard. “First of all he has a pot shot at you: and then he comes into the bally house, and says ‘How d’you do?’”

“Do you require anything, sir?” Denny had quietly materialised. “I thought I heard a shot.”

“Just go and say ‘shoo’ at the front door, my trusty fellah,” said Hugh. “But mind you don’t get strangled or anything. If you think it is likely, call me.”

“Very good, sir. Shall I lock up after that?”

“Yes—lock up. But say ‘shoo’ two or three times, as if you meant it. And then bring some more glasses. And beer. You know,” he continued as Denny left the room, “this bally fellow is growing on me. Peter—for sheer nerve—he’s got old Carl Peterson beat to a frazzle.”

“At any rate,” I said, “it has definitely settled one thing. Picot is le Bossu.”

“That is so,” he agreed. “And it seems to me that the thing to do now is to lay out our plan of campaign, provided, that is to say, Matthews is feeling fit enough.”

“I’m all right now, thanks,” said Matthews. “The thing was so completely unexpected that it shook me for a moment.”

“I’ll bet it did,” said Hugh. “Deuced nasty business having a bird like that keeping his hand in on you. Did you say ‘shoo,’ Denny?”

“Three times, sir,” answered the butler, putting down the beer. “Only a cat responded to the threat.”

“Good,” said Hugh. “We may not cut much ice with old Picot, but with cats we’re perfect devils. Now the next move, Denny, is with Mrs. Denny. Ask her to go and ferret round in Mrs. Drummond’s gear and get the necessary wherewithal for Miss Verney for tonight. Miss Verney will sleep in the green room. Now, what about you, Matthews? I think you’d better stay as well. You can sleep in my dressing-room—afraid it is the only one left. And you can sleep soundly, because the only way into it is through my wife’s and my room. So that if old Picot returns we can give him a thick ear between us.

“Thank you. Captain Drummond,” said Matthews. “I’ll accept your offer with pleasure.”

He had quite recovered, and the colour had come back to his face. He now appeared almost amused at the whole thing: Hugh’s very matter-of-fact conversation seemed to have pulled him together.

“Splendid. Very well then, Denny—that’s all settled. Lock up everywhere, and then you can turn in. Now,” he went on, as Denny left the room, “tomorrow, at crack of dawn, somewhere round about ten o’clock. Miss Verney, accompanied by Scott, will repair to Temple Tower. Having arrived there, while Miss Verney gets her kit, Scott will wander round the grounds, get the tower and the eastern turret in line and then mark the tree so that we shall know it again. That clear?”

“Absolutely,” said Freckles.

“Right. Then I suggest. Miss Verney, that you should push off to bed. You must be completely exhausted. And don’t feel alarmed: you’re quite safe.”

“I’m not a bit frightened,” she answered. “And I think I will go: last night was not a particularly restful one.”

“I’m for the shore, too,” said John. “Any chance of that bally fellow coming back?”

“Always a chance,” said Hugh. “But we’ll shutter all the ground floor, and unless he’s a cat-burglar as well as a strangler, he won’t get in. Off you push: there will be mighty little sleep for anyone tomorrow night. How’s the neck, Matthews?” he went on, when the other three had gone.

“Quite recovered. But when next I meet Picot…” He paused expressively. “And that will not be till tomorrow night. Our friend, I am open to a small bet, will not be much in evidence by day.”

“No,” agreed Hugh. “Probably not. Well, would you like me to show you your room?”

He led the way upstairs, and I mixed myself another drink. Used as I was to Hugh’s methods and moods, there was something about him tonight that I couldn’t quite understand. His complete calmness and nonchalance under the most unusual circumstances I was accustomed to, and his manner, since the attack on Matthews, had been just what I should have expected. But there was an underlying something that beat me. No one else would have noticed it, but then no one else in the room knew him as I did. And when he came down the stairs again I tackled him.

He gave a lazy grin.

“It’s his gall, old Peter, his gall, that tickles me to death. Plastering notices on my trees, and then doing target practice amongst the crockery. Damn the fellow, it might be his house. And then to come in and give poor old Matthews the once over.”

“But why the devil didn’t you go after him?” I cried.

“Nerve shaken, old boy,” he said earnestly. “I assure you I was all of a tremble.”

“Confound you, Hugh,” I laughed, “don’t talk such appalling tripe to me. There’s something at the back of your ugly face.”

“A desire for beer, Peter. More beer. Much more beer.”

He lit a cigarette, and, with his eyes half closed, he lay back in his chair blowing smoke rings. And now I knew I was right: it was the attitude he invariably adopted when he was thinking. Absolutely motionless, save for the movement of his arm as he lifted his cigarette to his mouth, he sat there staring at the ceiling. Then, quite suddenly, he began to laugh gently to himself.

“That’s it, Peter. Gall to the nth degree. But, by Gad! old boy, a dangerous man to play games with—damned dangerous. I wouldn’t miss tomorrow night for a thousand pounds. As Matthews says—it all fits in. As far as I can see, there isn’t a flaw up to date—but what is he going to do when he finds us sitting over the entrance to the passage? It won’t be too easy for the bird.”

“My own impression is that he will do nothing,” I said, “for the simple reason that there will be nothing to do.”

“Think so?” he laughed. “Well, well—we shall see. Another pint, old boy, and then what about a little shut-eye?”

“What are you doing tomorrow?” I asked.

“This and that, Peter,” he answered. “As a matter of fact, I think I shall take it easy. Do accounts, or something of that sort.”

“Do accounts?” I gasped. “If you weren’t so damned large, Hugh Drummond, I should welt you good and hearty.”

I stood up: I was beginning to feel infernally sleepy. But when I reached the top of the stairs Hugh was still in the same attitude, with a fresh cigarette between his fingers. And from what I knew of him it was more than likely that he would remain there for hours. Something was worrying him, though for the life of me I couldn’t see what. The one big problem—the identity of le Bossu—was solved. And the only thing that I couldn’t see—as I said to Hugh—was what le Bossu could hope to do against five of us the following night.

I slept like a log, despite the stiffness of my neck, and arrived down to breakfast before anyone except Victor Matthews.

“Le Bossu’s neck treatment seems to be conducive to early rising,” I said.

“Yes,” he laughed. “And somebody else was up pretty early, or stayed up mighty late. Your reporter friend has spread himself.”

He passed over a copy of the Folkestone Courier, and I glanced at it. Undoubtedly Matthews was right: Ferret-face had wallowed in it.

AMAZING CRIME ON ROMNEY MARSH

INCREDIBLE TRIPLE MURDER AND SUICIDE

MYSTERY OF THE WALLED HOUSE

The headlines shrieked at one, and I ran my eye down the page. It contained nothing that we did not know already, but one point became increasingly clear, as I read on. Before many hours were out, there would be hordes of people on the spot, armies of reporters. The account in the London papers was brief—just a summary of what had happened. But with the Folkestone Courier giving tongue as it had, the other papers would be sure to follow suit.

“Get off as soon as you can, Miss Verney,” said Hugh after breakfast. “It strikes me that this road is shortly going to look like Egham on Gold Cup day.”

She started off with Freckles five minutes later, and he turned to Matthews.

“What’s your programme?” he asked.

“Jean Picot,” answered Matthews tersely. “There is no other problem. And though I don’t think there is the smallest chance of my seeing him today, there is no harm in trying. There is nothing to do until tonight, and so I shall go into Rye and nose around.”

“Good,” said Hugh. “As you say, it can do no harm.”

And when John decided that he would go back to Laidley Towers, the same arrangement as the previous day was fixed up. He would drop Matthews in Rye, and pick him up again on his return in the evening.

“That leaves only the old firm, Peter,” said Hugh, as John’s car disappeared through the gates. “And what does the old firm do?”

“Accounts,” I grinned.

He was staring thoughtfully over the sun-baked marsh.

“Quite right,” he said, “accounts. To settle accounts is always an excellent thing to do. But in view of the fact that you bore the burden and heat of the day yesterday, I would like you to take a rest today. I want you to stay here. You can knit yourself some underclothes, or indulge in any other form of dissipation you like. But stay here—and keep your eyes skinned.”

“What are you going to do yourself?” I demanded.

“Settle accounts,” he repeated. “Or, at any rate, do the preliminary bookwork. And if you’ve got no other way to occupy yourself, ponder on one thing. If you saw that plan sticking out from under the bed, why was le Bossu suddenly stricken with blindness?”

So that was what had been worrying him the night before. If his words had any significance at all, he was implying that le Bossu had dropped the plan on purpose: that it was no accident and he had intended me to pick it up. And the notion was so completely novel that I must have stood for quite five minutes after the roar of the Bentley had died away, staring down the drive.

All of us, and most certainly I personally, had assumed that the dropping of the plan had been a slip. We had based our plan of action on that theory: we had, in military parlance, appreciated the situation from that point of view. And here was Drummond quietly suggesting to me that the whole of our foundation was faulty.

I sat down and began to weigh up the points for and against. And the more I thought of it, the more likely did it seem that he was right. Le Bossu had been in no hurry: he had quietly and systematically packed, taking about half an hour over it, and had then left. Was it likely that he would have dropped such a valuable asset as the plan, or, having dropped it in a distinctly conspicuous place, that he would not have seen it? Against that, why in the name of fortune should he have done it at all?

Matthews’ theory that he would still carry on was based on the idea that, though he had lost the plan, he would turn his loss to good account, by letting us find the entrance for him. But it put a very different complexion on matters if he had arranged for us to have it. To make the best of a bad job was comprehensible: deliberately to make the job bad was not. And it was absurd to say that only by using Miss Verney could the location of the entrance be found. There must be other ways, even though she afforded the simplest.

The devil of it all lay in the fact that this new idea complicated things so much. While it had been left as an accident—as a slip on le Bossu’s part—everything had seemed plain sailing. Now that we knew who he was, it had only seemed to be a question of waiting until he walked into our hands, either in the grounds of Temple Tower, or somewhere outside. But this notion of Drummond’s, if it was correct, altered the whole situation. What was at the back of le Bossu’s mind, that had caused him to do it? He must know that we would take advantage of the verse and would find the entrance. Then why had he done it? And the more I thought of it, the more utterly incomprehensible did it seem.

Unless—I sat up suddenly—unless the whole thing was a trap. Step by step I traced it from the hypothesis. Le Bossu wished to get rid of us, as he had got rid of the other four who stood in his way. He wanted to murder us, as he had murdered them. But with us he was confronted with a difficulty: he couldn’t get us individually as he had got them. We were always together. So he decided to try and do us in collectively. He presents us with a definite spot to gather together at, and prepares that spot beforehand, with some infernal machine like a bomb.

I checked there: how could he find the place? He might have got into the grounds after he had left us the preceding night—waited for the first faint streaks of dawn—and found it then. But in that case why didn’t he beat it while the going was good, and go straight on into the house? So that wouldn’t do.

And then in a flash it came to me. The spot was not prepared, but le Bossu was. Once when we were bunched together there, he would steal as near as he could in the darkness, and throw a bomb amongst us, either killing or wounding the lot. Then he would go calmly along the secret passage, probably murder Granger, take the jewels and clear out. If alarm was caused by the explosion of the bomb, he would trust to luck to escape in the confusion.

Once again the incredible audacity of the man staggered me. That I had hit the only possible solution, once granted Hugh’s theory was right, seemed to me obvious. There could be no other reason which would have caused him to give us a piece of information, which above all others it would seem he would have kept to himself. And the objection which might be advanced—namely, that without the plan we should not have found the spot—was easily met. True, we might not have found the exact spot, but we should have been wandering round in the locality. We had already interrupted him once, when he was killing the wretched Gaspard, and he was not going to run the risk a second time. And as the full realisation of the man’s cold-blooded ferocity sank into my mind, I was inclined to agree with Hugh that compared to him, Carl Peterson had been a turtle-dove.

The morning wore on slowly. Midday came, and there was still no sign of Miss Verney or Scott, though an increasing number of cars had passed the gate on the way to Temple Tower. And then, at half-past twelve, the Inspector looked in, ostensibly to see Drummond, but in reality to quench his thirst.

“Reporters like flies,” he said. “And there’s one—probably a photographer—circling over the house in an aeroplane. Look—there he is now.”

I glanced up: sure enough there was a machine passing backwards and forwards over Temple Tower,

“You’ve found out nothing more, I suppose?” I asked him.

“Nothing, sir,” he said. “I can’t say that I hold with those newspaper chaps myself, but I’m bound to admit that I think that red-haired young fellow has got it right this time. That is, as far as the actual murders are concerned. The man Vandali did them, and then hanged himself. But as to why, he doesn’t know any more than I do. Tomorrow, I think, should help us a little there.”

“At the inquest, you mean?” I said.

“That’s right, sir—at the inquest. That man Granger will have to talk then. I’ve been up there this morning, but he says he is sick and can’t see anyone.”

“By the way,” I said casually, “these Vandalis had a chauffeur, didn’t they?”

He nodded, and drained his glass,

“I’ve examined him already,” he said, “but he can’t tell me anything. Speaks very little English. From what he says he has only been with them about a month, and knows nothing about them at all. Secretive sort of chap: I wouldn’t be surprised if his past was a bit hectic. But as far as this show is concerned, he doesn’t come into it. He has no idea whatever as to why they went to Temple Tower: didn’t even know they had been there, in fact. No, sir. Granger is the man. Even though he had nothing to do with the actual murders, he knows why they were committed.”

He took his leave, and I sat on thinking idly. The aeroplane had finished its manoeuvres over Temple Tower, and was making off in the direction of Lympne: presumably the photographs had been taken. And then, happening to glance at my watch, I found, to my surprise, it was one o’clock.

“Will you have lunch now, sir, or will you wait?” said Denny, coming out of the dining-room. “Mr. Scott has just returned.”

“Hasn’t Miss Verney come?” I cried.

“She has not,” said Freckles, appearing on the scene. “I did my level best to persuade her, but when Pat sticks her toes in she’s like a mule.”

“We’ll have lunch, Denny,” I said. “Now what has happened?”

“After the devil of a lot of fuss we managed to get in,” he began. “And, incidentally, it’s lucky we went when we did: when I left the place, ten minutes ago, a crowd of some fifty people hailed me as the murderer. However, we got in all right, and Pat went straight into the house while I oozed round the grounds. There was no difficulty whatever about spotting the tree. It is a big oak standing by itself in a bit of a clearing, and you couldn’t possibly fail to get it, even at night.”

“Did you find the entrance to the passage?” I asked.

“I can’t say I did,” he said. “To tell you the truth I wasn’t quite certain which way North was. I had a vague dip, but the only thing I saw was a rabbit scrape.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’ll get it tonight by the Pole Star. Go on.”

“Well, I sat about the grounds for over two hours, when Pat suddenly appeared. And, according to her, the bloke was entrenched in his room absolutely gnawing the blotting-paper with fright. Worse, far worse, apparently, than he’s been before. Kept on saying ‘He can’t get in: he can’t get in,’ and wanting to know if they could force him to go to the inquest if he was ill. In fact, she seemed almost sorry for him, though I pointed out to her that, from what we’d heard, he must be a pretty ungodly maggot. Still, you know what women are—queer fish.”

I nodded gravely.

“Is that why she is staying with him?” I asked.

“Not on your life,” he said, lowering his voice mysteriously. “The old bean thinks she is well on the road to spotting some more cubby holes. Secret hiding-places,” he explained kindly, as he saw my look of bewilderment, “where he has hidden the rest of the stuff. She’s got one—the panel by the fireplace—already, and she strongly suspects the waste pipe in the bathroom to be another. Apparently he gave tongue like a wounded hare on hearing the water turned on, but that was probably due to fright at the thought of washing. However, she thinks, to cut the thing short, that if she does a bit of nosing about this afternoon she might find out some pretty useful information. I thought it a bit risky myself, but she said that that was what Matthews had said she ought to do. And so I pushed off, and trickled back here. Though I don’t like the idea much—leaving her practically alone in a house with a bloke crazy with fear.”

Undoubtedly the Toad was in an awkward position. A criminal himself, with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of stolen stuff in his possession, he dared not avail himself of police protection. Nor was he in a position to give the police any information as to the real terror that was hanging over him—le Bossu—for the very good reason that, unlike us, he didn’t know who le Bossu was. He could give no description of him. And it struck me that if ever there was an example of evil bringing its own retribution, that was it. All these years, flying from hiding-place to hiding-place, in mortal terror of an unknown man. What a life! Le Rossignol, at any rate, he knew by sight, but any stranger might have been le Bossu. And then, when at last he had got his loot over from France, to be run to earth by both of them, unable to do anything save sit and wait behind his barricades.”

“I wonder if he knows about the secret passage?” I said thoughtfully.

But to that question there was no answer: all that we could arrive at was that he had said nothing about it to Miss Verney. Which, of course, proved nothing at all.

The afternoon dragged on slowly until at about seven o’clock Hugh returned, and I lost no time in putting my theory in front of him.

“I haven’t said anything to Scott,” I told him. “But, if your idea is right, and that plan was left there on purpose, I don’t see any other solution that fits. He wants to get us bunched, and then out us.”

But somewhat to my surprise Hugh would have none of it.

“Not that I put it a bit beyond him, Peter,” he remarked. “If it suited his purpose, he would blow up a babies’ creche without scruple. But I cannot think that that would suit his purpose. Killing a stray individual silently is one thing: but to burst a bomb in the middle of the night is a very different affair. In all probability Temple Tower will have a certain amount of police attention tonight, and if the hell of an explosion takes place, it will be the scene of considerable activity. And there is another thing too, Peter. Supposing this entrance is all rusted over: supposing it takes a considerable time to get in? Then, according to your theory, he is going to draw the attention of everybody to the one spot which he wants to keep private.”

“Well, what the devil is your idea then?” I said peevishly.

“Something far more subtle, old boy,” he remarked with a grin, and from his tone of voice I knew that that was all I was going to get out of him. There are times when an oyster is chatty compared to Hugh.

“Here is John,” he said, glancing out of the window. “But no Matthews. I wonder where he has strayed to.”

“I left the policeman wallah running round in small circles in Rye,” said John as he came in. “I’d fixed to meet him at a quarter to seven, and he didn’t appear till ten past. From what he said he seems to have found out something completely new this afternoon. And he told me to tell you not to wait dinner for him, but that he would come up after.”

“Good,” said Hugh. “Then we might get down to it.”

“And what have you been doing all day, old horse?” went on John chattily.

“This and that, laddie,” said Hugh. “Trying to make four equal six, to be exact.”

“Presumably there is some meaning in your remark,” said John kindly. “But at the moment I confess it eludes me.”

“And yet the fact that under certain circumstances four are as good as six will, unless I’ve bloomered badly, prove to be the deciding factor,” laughed Hugh. “Come on, chaps: let us go and feed our faces.”

CHAPTER XII

In Which We Hear the Noise of Turning Wheels

That Hugh had some theory of his own was obvious, but by what possible method of subtlety le Bossu hoped to outwit us defeated me. His objection to my bomb idea was sound, I realised, but there seemed equally powerful objections to the use of cunning. Boiled down to rock-bottom facts, if five of us who all knew Jean Picot by sight were sitting round the entrance of the passage, it would require the deuce of a lot of subtlety to get past us. Force would be out of the question, and so what was going to happen? And the more I thought about it, the more did I come back to my original answer to the question—nothing at all. We should spend a night of intense discomfort for no result whatever.

Dinner was over and we were sitting in the smoking-room. In half an hour it would be sufficiently dark to start, but there was still no sign of Victor Matthews. And we were just wondering when he would roll up when the telephone rang close by my chair.

“Probably him,” said Hugh. “Take the call, Peter.”

It was, and I told him we were all waiting.

“Good,” came his voice. “Listen, Mr. Darrell; the most extraordinary development has taken place. I’m hard on le Bossu’s trail. I think he has lost his nerve. Will you come at once—all of you—to Tenterden to the—Oh! my God.”

His voice rose to a hoarse scream, then stopped abruptly, and for a moment or two I was too stupefied to speak.

Then, “Matthews!” I shouted wildly. “Matthews! What’s happened?”

But there was no answer—only silence, though again I shouted into the instrument.

“Steady, Peter,” came Hugh’s voice. “What is the excitement?”

“It was Matthews,” I said. “He’s just said he was hard on le Bossu’s trail, and wanted us all to go to Tenterden at once. He was just going to say the name of the hotel, when he screamed out ‘Oh! my God.’ Then nothing more. Le Bossu must have got him.”

“Give me the receiver,” said Hugh quietly. “I’ll ring the exchange.”

We waited for what seemed an eternity.

“That last call you put through to me,” he said. “Where did it come from?”

Again an interminable delay, and then he turned round.

“The A.A. road box,” he remarked, “on the road to Tenterden. I know it well. How very extraordinary.”

“Extraordinary!” I said. “It is more than that: it is uncannily devilish.”

It seemed so easy to reconstruct the scene. Matthews pausing on his way to Tenterden, believing himself hot on le Bossu’s trail. He sees the A. A. box; decides to ring us up. And then as he stands there, unconscious of his danger, the very man he thought he was hunting steals on him from behind. The hunter hunted. And now a fifth murder to le Bossu’s credit.

“Come on,” said Hugh quietly. “This requires investigation.”

We tumbled into the Bentley and started off. I could see Hugh’s face silhouetted against the reflection of the headlights, and it was like an expressionless mask.

“It’s simply amazing, Peter,” he said suddenly. “I can’t understand it. You’re certain it was Matthews?”

“Of course I’m certain,” I answered. “I’d know his voice anywhere.”

He relapsed into silence again, and I tried to make out what was puzzling him. It seemed to me to be a development quite in keeping with the whole affair.

“Here’s the telephone box,” he remarked, “about fifty yards ahead.”

He pulled up the car, and in the glare of lights the box stood out clearly outlined by the roadside. But of anything else there was no sign: the road was empty, there was no trace of any body.

“He would have hidden it,” I said. “He wouldn’t leave it where anybody passing could see.”

“No,” said Hugh. “He would not. Can it be possible?” he added half to himself. He suddenly switched off the lights. “Come on—we must look. But, for God’s sake, move warily. There’s something here I don’t understand at all.”

Halfway to the box he halted, and for a time we stood in the road listening intently. Not a sound could be heard save a train in the distance, and I suggested we should go a bit closer, and begin to search.

“What I’m afraid of,” said Hugh in a low voice, “is a trap. If Picot strangled Matthews, he must have heard what Matthews was saying, as he crept up to him from behind. If so, what will he assume? Why, that we shall do exactly what we have done. The flies are walking straight into the parlour, and your theory, Peter, of the bomb is quite feasible here. We must string out: I’ll go first. And don’t make a sound.”

He faded into the darkness, and we followed at intervals. Every now and then I stopped to listen, but I heard nothing except an owl hooting mournfully in a little wood ahead of us. Suddenly I saw a light on the road some twenty yards in front; Hugh had turned his torch on to the ground at the foot of the box, and was examining it carefully. I almost called out to him: if there was any chance of a trap, he was surely asking for trouble. But after a moment or two he switched it off again, and once more I crept forward till I came to the telephone box myself. He had disappeared, and for a while I stopped there trying once more to reconstruct in my mind what had happened.

What would le Bossu have done with the body?

Hidden it, of course, but hidden it as quickly as possible. A hedge ran behind the box, but as far as I could see there was no gap in it, and after a bit the hopeless futility of finding the body at night struck me. One might stumble on it, but the chances were all against it. And at that moment I heard Hugh’s low whistle.

He was standing in the road, and I joined him.

“Look here, Peter,” he said, “this is utterly futile. It’s a hundred pounds to a banana skin against finding him.”

“I quite agree,” remarked Freckles, looming up. “I’ve stubbed my toe, and I don’t want to play any more. The only way to spot him will be by day. Take an aeroplane and fly over the ground low, like that bloke was doing this morning at Temple Tower.”

“What’s that you say?” yelled Hugh. “An aeroplane over Temple Tower?”

“What under the sun is the excitement?” I cried. “I saw the fellow myself. A journalist taking photographs.”

“Journalist be damned,” snapped Hugh. “Why in God’s name didn’t you tell me that before? To the car—and leg it.”

Almost speechless with amazement I followed him: what on earth was the great idea?

“The one point that was missing,” said Hugh tensely, as the speedometer touched seventy. “If only you had told me, Peter! Don’t you see, man, the vital significance of it? The line between the tower and eastern turret, when produced, hits the ground at one end, and the other goes into the air. Get into that line from the air and you pick up the tree. It wasn’t a journalist who was in the plane: it was le Bossu. And le Bossu, whilst we have been wasting time here, has calmly entered Temple Tower on the strength of the information that we thought only we possessed. Merciful Heavens!” he suddenly added in a low voice, “and the girl is there, too.”

The car roared on, whilst I cursed myself bitterly and savagely. Why had the point not struck me? I had accepted the Inspector’s remark about a Press photographer without thought. It had seemed quite a probable explanation, and I hadn’t bothered to look any further. And now, with a sick feeling of fear, I realised the result. Le Bossu was loose in Temple Tower, and Pat Verney was alone and unprotected in the house. Just as Hugh has said, he had assumed we should come to Matthews’ aid, and had turned that assumption to good account. Probably we had actually passed him on the road as we came, in one of the cars we had met.

“Lord! Peter,” said Hugh, as I expressed my opinion of myself, “this is no time for regrets. And it wouldn’t matter a tinker’s curse, old man, but for the girl. But it is the one point that has been worrying me ever since le Bossu presented us with the plan. How was he going to find the tree without our assistance? And since it seemed an impossibility to me, I assumed he was proposing to invoke our assistance. On that assumption I mapped out his plan of campaign—a plan which I think I told you was one of subtlety.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“All in good time, old boy,” he said. “This is not the moment for discussing theories that have proved to be wrong. All that we have to concentrate on at the moment, is beating the gentleman. But I will say one thing: I agree with Matthews’ description of him. He is a very clever and dangerous man. And I blame myself bitterly for having given way to an extremely stupid and foolish impulse.”

But what that impulse was I had no time to ask, because at that moment we drew up outside Hugh’s house.

“Bolsters,” he said. “One apiece.”

“What on earth do we want bolsters for?” cried John.

“Denny,” shouted Hugh. “I want four big bolsters.”

“Very good, sir,” said Denny. “I will get them at once.”

“If I asked for four elephants,” said Hugh, “Denny would get them at once. My dear John,” he remarked, “you don’t suppose, do you, that our friend is going to leave the rope ladder in position on the wall? All nicely ready so that we can follow him in? He is going to get over himself, and then, with that wooden implement, remove the thing altogether, hiding it somewhere inside the wall. Moreover, he won’t even go over in the same place as he went over before, so that we can dismiss the ladder as a method of entrance.”

“Four bolsters, sir,” said Denny at the door.

“Good,” said Hugh. “Now some ropes. I want about four yards.”

“Very good, sir,” said Denny. “I will get it at once.”

“We may not have a rope ladder,” remarked Hugh, “but we’ll get a damned good makeshift. Don’t get fidgetty, young fellah,” he added to Freckles. “I know what you’re thinking, but believe me these preparations are necessary. There ain’t much good arriving at the wall and having to stand outside the whole night looking at it.”

“I’m blaming myself over that aeroplane,” said the youngster miserably. “It’s I who ought to have spotted it much more than Darrell. Two or three times when I was standing by the tree I actually noticed the thing coming straight towards the house in a line with the tower. By God! if anything happens to Pat…”

“Nothing is going to happen to Miss Verney,” said Hugh quietly. “And here is Denny with the rope. Now then, a loop at one end, and we’re ready. Except for one thing. Here are three whistles. Each of you take one of them, and keep them handy. And those whistles are only to be used for one purpose. If, in the darkness, le Bossu gets one of you, put it to your mouth and blow like hell.”

“Are you going to take the car?” I asked, and he nodded.

“It will be wanted before the night is out,” he said enigmatically. “And this time we will take precautions over sparking-plugs. Now then—up and over.”

And with a feeling strongly reminiscent of zero hour in France, in my chest at any rate, we followed him to the gate, carrying bolsters and the rope. But this trip there was no question of seventy miles an hour: we crept along at the car’s most silent speed, with only our sidelights on. As I worked it out, le Bossu had about half an hour’s start of us at the most, but half an hour was a terribly long time for that cold-blooded murderer to be given a free hand. And though I quite saw the necessity for silence, I chafed at the slow rate we were going.

A hundred yards from the beginning of the wall Hugh stopped. A grass track ran off the road, and he backed down it for about thirty yards till a jink in the hedge completely hid her from anyone passing. Then he padlocked both sides of the bonnet; took out the safety key, and we left her.

To make absolutely certain, we first of all searched under the bushes where the rope ladder had been left, but there was no sign of it: Hugh’s forethought over the bolsters was justified. Le Bossu, guessing it would be somewhere near the spot at which we had previously entered, had found it and used it, and we wasted no further time. We passed up the bolsters one by one to Freckles, who was standing on Hugh’s shoulders, and he wedged them in between the spikes. Then he fixed the rope, and in turn we swarmed up and down the other side. The final act had started.

The first thing to do was to locate the tree, and we crept silently forward. To keep in touch had been Hugh’s order as we started, and he led us quickly through the undergrowth. Away to our right lay the house, sombre and forbidding. Two lights shone from it—one from a window at the very top, and the other from one about halfway up. At last we came to the old chapel wall, and he paused.

“Now then, Scott,” he whispered, “you take the lead. And not a sound.”

The tree stood, as Freckles had said, in a little clearing, and we found it without difficulty. But it was some little time before Hugh made the next move. He stood underneath it listening intently, though everything was silent, save for the faint creaking of the branches in the breeze. Once I thought I heard the crack of a twig not far off, but it was not repeated, and I dismissed it as imagination. And once I could have sworn I saw a dark shadow move between two bushes a few yards away.

“For God’s sake let’s get on with it,” muttered Freckles. “This is giving me the jumps.”

“Shut up,” said Hugh curtly. “Use your ears and not your mouth.”

At last he seemed satisfied, and stepped out into the open. The Great Bear was easy to spot, and from it the Pole Star. Thirty long paces north—our next task—was simple, and there the answer lay.

The excitement of the thing was getting me now—what was the answer going to be? Should we find some hole open in the ground—some ancient rusted door, perhaps, through which le Bossu had already passed? Or should we find le Bossu himself still trying to force an entrance, and unable to do so single-handed?

Twenty-five: twenty-six long steps, and Hugh paused, again peering into the darkness ahead. I could hear my heart beating in the deathly stillness: even the night breeze had died away. But nothing stirred—nothing moved in front.

Twenty-eight: twenty-nine: thirty. We were there—but where was the answer? We were standing on an ordinary piece of roughish turf, exactly the same as the ground we had walked over from the tree. But of any secret entrance to a passage there was no trace. In front of us were more bushes, but the actual spot where we were standing was in a little open space. And round that space we felt our way, exploring every inch of it. The result was nil: something had gone wrong. Wherever the answer lay, it wasn’t there.

That the tree was the correct one Freckles was prepared to swear. That the directions had been thirty long paces north we were all prepared to swear. So it boiled down to the fact that the directions were wrong. But if they were wrong for us, they were also wrong for le Bossu. He was in the same boat as ourselves, and in that lay the only consolation.

The thing was so completely unexpected. All sorts of other difficulties we had been prepared for, but none of us had ever thought of the possibility of not finding the entrance at all. And the problem that immediately confronted us was what to do next. Somewhere within the grounds was the man we wanted; but how were we to get at him? Wait till dawn and hope for the best, or what? One thing seemed obvious: it was useless to try and look for him in the darkness. And that course being eliminated, it really seemed that there was nothing else to do but to sit tight and wait with what patience we could.

It was Hugh who was the most worried. Freckles, now that any danger to Miss Verney had gone, was quite happy: John and I were inclined to view the matter philosophically. But Hugh had worked himself into a condition of positive irritability, which was an unheard-of thing with him.

“I want that swab, Peter,” he fumed, “as a cat wants milk. And what is he doing now? That is what I can’t make up my mind about. Is he still here in the grounds, or has he done a bunk? Why should he stop on when he has once found out that the verse is wrong?”

“Well, my dear man,” I said, “one thing is pretty obvious. If we can’t find him inside the wall there is even less chance of our doing so outside. So it seems to me that we have either got to sit here and hope, or toddle back to bed.”

And even as I spoke there came a most peculiar noise from the house. It sounded like the clanging of a gong, and we all sprang up and stared through the bushes. The noise went on for perhaps a quarter of a minute: then it ceased as abruptly as it had begun.

“A burglar alarm for a fiver,” said Hugh. “Now, who has caused that to go off?” He was rubbing his hands together in his satisfaction. “He’s inside, you fellows, he hasn’t done a guy. And he is trying to get into the house. He has hit a trip wire or something of that sort. But where—damn it—where?”

Still we peered in front of us, trying impotently to see. Somewhere in that inky blackness was le Bossu, but he might as well have been in Timbuctoo for our chances of catching him.

“He can’t get in through a window, anyway,” said Hugh, “short of using dynamite. If only that damned fool inside would realise that he is far safer if he lit every room in the house instead of cowering there practically in darkness. Keep your eyes skinned for the flash of a torch, or the faintest suspicion of a light.”

But there was nothing: the darkness remained impenetrable, and the minutes dragged slowly on. Had le Bossu, alarmed by the sudden noise, given up, or was he still in front of us trying to break in? It was the uncertainty of it and the impossibility of doing anything to make sure that was so maddening. And yet we were better where we were than blundering round blindly. Suddenly Hugh gripped my arm.

“Peter,” he said tensely, “look at the top room. There were three shadows there a moment ago.”

I stared up at it: the light shone out undimmed. And then, there appeared for an instant the shadows of three people. Distorted into fantastic shapes, they showed up clear in the light—then they vanished again. Miss Verney and Granger—but whose was the third? Even as I asked myself the question it appeared again—grotesque and monstrous, with outstretched arms. Le Bossu was in the room.

“We must get in,” cried Freckles in an agony. “We must. If necessary by the front door.”

The boy was almost beside himself, and small blame to him. Until that moment the situation from his point of view had seemed all right: now everything was changed. If the third shadow was le Bossu the danger was enough to appal anyone, let alone the fiancé of the girl who was now facing him.

“Can’t you fire through the window?” he muttered. “Drummond, you must do something.”

“Steady, old boy,” said Hugh, and though to the others his voice was quite normal, I caught the note of almost feverish anxiety in it. In fact, he told me afterwards that in the whole course of his life he had never felt so desperately afraid.

“I visualised the scene, Peter,” he said to me a few days later, “as if I had been in the room myself. I could see Granger and the girl sitting there, believing themselves to be perfectly safe. And then the door slowly opening, and that great masked figure standing in silence watching them. Granger crazy mad with fear: the girl wondering desperately what to do, and where we were. She would play for time, of course, and provided Granger handed over the stuff, it was possible that le Bossu would spare her. That was all I cared about, naturally. Nothing else mattered. Even allowing le Bossu to escape altogether was infinitely better than that the slightest damage should come to her. But what to do? Peter, I damned nearly went bughouse. There was that poor devil jibbering beside us, and I knew that the most fatal thing we could do was to give away the fact that we were in the grounds.”

“You see,” he went on, “our only hope was to let le Bossu think he had the whole stage to himself. And the devil of it was that to all intents and purposes he had. He had got into the house, and we hadn’t. And it was possible, I thought, that if he remained in ignorance of our presence he might not hurt the girl. Whereas, if we went and pealed on the front door bell, we gave the whole show away without doing any good. Up till then we had all of us thought that he, like ourselves, was outside. Now we knew he’d got in. How? Not by the door: not by a window. So how? It must have been by the passage.

“Gosh! old boy, my brain was moving as the poor old thing had never creaked before. Passage, passage, passage—the word positively hammered at it. Le Bossu had found the entrance: we hadn’t. Why? We had followed out the instructions to the letter: the same instructions that he had followed out before us. But we couldn’t have done, or we should have found the entrance ourselves. What followed irresistibly? Why, that the instructions we had followed were not the same that had guided le Bossu. It was just about that stage of my brain storm,” he added with a laugh, “that I bit young Freckles’ head off, if you remember, for interrupting. Poor devil! he couldn’t help it, I know, but I was absolutely keyed up. I felt I was on the right track, but what was the next step?

“If the instructions were not the same, le Bossu had deliberately altered them before passing the plan on to you. He had read them aright himself first: then he had cooked them for our benefit. And at that point I almost despaired. He might have written anything—the most complete rot and gibberish. Bad thing—despair, and the ray of hope came quick. Would he have dared to write rot? His object was to keep us in some safe place out of the way, while he walked in. If the verse he had invented was meaningless, it would not have produced that result. Besides, he knew that at any rate part of the verse was far from meaningless: it had led us straight to the tree. Therefore the alteration he had made was a small one—yet it was sufficient. And it was then that I made the remark that so astounded you: the solution had hit me like a kick in the stomach from a mule.”

So, four days later, did Hugh fill in for my benefit the two minutes that followed the appearance of le Bossu’s shadow in the upper room. To us who were with him, they had seemed an eternity. He had stood there absolutely motionless, without speaking, save for one remark, when, as he said, he bit the youngster’s head off. John was muttering to me that we must do something: Freckles was almost sobbing in his despair. And then, like a bolt from the blue, came Hugh’s sudden remark.

“Sixty yards. Ample at night. That’s it. Wait by the tree.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” I cried, but he had vanished, and, a little dazedly, we walked towards the tree. I could hear him near at hand: with le Bossu inside the house the necessity for silence had gone. And suddenly he loomed up out of the darkness.

“I’ve found the entrance,” he said quietly. “Our friend altered two letters in the verse before passing it on to us. S to N and U to R. Thirty long paces north took us exactly sixty long paces from the spot we wanted to find, which happens to be thirty long paces south of the tree. Come on.

At the time it had seemed to me the wildest piece of guess-work that had come right: an unworthy suspicion for which I afterwards abased myself. But the fact that it had come right was all that mattered, and a few seconds later we were standing in front of the entrance. Some bushes screened us from the house, and Hugh switched on his torch.

It consisted of a hole in the ground, from which mouldering stone steps went downwards. It had evidently been covered with boards and rubbish, because these had been removed and now lay in an untidy heap beside the edge. Rotting green fungus was growing on the sides of the steps and walls, and the spot reeked with the putrid smell of decay.

Earth was lying thick on the steps, and in the light of the torch footprints were plainly visible—footprints which went towards the house and did not return, grim proof that we were not mistaken over the shadow. Not many minutes previously le Bossu had passed along that passage, and with a curt warning to walk warily, Hugh led the way down the steps.

The air was dark and foetid, though the passage itself proved to be of a comfortable height to walk in. The floor was rough and uneven, and the walls consisted of crude blocks of stone, moss covered and crumbling in places.

For about twenty yards it ran in a straight line: then it jinked sharply to the left, and Hugh paused.

“Presumably,” he said, “we are now under the chapel wall. And from this point the passage runs straight to the house. So we’ve got to carry on without a light.”

He switched off his torch: undoubtedly he would have been a sitting shot for anyone lying up for us at the other end. But feeble though the glimmer had been in front, it had served its purpose: now that it was out, the darkness seemed the most intense thing I had ever known. It pressed on one till one felt it was tangible. Not one glimmer of even faint greyness, but a solid black wall closing in on one from all sides.

From my recollection of the position of the chapel wall, I estimated the distance to the house from the jink in the passage, to be about sixty yards. And I guessed that we had gone about thirty when suddenly the same noise began as we had heard in the grounds before. But this time it was much louder. It came from the house in front of us—the loud insistent clanging of a gong. I stopped instinctively: we must have run into the same alarm as le Bossu.

The others had halted also: I could hear John’s quick breathing just in front of me. And what happened then, happened so quickly that it is hard to recall the exact sequence of events.

First there came a loud creaking noise from close by us—so loud that it quite drowned the clamour of the gong. Then a sudden shout from Freckles—“My God! the walls are moving!” Then light—blessed light—from Hugh’s torch.

Only one momentary glimpse did I get of the amazing scene before Hugh’s roar of warning galvanised us all into activity.

“Back for your lives.”

And just in time did we all get back. Another half second and Hugh, who was the last out, would have been caught. As Freckles had said, the walls were moving: they were closing together for a length of about ten yards in front of us. Like two gigantic millstones they approached each other until they met with a dull thud in the centre. The meaning of the line about the turning wheels was clear.

“An unpleasant death,” said Hugh grimly, his torch fixed on the solid block of stone that now confronted us. “But the damned annoying thing is that we are on one side of the obstruction and le Bossu is on the other. He got through and we didn’t. Back to the entrance: there is nothing more to be done here.”

And there was nothing more to be done there either. Fifteen yards only did we go before we found that the walls had closed behind us also. We were shut in the space between them: caught like rats in a trap.

For a moment even Hugh gave way to despair and cursed wildly: then he pulled himself together.

“No good biting the bedclothes,” he remarked. “Let’s explore our quarters.”

The exploration did not take long, and certainly did nothing to raise our spirits. There was no possible way out, until the mechanism should operate in the other direction. We could go neither forwards nor backwards. And the roof presented no hope either. It looked perfectly solid, and judging by the number of steps we had come down at the entrance there were at least four feet of earth on top of it. In fact the only ray of comfort lay in the fact that though the moving walls had completely blocked us in, there was a space between the top of them and the roof. Not large enough for one of us to crawl through, but sufficient to allow of the passage of air. There was no danger of our being suffocated. Also for the same reason our prison was not sound-proof: we could shout and in due course somebody would be certain to hear us. But who? What was the good of shouting when the whole house was in the hands of le Bossu? He wasn’t likely to let us out.

It was the thought of that that drove us nearly insane. At that very moment, whilst we stood there powerless to do anything, le Bossu was free to do what he liked in the stronghold itself. And Miss Verney was in his power. He had the whole night in front of him to find the stolen stuff, and then what would he do? Kill Granger for a certainty, but what about the girl? If he was the type who would kill one woman, he certainly wouldn’t scruple about killing another if it served his purpose. And then, leaving us where we were, he would quietly depart, having beaten us all along the line. True we did know who he was, but that was very cold comfort. To devote the rest of one’s life to the pursuit of Jean Picot was an inadequate return for what he had done to us, even if we ever caught him.

We didn’t talk: there was nothing to say, just as there was nothing to be done. Just once Hugh put his hand on Freckles’ shoulder and said, “Buck up, old man: no need to despair yet.” But for the rest we sat or stood in silence, each busy with his own thoughts. And after a while Hugh switched off the torch, which was beginning to run low, and black, overpowering darkness came down on us again.

Not a sound came from the house; each minute seemed like an hour as it dragged by. And at length I began to doze where I stood. Suddenly I felt Hugh’s grip on my arm: a faint light was filtering over the top of the barrier between us and the house. I glanced at the luminous dial of my wrist watch; and it showed a quarter to one. For nearly two hours had we been imprisoned.

The light flickered a little, and then grew steady. Still there was no noise; only that faint illumination proved that someone was about on the other side. Then, without warning, there came the most ghastly sound I have ever listened to in my life—peal after peal of wild maniacal laughter. It rose and fell—echoing round us: then, abruptly, it ceased. And a moment or two later the light flickered again, and then went out. Darkness was on us once more: darkness and silence.

“My God!” stammered Freckles in a shaking voice, “what was that?”

My own forehead was wet with sweat, and even Hugh’s iron nerve was a bit shaken. Regardless of his failing battery he had switched on his torch: even its feeble glow was welcome after that devilish laughter. Was it Granger, or was it le Bossu? Gone mad suddenly…loose in the house.… And no one blamed the youngster when he suddenly hurled himself hysterically at the stone barrier and began to beat at it with his fists.

“Damn you,” he screamed, “damn you—open.”

And to our stupefied amazement it did. At the time—not knowing the reason—it seemed like a miracle: afterwards when we did know the reason, and the marvellous part played by that marvellous girl, it seemed no less of a miracle. But at the moment we could think of nothing save the fact that the prison door was opening. The wheels on which the walls moved creaked and groaned, until, with a thud, they came to rest in their proper place. The way to the house was free.

But not at once did Hugh move: the possibility of a trap was still there. It might have been the man whose frenzied laughter we had heard who had opened the walls. And if that was so he might be even now waiting for us out of sight, inside the house, to pot us one by one as we came out of the passage. At last he went with a rush, and from inside there came the single sharp clang of the gong. And with each of us as we dashed through the clang was repeated. But after that there was silence. No movement came from the walls: no movement came from the house. The man whose laughter we had heard was not there.

We were standing in a sort of stone basement, from which stairs led to the upper part of the house. Further delay was useless now: the time had come to meet le Bossu on equal terms. And so we raced up the stairs behind Hugh. A light was shining above us through an open door. And in the doorway he stopped abruptly.

“My God!” he muttered. “Look at that.”

We crowded round him. It was the hall we were in, and the big chandelier in the centre was lit. Hanging from it, just as Vandali had hung from the beam in the Dolphin, was Granger. He was swinging to and fro, and as he moved the tips of his toes brushed against the carpet.

Suddenly there came footsteps on the stairs above us, and we swung round. Faltering they were, and unsteady: no man was making them. A figure in white appeared, clutching the bannister: then, tottering and swaying, it came down towards us—a step at a time. It was Pat Verney, and with a great cry Freckles sprang to meet her.

But she hardly seemed to see him, as she stood staring at us with a look of frozen horror in her eyes. She just gave a little cry of: “Has he gone?” then, without another word, she pitched forward insensible.

CHAPTER XIII

In Which the Account Is Settled

And now, before I tell of the last grim fight between Hugh Drummond and le Bossu, I will go back a few hours, and write of what happened in Temple Tower while we lay prisoners in the passage. Not for three or four days did we hear it, and, bit by bit, we got it from Pat Verney. And because the horror of it was still on her, she got the horror of it across to us, so that I feel that I actually was present myself in that upstair room where it happened. Wherefore I will write of it as if I had been a silent and invisible witness, and not as the teller of a secondhand tale.

At eight o’clock Pat Verney had dinner in her own room. It was served by Mrs. Gaspard, and to her dismay she discovered that the instant it was dark the servant proposed to go. Nothing, she said, would induce her to remain another night in the house, and so the girl found herself confronted with the prospect of being left alone in the house with a man who was to all intents and purposes demented with terror. For a while she hesitated: should she go too? She weighed it up in her mind, as she stood by the window staring over the grounds. Dusk was beginning to fall, and in her imagination she seemed to see phantom figures slinking through the undergrowth already. Then she took a pull at herself. Even if le Bossu did come, were there not five of us? And already she had discovered another of Granger’s hiding-places: afterwards she might discover more. She had agreed to go and sit in his room at the top of the house, after she had finished her meal, and with luck she might get him to talk.

Nine o’clock came, and she turned on her light. In half an hour or so she would go to Granger: until then she tried to concentrate on a book. From below there came no sound: Mrs. Gaspard had gone, and much as she disliked the woman it seemed as if the last link with the outside world had snapped. She and the Toad were left alone to face the unknown terrors of the night.

“Don’t be an ass, Pat Verney,” she told herself. “You and your unknown terrors! Le Bossu will probably get a thick ear, and with your share of the reward you will be in a position to tell Miss Mudge to go to blazes.”

But try as she would she couldn’t be altogether common sense about it. There was something in the incredible cold butchery of le Bossu that prevented anyone being normal about him. Supposing he did dodge us: supposing he came first—what then? Little did she think that she was actually going to get the answer to her question, poor kid.

At half-past nine she put down her book: even Granger’s society seemed preferable to none at all. She opened her door; outside the house was in darkness. No lights were lit in the passage, and for a while she hesitated. No lights ever were lit in Temple Tower, but tonight she wondered whether she should turn them on. From all around her came those queer noises that occur in every house after the sun goes down, but each sudden crack of a board sounded to her like a footstep on the stairs. And at length she turned and fairly ran up to Granger’s room, feeling every moment that hands might come out of the darkness and clutch her by the throat.

The Toad was seated at his desk, muttering to himself. He looked up as she entered, and it seemed to her that he looked lower and more debased than ever. Some trick of the light perhaps, or a leering expression of cunning that had for the moment replaced his chronic terror, may have caused it, but the fact remained that she very nearly returned to her room.

“Sit down. Miss Verney,” he mumbled. “Sit down. Will he come tonight, do you think?”

“Will who come, Mr. Granger?” she asked.

“The other one,” he said. “The one who is the devil himself.”

His clawlike hands were moving like talons, and suddenly he burst into a cackle of laughter.

“He has been once. I know: I know. But the police don’t. He caught the Nightingale, and he caught Gaspard: with his hands—so.”

Fascinated, she watched his hands curving as if a man’s throat was inside them.

“The Strangler: the Silent Strangler,” he went on. “That is what we called him in the old days. And other names, too. But le Crapeau was his match: le Crapeau beat him.”

She said nothing: not by the tremor of an eyelid did she give away the fact that she knew the whole story. To let him talk was her object, in the hope that he might give away the secret of his various hiding-places. And it never seemed to occur to him that to anyone who knew nothing of the story what he was saying must have appeared absolutely gibberish.

“By the old mill near Bonneval the Toad hid the stuff. Deep down under boards and sacks. He feared the police: but he feared the other one more. For to offend the other one—to play him false—meant death. Till then, no one who had done so had ever lived: but le Crapeau did, for he could not find le Crapeau.”

“How do you know all this, Mr. Granger?” she said quietly.

But he didn’t seem to see the relevance of the question: apparently it didn’t strike him that he had given himself away utterly and completely. And after a while, as he went on chuckling and talking more to himself than to her, she began to realise that the man’s brain had partially gone. Sudden flashes of suspicion pulled him up periodically in his rambling story, but only for a moment. Then he was off again in full spate, as she put it.

“Beaten them all,” he kept on repeating. “Le Crapeau beat them all. He was clever, was the old one. And now he will beat them again. The Nightingale”—he shook with hideous, silent laughter—“the Nightingale. The Strangler got him, but he won’t get the Toad. The Toad is too clever for him.”

“What does the Strangler look like?” she asked.

But he took no notice of the question, hardly seemed to hear it, in fact. On and on he rambled, incoherently mixing up the past and the present, until she gave up any attempt at listening. And after a while a sense of unreality stole over her: she felt the whole thing must be a dream. This crazy man gibbering and muttering: the bright-lit room, with its barred window making a black patch against the night, was a figment of imagination. And even as her eyes began to close, a sudden deafening clamour filled the room.

In a second she was wide awake. The noise was coming from a gong fastened to one of the walls. It was evidently worked by electricity, and for a time she stared at it in bewilderment. What had suddenly started it ringing? Then she looked at Granger, and it took all her strength of mind to bite back a scream. For the man’s face was that of a devil. His lips were drawn back in a snarl, showing his yellow, discoloured teeth, and he was half standing, half crouching by his desk, with his eyes fixed on the gong. Then suddenly, with a grunt that was animal-like in its ferocity, he hurled himself across the room and forced home a big electric switch.

Almost immediately the gong ceased, and in its place she heard another noise, this time coming from down below. Then that ceased also, and there was silence, save for Granger’s wild laughter. He was dancing round the room like a madman, yelling and shouting, but after a while he calmed down a little.

“Beaten him: the old one has beaten him,” he mouthed. “The wheels have turned: the Strangler is caught.”

And now terror got hold of her: what did he mean? In a flash the line of the verse came back to her: The sound of turning wheels—beware. But what was she to do? Something had happened below in the secret passage: something which filled Granger with such delight that he was almost off his head. Something, moreover, which made him think he was absolutely safe.

She forced herself to be calm. She must act, and act quickly. Granger believed that the Strangler was caught below: to her it seemed certain that it was us. And so she did the one fatal thing. Believing us to be in some deadly peril, she argued that if it had been caused by putting in the switch, it would be removed by taking it out. And so, utterly regardless of the crazy madman, she dashed to the wall and pulled it out.

For a moment or two he did not seem to realise what she had done: then, with a scream of bestial fury, he hurled himself at her. Desperately, she clung to the handle of the switch, whilst from below came the creaking, grinding noise once again. What had shut was now opening: let her but hold it a little longer and we should be safe.

Thus she argued, whilst Granger clawed at her throat, mouthing foul abuse at her. Then there came one sharp clang of the gong above their heads, and silence from below. She had succeeded: we were free. Her hands relaxed weakly from the handle: she sank, half fainting, on the ground.

Standing over her, with murder in his eyes, was Granger. So great was his fury that he seemed to have forgotten the Strangler, forgotten everything save his animal fury with her. His hands shot out once more and gripped her throat—gripped it till there came a roaring in her ears. He was murdering her: would we never come? And even as she had given up hope, a shadow fell on them both, and over Granger’s shoulder she saw a great masked figure. Le Bossu Masqué had arrived.

“Crapeau! Crapeau!”

Like a whiplash, the words cut through the room, and the grip relaxed from her throat. For a moment or two the relief was so great that she could think of nothing else: then she scrambled to her feet with a feeling of sick despair. We had not come: le Bossu had. Opening the switch had been the worst thing she could have done.

“So, Crapeau, we meet again. What have you to say?”

Granger, his hands plucking feverishly at his collar, was cowering in a corner, whilst le Bossu stood motionless in the centre of the room.

“Doubtless a lot, Crapeau. But it will keep for a while. Just now I would like an explanation of that interesting mechanical device in the secret passage. Quickly, Crapeau: very quickly. I have an idea that before the night is out it may come in handy once again.”

“Spare me,” screamed Granger, dragging himself forward on his knees. “Spare me. I’ll tell you everything.”

“Speak!” hissed the other. “And at once.”

“A stone in the floor,” explained Granger in a shaking voice. “If you stand on it it rings that gong by electricity. Then that switch makes the walls close. It used to work differently, by some mechanism, but I had it altered.”

“I see. So when you heard the gong ring, Crapeau, you knew that someone was standing on the stone. You knew that I had come for you, Crapeau. And so you put in the switch.”

The Toad was grovelling at the other’s feet in his terror.

“That is easy,” continued le Bossu. “What is difficult is why you took it out again. Or was it the lady?”

“It was, you foul murderer,” said the girl contemptuously, and le Bossu gave a little hissing chuckle.

“Considerate of you,” he remarked. “Do you think the gong will ring again tonight or not?”

He stood there shaking with silent laughter, and she stared at him fascinated.

“Because, if it does, we know what to do,” he continued, “to ensure that we shall not be interrupted. Your friends are a little foolish to pit their brains against mine. And now, Crapeau”—he turned once more to the cowering man—come here.

Granger rose and slunk towards him like a beaten dog.

“To gratify my curiosity I am going to ask you a few questions, and then we will proceed to the business of the evening. Where did you hide yourself, Crapeau, so that even I couldn’t find you?

“In Switzerland,” whined Granger.

“Switzerland!” said le Bossu thoughtfully. “That’s where you bolted to, was it? However, it matters not. What you did in those far-off days is old and stale, and I grow weary of you. All these years you have slunk through the world, Crapeau, in fear of your life. Never knowing when le Bossu Masqué would come: never knowing when his hands would steal round your throat. You hid yourself here: you barricaded yourself in thinking you would be safe. And now you see the result. Your precautions were useless: le Bossu has found you. The time of reckoning has come.”

Clang went the gong again, and le Bossu turned to the girl.

“Quicker than I had expected,” he murmured. “But this time the switch will remain in, young lady.”

He forced it in, and, sick with apprehension, she heard the gong cease abruptly and the creaking noise come from below. Then silence.

“A pretty little prison,” purred le Bossu, where your friends will remain until I have finished. And perhaps longer than that. It all depends—on you. Should you attempt to open the switch”—his fingers touched her throat, and she shrank back in horror—”I should have to take steps to prevent you succeeding. And then they might have to stop there for days, or even weeks. So remember. Go and sit on the other side of the room.”

She stumbled over blindly: there was something immeasurably more terrifying in that soft hissing voice even than there had been in the animal fury of Granger,

“Now, Crapeau, to business. What have you sold in these past years? Give an account of your stewardship.”

“Only enough to live on, and to buy this house,” pleaded Granger. “By the blood of the Virgin, I speak the truth. The rest is all here: take it.”

“I shall take exactly what I want,” said le Bossu. “I trust for your sake that you have not sold the emeralds.”

“They are here,” cried Granger, fumbling with unsteady hands at the opening by the fire-place. “All of them.”

Fascinated in spite of herself the girl watched le Bossu as he tossed them from hand to hand in lines of living green fire.

“The beauties,” he whispered. “The beauties. Now, Crapeau—the rest. Put them on your table, and I will choose.”

And then for the next hour the scene must surely have been as amazing as any ever thought of in the wildest fairy story. From different hiding-places all over the room came every conceivable form of treasure. Pearls, rubies, diamonds, exquisite miniatures, littered the desk, until the mind reeled at the value of what lay there. And all the time le Bossu sat motionless in his chair. Once only did he make a movement, and that was to pick up an exquisitely chased gold cup and turn it over in his hands.

“Divine work,” he said thoughtfully. “A pity that it must remain.”

Another hour passed in a sort of semi-stupor for her, while le Bossu made his choice. Each stone was carefully examined, and either returned to the table or placed carefully in one of the velvet bags he had taken from his pocket. No word was spoken, and once when Granger ventured some cringing remark he was bidden curtly to be silent. And for the second time that night the sense of unreality came over her. The great deformed figure at the desk, silent and absorbed: the fawning, obsequious Granger at his side, were just parts of some ghastly nightmare.

At length le Bossu rose: he had finished, and for a space he stood staring at Granger. His back was towards the girl, but in his eyes there must have been something which told the other the truth. For with a sudden frenzied cry he hurled himself on his knees and grovelled for mercy.

“Spare me,” he screamed again and again. “I have given you all.”

“Crapeau,” came a terrible voice, “what was the penalty for disobeying me in the past?”

“Death,” moaned the other.

“Is there any reason, Crapeau,” went on the voice, “why you should escape that penalty?”

And then le Bossu paused and swung round. For the girl had seized him by the arm, and was shouting at him hysterically.

“You’re not going to murder him,” she cried. “It’s monstrous: it’s…”

The words died away on her lips, and she gave a little moaning sob of terror, and cowered back. For his eyes seemed to be glowing with some strange light, a greenish-yellow light, which bored into her brain and numbed her. Then like a flash he turned again. There came a choking squeal: then silence save for a faint hissing noise. Le Bossu was strangling le Crapeau before her eyes.

He seemed to her like some monstrous spider, who had at last got the fly in its clutches. Her brain refused to act: she could only lean against the wall moaning pitifully. And suddenly it was all over. With a thud Granger fell on the floor: the strangler’s work was done. For a moment she stared at the victim’s face. Then, with a little sob of utter horror, she fainted.

When she came to herself the room was empty. And it was only the heap of rejected stuff which still lay on the table that told her it had been grim reality and not some ghastly dream. Le Bossu had been there, he had murdered Granger and had gone. But had he? For the moment he was not in the room, but at any instant he might return and complete his work by killing her.

Now was her chance to open the switch. Shakily she got to her feet, and it was when she was halfway across the room that the crazy maniacal laughter, which we had heard in the passage, pealed through the house. For a second or two she paused, clutching the table, wondering whether the murderous fiend was even now playing with her as a cat plays with a mouse. Then, as the laughter ceased, she took a little run forward and pulled out the switch. And so did she come stumbling down the stairs to us—a girl who had reached the breaking-point.

We lifted her on to the sofa, and then Hugh spoke. His voice was perfectly normal, and in all probability the others noticed nothing. But I knew at once that he was in a condition of cold, overmastering rage. It was rare with him, very rare: only twice before, I think, had I seen him in a similar condition. And it were safer for a man to sit on an open barrel of gunpowder with a lighted match in his hand, than to come to grips with Hugh Drummond in such a mood.

“Scott,” he said quietly, “you and John will remain with Miss Verney. When she has recovered sufficiently take her back to my house. Come, Peter.”

Without another word he strode to the front door and I followed. It was open: le Bossu had left that way. And the instant he was outside he dodged into the bushes: rage or no rage his judgment was not blinded. In absolute silence he made his way through the undergrowth, and at such a speed that I, used though I was to his uncanny power of movement at night, was hard put to it to keep up with him. Only once did he pause, and that was when there came from the distance the sudden roar of a motor engine. Then we reached the wall, and swarmed over.

“Leave those things,” he said shortly. “There will be a good deal to tell the police before the night is through, and our method of entry will be one of them.”

The Bentley was where we had left her, and started at once. No tampering this time, and a few minutes later we spun past Hugh’s house.

“Where are we bound for?” I asked.

“The Marsh,” he answered. “And the proof that four can be as good as six. But, my God! Peter, we’ve cut it fine this time.”

Through Rye, and along the straight stretch to the fork, where he turned right-handed along the sea road. We were going to the same place as the first night when we had visited Spragge’s Farm. And it was not until he was getting out of the car that he spoke again.

“If by any chance he does me in, Peter,” he said gravely, “shoot him as you would shoot a mad dog.”

So it was here that the final battle was to come. Somewhere in the sand dunes Drummond and le Bossu Masqué were going to meet. How Hugh knew I didn’t ask: he was in no mood for idle chatter. That he did know was enough for me: that he had known all along was obvious now. And even at that moment, keyed up though I was, I couldn’t help realising the torment of mind he must have gone through when, as a prisoner in the passage, he thought his plan was going to fail through no fault of his own.

Side by side we crept over the sandy hummocks. He was taking a course almost parallel with the sea, but a little inshore. And after we had gone about four hundred yards, he put out his hand as a warning. Evidently we were near the spot. In front of us lay a dune higher than the average, and up this he wormed his way on his stomach. I followed him, and then, inch by inch, I raised my head to see what was on the other side. And in that instant I understood.

Below us was the motor-boat we had found on our visit to Spragge’s Farm. It had been moved from its original position, and now it lay, its bows pointing to the open sea, in a little creek. We had cut in on le Bossu’s line of retreat.

“We may have to wait some time,” whispered Hugh in my ear. “But that is better than being too late.”

And then began an eerie vigil. The ceaseless roar of the sea: the harsh call of some night bird above our heads, were the only sounds. And after a while there came that faint lessening of the darkness over Dungeness that heralded the approach of dawn. I glanced at my watch, it marked a quarter to three.

Suddenly Hugh gripped my arm.

“He is coming,” he whispered.

I had heard nothing myself, but of old I knew that Drummond at night was not as other men. And then, I, too, heard the noise of a stone being dislodged. It came from inland, and I peered in the direction of the sound.

“There he is,” breathed Hugh. “We will play with him a little, Peter.”

And now I could see his outline plainly. He was coming along the side of the dyke towards the motor-boat. Moreover, he did not seem to be taking any precautions about moving silently: evidently he had no suspicions whatever that we were there before him. He paused by the side of the boat, and I half expected Hugh to hurl himself down the dune on to him. But he made no movement, though in the very faint light I thought I detected a grim smile on his face.

Below us, quite unconscious of his danger, le Bossu went on with his preparations. He was stowing some things away in the stern of the boat, and every now and then he lifted his head and listened. The possibility of pursuit was clearly in his mind, and once he paused for nearly a minute. One could just see his movements against the jet-black mirror of water: one was near enough to hear the faint hissing whistle with which he worked, like a man grooming a horse.

At length he straightened up and stepped into the boat: he was going to take off the tarpaulin that covered the engine. I glanced at Hugh: it struck me that what he had said on the drive down was true now—he was cutting it fine. Once let le Bossu start the engine, there was every chance in the darkness of his being able to make the sea. At any rate, the only method of stopping him would be to fire more or less blindly at the boat. But still Hugh made no movement: like a piece of carved granite he lay there staring at the boat below.

Le Bossu folded the tarpaulin, and threw it into the bows. Then he got on to the bank once more, and the rattle of a chain told us he had cast off the painter. He was ready to go. For a moment or two he stood by the side of the boat, and clear above the noise of the waves we heard him laughing. Low and triumphant, and yet with the same ring of madness in it as that wild, frenzied peal he had given at Temple Tower. Then he got back into the boat, and again I glanced at Hugh. Surely he wasn’t going to wait any longer.

Crank went the starting-handle: no result. Again he tried: nothing. His laughter had ceased; and he tried once more. The engine refused to fire. And now I felt Hugh shaking silently beside me—and a dim premonition of what had happened began to dawn on me—a premonition which was confirmed a moment or two later. Le Bossu had switched on his torch to examine the motor. All the four sparking-plugs had been removed. The meaning of Hugh’s cryptic utterance about four being the equivalent of six was clear.

Out went the light, and from below us came a flood of the most frightful blasphemy. His voice was hardly above a whisper, but every word carried to our ears. Then abruptly it ceased: le Bossu was thinking. That he still had no inkling of our presence was obvious: he still believed himself to be alone. But alone with a useless motor-boat instead of alone and well out to sea. What was he to do? He must have realised that the object of the boat was known to us; and that being the case, that we should come to it the instant we got out of the secret passage. And he must have cursed himself for not having taken more precautions to prevent us doing so. As long as he had thought that the secret of the boat was his alone, it had not mattered when we escaped: now when he knew it wasn’t, everything was altered.

One thing was clear: the idea of escaping in the boat must be abandoned, at any rate, for the present. Moreover, the sooner he was away from the boat, the better for him. Feverishly he began to unpack the things he had so carefully stowed away; every second was of importance. At any moment we might be on him: from triumph he had plunged to failure. And it was then I realised that Hugh was no longer beside me: like a shadow he had vanished into the darkness. The time for play was over: the final settlement was due. I hitched myself forward a few inches, and with my revolver ready I waited. How was it going to happen?

Suddenly from about ten yards away came Hugh’s clear laugh, and with a hiss like an angry snake le Bossu straightened up. A few seconds later came the laugh again, but from quite a different spot, and le Bossu spun round. Then again and again came that laugh, each time from a fresh place. Dimly I could see le Bossu, crouching on the bank, his head jerking round quickly at each sound: playtime evidently was not yet over. The murderous devil was to have a taste of his own medicine before the end.

“Good-evening, Bossu,” came Hugh’s drawling voice. “Your sparking-plugs are in my pocket. It was kind of you to give me the idea. Won’t you come and get them?”

A snarl was the only answer.

“Five people, Bossu, have you murdered on this little trip. To say nothing of an attempt to brain me with a chimney-pot. I dislike people who try to brain me with chimney-pots, Bossu. So what are we going to do about it?”

And once again there came a snarl that was half animal in ferocity.

“I can see you quite clearly, Bossu,” mocked Hugh. “And you can’t see me. Unfortunate, isn’t it? Shall I put five perfectly good bullets into your carcass, one for each person you have murdered, or would you prefer to die another way?”

There came a sudden crack from below me, and a shot went droning harmlessly over the Marsh.

“Quite the wrong direction, my friend,” said Hugh easily. “Don’t, I beg of you, add a harmless cow to your bag. And you haven’t answered my question. Which way would you prefer to die, Bossu? Because you are going to—very shortly. You won’t say? Then I have a suggestion to make. You shall die as you have lived—by strangling. Does that appeal to your sense of humour?”

Silence from below, and once again Hugh laughed.

“Putting on the robes of office, are you, Bossu? The false hump: the mask: the long black hood. I have been wondering off and on why you bothered with quite such an elaborate make-up. The mask I can understand: even the hump. But it was the hood that defeated me. Am I right in supposing that a fold of loose stuff like that round your neck, gives you a considerable advantage if your adversary tries to meet you at your own game and endeavours to strangle you? I can assure you that you needn’t be afraid of giving away any of your parlour secrets: you will never need them again. You won’t speak? Not very chatty tonight, are you, Bossu?”

It was growing lighter now, and I could plainly see the great black figure below me. He was staring around like a wild beast at bay, trying to locate Drummond, and in his right hand was an ugly-looking revolver. And knowing the nature of the brute I slipped my own gun a little further forward: it was not a moment for taking chances. “It was clever of you to think of the aeroplane today,” went on his invisible tormentor. “Indeed I don’t mind admitting it was a stroke of genius. Very nearly—so very nearly—it enabled you to pull it off. In fact, Bossu, I quite agree with all that that dear fellow Victor Matthews said about you. But it doesn’t alter my opinion that you are a nasty bit of work: so nasty, to be exact, that I grow weary of you. I would fain seek ale in my humble cottage. Throw your gun into the water, Bossu.”

The drawling voice had ceased: the order came curt and stern. But the man below still glared savagely round him. Came a crack, and a stab of flame. Another crack from le Bossu, who had fired at the flash, and Hugh’s mocking laugh.

“Through your hump that time, Bossu, and more peril to the cows from you. I am a very much better shot than you, so if you take my advice you won’t go on playing at that game. I give you exactly five seconds to throw your gun into the water. The next time I fire it will be through your revolver hand.”

For a moment or two le Bossu seemed to hesitate: then without a word he flung his revolver into the creek.

“Good!” said Hugh curtly. “Now, Bossu, put your hands above your head.”

Again came a momentary hesitation, then his arms, grotesquely draped in the black hood, went above his head. And simultaneously Hugh emerged from behind a sand dune twenty yards away. His gun was in his hand, and he walked slowly along the edge of the water till he reached le Bossu. And then for a space there was silence.

I watched fascinated: had ever day dawned on a more incredible scene? This monstrous masked devil—this murderer many times over, facing a man in whose face there was no glint of pity.

“Strictly speaking, Bossu, I suppose I should hand you over to the police,” said Drummond quietly. “But we are not speaking strictly at the moment. And so I propose to give myself the extreme pleasure of anticipating the hangman. Do not imagine, Bossu, that I shall suffer in any way. I have here a witness in the shape of Mr. Darrell who will swear that you made a dastardly assault upon me, should any questions arise.”

He paused: then he flung his revolver up to me.

“Right, strangler, I am ready. Do you begin, or shall I?”

And now, the necessity for concealment gone, I stood up. I was almost shaking with excitement, but neither man paid any attention to me. Le Bossu had dropped his arms, and was crouching a little. His body swayed slightly from side to side: his hands, with the fingers curved like steel hooks, were in front of him, stretched out towards Hugh. And suddenly, like a flash, he sprang.

Came a dull heavy thud, and a short laugh from Drummond, as le Bossu crashed on his back.

Hugh’s fist, with fourteen stone behind it, had caught him on the point of the jaw.

“Fight on, strangler,” said Hugh quietly. “Fight on. There is no time limit to this round. “

And then to my amazement he stepped back a pace. He was staring at le Bossu fixedly with an expression on his face I couldn’t fathom.

“By God! Peter,” he cried, “his eyes have gone green. The brute is not human.”

But human or the reverse, the next instant he was fighting for his life. Snarling and panting, infuriated by the blow, le Bossu, for the next minute, gave Hugh all he wanted. Once he got his hands to Drummond’s throat, only to have them torn away. He tried to wrap himself round Drummond: he fought like a maddened beast. And at one moment I, who knew his strength, began to feel uneasy.

But not for long: the strangler had met his match at last. Under the hood went Hugh’s vice-like hands, and the snarling gave place to a hideous gurgling noise. Then that, too, ceased. And when Hugh finally relaxed his grip, it was into the boat, which he had planned to take him to safety, that le Bossu Masqué fell dead.

“His eyes were green, Peter,” Hugh said to me. He was rubbing his hands together thoughtfully. “A sort of greeny yellow.”

He bent over the dead man, and ran his hands through his pockets.

“The loot,” he said curtly. And then—”Greeny yellow. For a moment it shook me.”

“Anyway,” I remarked, “Jean Picot will strangle no more.”

He stared at me thoughtfully.

“You’ll blame me, Peter: you’ll all of you blame me. I ought to have told you sooner. But I never thought it would be quite such touch and go as this.”

He stepped into the boat, and ripped off the mask and hood from the dead man. And I gave an involuntary cry.

“You knew?” I almost shouted.

“All along,” he said.

For the man who lay dead in the boat, his face still distorted in the snarl of death, was Victor Matthews.

CHAPTER XIV

In Which the “Maid of Orleans” Returns from Boulogne

“My dear people,” remarked Drummond lazily, “you have every right to pelt me metaphorically with bad eggs. I abase myself: I grovel. I should have let you into the secret. My only excuse is that between you I thought you’d give it away to the swab: and in addition I believed I had the situation easily in hand.”

We were all of us sprawling in easy chairs in his garden late that afternoon.

“How did you spot it?” demanded Freckles.

“I spotted it when he was telling us the tale,” said Hugh. “All about the Château du Lac Noir, which, incidentally, I have taken the trouble to verify. It was all absolutely true. In fact, where Matthews’ cleverness came in was that all the way through ninety percent of what he told us was the truth. But to go back to the moment when I spotted it. He reached out his left hand to pick up a glass of ale. In doing so his sleeve slipped back, and on his forearm were some most peculiar red marks. They were evidently caused recently, because in places the blood was showing purple under the skin. And I found myself wondering idly what could have caused them. I suppose suspicions like that come in a flash, and to start with it was only a suspicion. It struck me that they were exactly the sort of marks that would be caused by a dog savaging a man’s arm that was protected by a sleeve. What does a fellow do, instinctively, if an animal flies at him? He flings up his left arm to protect his face, and uses his right for attack. I studied his sleeve. The cloth was not torn, but its condition was on the tired side. And from that moment I began to read everything that happened by the light of the supposition that Victor Matthews was le Bossu Masqué. I was prepared to abandon it at any moment, but it was always present in my mind. The revolver shot through his coat, of course, was a very old trick. It might have been fired by someone else: equally well it might have been fired by himself as a blind. The first thing was to go through everything that had happened, and find out if there was any episode that ruled it out. And up to date there wasn’t. The chimney-pot on my head: there was no reason why Matthews shouldn’t have done it. You get the line I was going on? True, there was no proof that he had: but there was no proof that he hadn’t. Therefore the chimney-pot didn’t rule him out.

“Stealing John’s plan. Once again there was nothing to prove that Matthews wasn’t the culprit. He had plenty of time to go to Laidley Towers, steal the plan, and then be back at Spragge’s Farm at the hour we saw him.

Then came number one difficulty—my sparking-plugs. True, there was time for him to have walked back to where the car was, after he had been caught by the light, whilst we were lying up. It didn’t absolutely rule him out—but I didn’t like it very much. And Jean Picot began to float into my mind. Where did he come in? It was him we had seen skulking by the warehouse when we started in the car. Was he in league with le Bossu? If so what about the Vandalis? At that time I had to leave a lot to chance, and all I had arrived at up to date was that nothing had happened which absolutely ruled him out.

“Then came the biggest poser of all. Why, in view of the fact that he had got well away from us, after the murder of Gaspard, had he deliberately delivered himself, so to speak, into our hands? Well, the answer to that, after a good deal of thought, struck me this way. We were a completely unexpected factor in his calculations. Four large men, barging round for sport, were a complication he hadn’t bargained for at all. He had failed to get into Temple Tower, through knowing nothing about the verse at the back of the plan. So he knew he would have to try again the following night. And he came to the instantaneous decision that if we were going to be there he would sooner have us as allies than enemies. That seemed to answer that.

“Then the Inspector arrived on the scene with the information about the Nightingale’s murder. And I cast my optic on Matthews’ face. There was no doubt about it: the news had upset him. He was annoyed. How did that fit in with my assumption?

“All right: at any rate, it didn’t disprove it. When he murdered the Nightingale his idea was that he would be through with the whole thing that night, and since the Nightingale had served his purpose by supplying the ladder, he was a nuisance who might well be removed. If you remember, Matthews himself said all this afterwards, which was where his damned cleverness came in. It was true, and his momentary annoyance was due to the fact that, having failed to get in, the body had been found; as he said, it cut le Bossu short for time, meaning that it cut him himself short for time. Then along comes Miss Verney with the news about Gaspard, and he realises that both these murders, which wouldn’t have mattered if he had succeeded the night before, are now going to complicate things badly. Police, reporters—the light of day on Temple Tower—altogether very awkward. How was he going to rectify it? I assure you I was as interested as he was.

Well, we know how he rectified it. The cold-blooded, unscrupulous devil proceeds to murder both the Vandalis, and throws suspicion for all four murders on Vandali. Matthews was Mr. Thomas of the Dolphin. But it was there he nearly overstepped the mark. He had forgotten Jean Picot, a gentleman with whom I had a long talk yesterday afternoon.

“Jean Picot is another of these birds with a past, and Jean Picot has been serving two masters. He had been with the Vandalis as chauffeur for three years, and in his queer way was absolutely devoted to her. But as I say, he had a past, and Matthews knew that past. And so he had but little difficulty in persuading Picot to help him. And, as a matter of fact, it was Picot who actually removed the plugs from the car, acting under Matthews’ orders.

“But when it came to the murder of the Vandalis, Picot stuck in his toes. He knew it was Matthews who had done it—or Thomas as he called him—but he couldn’t prove it. And exactly what happened in that room we shall never know. As Mr. Thomas, Matthews had undoubtedly become acquainted with the Vandalis. And presumably he carried out that double murder in much the same method as he described it. Only he put it on Picot.

“A clever touch, that. In the first place it gave him a ready-made Bossu to plant on us: in the second, it would fit in with any possible attempt Picot might make to get even. In fact, I should imagine that our friend, as he sat in the dining-room that evening, just before Picot’ s shooting practice, must have thought himself on velvet.

“He had removed four obstacles in his path, without any suspicion falling on him. The outside public thought the murderer was Vandali: we thought it was Picot. In addition to that he had all of us eating out of his hand. And at that time I thought, as I told you Peter, that his plan was one of subtlety. He had presented us with the map—incidentally, how any of you could ever have thought that was an accident I don’t know. It was the one flaw in an otherwise brilliant scheme. However, he had to take a chance, and he took it.

“We now know he made an alteration in the verse, but that does not affect what I believe his scheme to have been. It merely gave him an alternative line of action which, as events turned out, he availed himself of. And his scheme, I am convinced, was this. He intended to remain Victor Matthews with us to the end. With us he would have entered the grounds. No trace of le Bossu. With us he would have found the entrance: with us he would have forced his way into the house, and in the name of law and order compelled Granger to disgorge. And then, somehow or other, he would have given us the slip. That was his scheme, I am convinced, before I gave way to an extremely stupid impulse.

“You remember when Picot let drive through the window and Matthews turned out the lights. Well—I couldn’t help it: I knew I was a fool at the time—but I just couldn’t help it. The door opened slowly, didn’t it?—largely because I pulled it. Then it shut, largely because I shut it. And Matthews screamed and gurgled, largely because I had my hands on his throat.”

“You’re the limit, Drummond,” cried Freckles ecstatically.

“Far from it, young fellow,” said Hugh gravely. “It was a damned silly thing to do, knowing what I did. From being absolutely confident that he had us fooled, he suddenly became suspicious. Was it Picot who had caught him by the throat, or was it not?

“However, the mischief was done, and I did my best to rectify it. I took the precaution of making him sleep in a room from which he could not get out without my knowledge, and I did my best to allay his doubts. But I know I didn’t succeed. It was then he changed his plan, and took the alternative. It was then he decided to work alone: to make use of what he knew was the right verse, and leave us to stew in the wrong one.

“But at once he was confronted with a difficulty. Miss Verney and Scott were going to find the tree, and under his first scheme of working with us that was good enough for him: working alone it wasn’t. He had to find that tree for himself. And he thought of the aeroplane.

“Admittedly the man was a devil incarnate, but you can’t deny it was a stroke of genius. Not only did it make him independent of us, but it had the secondary effect of lulling me into a fool’s paradise. I did not see how he could get in without us. That he was going to have a dip at it that night I knew: I was lying up in the Marsh yesterday when he moved the motor-boat from its original position to where Peter and I found it.”

“That’s when you took the plugs?” I said, and he nodded.

“How was he going to get in?” he went on.

That was what seemed to me to be the essence of the whole thing. And all through yesterday I still believed that my original idea was right.

Knowing nothing of the aeroplane or the change in the verse, it was impossible to allow for the alternative plan. Even when he gave his cry for help over the telephone, I still felt absolutely safe, though that little effort positively reeked of suspicion. Why an A. A. box, of all places, to ring up from? And by what possible fluke of fate could he expect us to believe le Bossu was waiting there for him? But once again, believing that we were indispensable to him, I saw no risk in going. In fact, to tell you the truth, so preposterous did it seem to me as a blind, that I half believed something had happened to him. That possibly he had persuaded Picot for some reason or other to go with him in the car, and that in the middle of a message to us, Picot had actually set on him. Anyway, we know he didn’t, and Matthews got a start on us that, had it not been for Miss Verney, would have proved fatal. A very salutary thought, chaps: he got away with it as near as makes no odds, and but for her, he got away with it entirely. “Anyway, that’s that: only one little ceremony remains. From inquiries I made yesterday I gather that Count Vladimir still lives in the Rue Nitot in Paris. And since this property is his “—he held up the velvet bag—” I took the liberty of telling him that a charming lady, accompanied by a graceless young blighter, would wait upon him in due course to restore it, and to entertain him with an account of how it was recovered. He expressed himself as delighted, and confirmed the fact that the reward still stood. And so I have much pleasure in presenting Miss Verney with the bag of nuts, prior to consuming one or even two beakers of ale.”

“But it is impossible, Captain Drummond,” cried the girl, “We must share it.”

“My dear soul,” said Hugh, with a grin, “it’s too hot to argue. Peter would only spend it in drink and riotous living, and my share would go in bailing him out. As for John, churchyards are full of Inspectors of Taxes who have died of shock on seeing his income tax cheque. They didn’t know there was so much money in the world.”

And so it ended—that strange affair which had started in an Apache revel nearly thirty years ago. Vengeance had come on the last two of that motor-bandit gang: vengeance had come on the mysterious being who had employed them. Whether his real name was Matthews no one will ever know. From inquiries we made, the fact emerged that there was a man of that name, whose description tallied with Matthews, employed in the Paris police round about 1900, and whose reputation was above reproach. And if they were the same it may well be that it was an extraordinary example of dual personality, a second case of Jekyll and Hyde. For without some such explanation it is well-nigh impossible to conceive how the suave, capable, courteous man we had known could turn on the sudden into a snarling brute-beast murderer.

* * * *

The Maid of Orleans drew slowly into the side.

Leaning over the rail was the usual row of cross-Channel passengers calling out greetings to their friends on the quay. An odd Customs man or two drifted out of their respective offices: the R.A.C. representative raised entreating hands to High Heaven lest one of his charges should arrive without his triptyque. In fact, the usual scene on the arrival of the Boulogne boat, and mentioned only because you must end a story somewhere, and Folkestone Harbour is as good a locality as any.

Standing side by side on the quay were two men, waving their hands in that shame-faced manner which immediately descends on the male sex when it indulges in that fatuous pursuit. The targets of their innocent pastime were two women whose handkerchiefs fluttered in response from the upper deck. And since these two charming ladies have come into the matter again, it might be as well to dispose of them forthwith. They were, in short, the wives of the two men, arriving on their lawful occasions from Le Touquet, where they had played a little golf and lost some money in the Casino. Which is really all that needs to be said about them, except, possibly, their first remark, chanted in unison, as the ship came to rest.

“Have you both been good while we’ve been away?”

“Of course,” answered the two men, also in unison.