“Will you show me the place?” said Michael quickly.
He followed the other across the road to the bushes, a little clump which was empty when they reached it. Kneeling down to make a new skyline, Michael scanned the limited horizon, but there was no sign of Bhag. For that it was Bhag he had no doubt. There might be nothing in it. Penne told him that the animal was in the habit of taking nightly strolls, and that he was perfectly harmless. Suppose …
The thought was absurd, fantastically absurd. And yet the animal had been so extraordinarily human that no speculation in connection with it was quite absurd.
When he returned to the garden, he went in search of the girl. She had finished her scene and was watching the stealthy movements of two screen burglars, who were creeping along the wall in the subdued light of the arcs.
“Excuse me, Miss Leamington, I’m going to ask you an impertinent question. Have you brought a complete change of clothes with you?”
“Why ever do you ask that?” she demanded, her eyes wide open. “Of course I did! I always bring a complete change in case the weather breaks.”
“That’s one question. Did you lose anything when you were at Griff Towers?”
“I lost my gloves,” she said quickly. “Did you find them?”
“No. When did you miss them?”
“I missed them immediately. I thought for a moment—” She stopped. “It was a foolish idea, but—”
“What did you think?” he asked.
“I’d rather not tell you. It is a purely personal matter.”
“You thought that Sir Gregory had taken them as a souvenir?”
Even in the half-darkness he saw her colour come and go.
“I did think that,” she said, a little stiffly.
“Then it doesn’t matter very much—about your change of clothing,” he said.
“Whatever are you talking about?”
She looked at him suspiciously. He guessed she thought that he had been drinking, but the last thing in the world he wanted to do at that moment was to explain his somewhat disjointed questions.
“Now everybody is going to bed!”
It was old Jack Knebworth talking.
“Everybody! Off you go! Mr. Foss has shown you your rooms. I want you up at four o’clock tomorrow morning, so get as much sleep as you can. Foss, you’ve marked the rooms?”
“Yes,” said the man. “I’ve put the names on every door. I’ve given this young lady a room to herself—is that right?”
“I suppose it is,” said Knebworth dubiously. “Anyway, she won’t be there long enough to get used to it.”
The girl said good night to the detective and went straight up to her apartment. It was a tiny room, smelling somewhat musty, and was simply furnished. A truckle bed, a chest of drawers with a swinging glass on top, and a small table and chair was all that the apartment contained. By the light of her candle, the floor showed signs of having been recently scrubbed, and the centre was covered by a threadbare square of carpet.
She locked the door, blew out the candle and, undressing in the dark, went to the window and threw open the casement. And then, for the first time, she saw, on the centre of one of the small panes, a circular disc of paper. It was pasted on the outside of the window, and at first she was about to pull it off, when she guessed that it might be some indicator placed by Knebworth to mark an exact position that he required for the morning picture-taking.
She did not immediately fall asleep, her mind for some curious reason, being occupied unprofitably with a tumultuous sense of annoyance directed towards Michael Brixan. For a long time a strong sense of justice fought with a sense of humour equally powerful. He was a nice man, she told herself; the sixth sense of woman had already delivered that information, heavily underlined. He certainly had nerve. In the end humour brought sleep. She was smiling when her eyelids closed.
She had been sleeping two hours, though it did not seem two seconds. A sense of impending danger wakened her, and she sat up in bed, her heart thumping wildly. She looked round the room. In the pale moonlight she could see almost every corner, and it was empty. Was it somebody outside the door that had wakened her? She tried the door handle: it was locked, as she had left it. The window? It was very near to the ground, she remembered. Stepping to the window, she pulled one casement close. She was closing the other when, out of the darkness below, reached a great hairy arm and a hand closed like a vice on her wrist.
She did not scream. She stood breathless, dying of terror, she felt. Her heart ceased beating, and she was conscious of a deadly cold. What was it? What could it be? Summoning all her courage, she looked out of the window down into a hideous, bestial face and two round, green eyes that stared into hers.
XI
The Mark on the Window
The Thing was twittering at her, soft, birdlike noises, and she saw the flash of its white teeth in the darkness. It was not pulling, it was simply holding, one hand gripping the tendrils of the ivy up which it had climbed, the other hand firmly about her wrist. Again it twittered and pulled. She drew back, but she might as well have tried to draw back from a moving piston rod. A great, hairy leg was suddenly flung over the sill; the second hand came up and covered her face.
The sound of her scream was deadened in the
