“But this was two or three days before Robert turned up.”
“Exactly. I am not suggesting that there was anything sinister about the passage in the first place. It was just a little private bit of romance and adventure for Mark, three days ago. He didn’t even know that Robert was coming. But somehow the passage has been used since, in connection with Robert. Perhaps Mark escaped that way; perhaps he’s hiding there now. And if so, then the only person who could give him away was Miss Norris. And she of course would only do it innocently—not knowing that the passage had anything to do with it.”
“So it was safer to have her out of the way?”
“Yes.”
“But, look here, Tony, why do you want to bother about this end of it? We can always get in at the bowling-green end.”
“I know, but if we do that we shall have to do it openly. It will mean breaking open the box, and letting Cayley know that we’ve done it. You see, Bill, if we don’t find anything out for ourselves in the next day or two, we’ve got to tell the police what we have found out, and then they can explore the passage for themselves. But I don’t want to do that yet.”
“Rather not.”
“So we’ve got to carry on secretly for a bit. It’s the only way.” He smiled and added, “And it’s much more fun.”
“Rather!” Bill chuckled to himself.
“Very well. Where does the secret passage begin?”
XI
The Reverend Theodore Ussher
“There’s one thing, which we have got to realize at once,” said Antony, “and that is that if we don’t find it easily, we shan’t find it at all.”
“You mean that we shan’t have time?”
“Neither time nor opportunity. Which is rather a consoling thought to a lazy person like me.”
“But it makes it much harder, if we can’t really look properly.”
“Harder to find, yes, but so much easier to look. For instance, the passage might begin in Cayley’s bedroom. Well, now we know that it doesn’t.”
“We don’t know anything of the sort,” protested Bill.
“We know for the purposes of our search. Obviously we can’t go tailing into Cayley’s bedroom and tapping his wardrobes; and obviously, therefore, if we are going to look for it at all, we must assume that it doesn’t begin there.”
“Oh, I see.” Bill chewed a piece of grass thoughtfully. “Anyhow, it wouldn’t begin on an upstairs floor, would it?”
“Probably not. Well, we’re getting on.”
“You can wash out the kitchen and all that part of the house,” said Bill, after more thought. “We can’t go there.”
“Right. And the cellars, if there are any.”
“Well, that doesn’t leave us much.”
“No. Of course it’s only a hundred-to-one chance that we find it, but what we want to consider is which is the most likely place of the few places in which we can look safely.”
“All it amounts to,” said Bill, “is the living-rooms downstairs—dining-room, library, hall, billiard-room and the office rooms.”
“Yes, that’s all.”
“Well, the office is the most likely, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, it’s on the wrong side of the house. One would expect the passage to start from the nearest place to which it is going. Why make it longer by going under the house first?”
“Yes, that’s true. Well, then, you think the dining-room or the library?”
“Yes. And the library for choice. I mean for our choice. There are always servants going into dining-rooms. We shouldn’t have much of a chance of exploring properly in there. Besides, there’s another thing to remember. Mark has kept this a secret for a year. Could he have kept it a secret in the dining-room? Could Miss Norris have got into the dining-room and used the secret door just after dinner without being seen? It would have been much too risky.”
Bill got up eagerly.
“Come along,” he said, “let’s try the library. If Cayley comes in, we can always pretend we’re choosing a book.”
Antony got up slowly, took his arm and walked back to the house with him.
The library was worth going into, passages or no passages. Antony could never resist another person’s bookshelves. As soon as he went into the room, he found himself wandering round it to see what books the owner read, or (more likely) did not read, but kept for the air which they lent to the house. Mark had prided himself on his library. It was a mixed collection of books. Books which he had inherited both from his father and from his patron; books which he had bought because he was interested in them or, if not in them, in the authors to whom he wished to lend his patronage; books which he had ordered in beautifully bound editions, partly because they looked well on his shelves, lending a noble colour to his rooms, partly because no man of culture should ever be without them; old editions, new editions, expensive books, cheap books—a library in which everybody, whatever his taste, could be sure of finding something to suit him.
“And which is your particular fancy, Bill?” said Antony, looking from one shelf to another. “Or are you always playing billiards?”
“I have a look at Badminton sometimes,” said Bill. “It’s over in that corner there.” He waved a hand.
“Over here?” said Antony, going to it.
“Yes.” He corrected himself suddenly. “Oh, no, it’s not. It’s over there on the right now. Mark had a grand rearrangement of his library about a year ago. It took him more than a week, he told us. He’s got such a frightful lot, hasn’t he?”
“Now that’s very interesting,” said Antony, and he sat down and filled his pipe again.
There was indeed a “frightful
