Michael decided to look for himself. They put up the ladder and he climbed to the broad top of the tower and looked down. At the base of the stonework the ground sloped away in a manner curiously reminiscent of the shell-holes he had seen during the war in France. The actual floor of the tower was not visible under the hawthorn bushes which grew thickly at the centre. He caught a glimpse of the jagged edges of rock, the distorted branches of an old tree, and that was all.
There was ample opportunity for concealment. Possibly Bhag had hidden there most of the time, sleeping off the effects of his labour and his wounds; for Michael had seen something that nobody else had noticed—the gashed skin, and the ear that had been slashed in half.
He came down the ladder again and rejoined Knebworth.
“I think that finishes our work for today,” said Jack dubiously. “I smell hysteria, and it will be a long time before I can get the girls to come up for a night picture.”
Michael drove the director back in his car, and all the way home he was considering this strange appearance of the ape. Somebody had handcuffed Bhag: he ought to have guessed that when he saw the torn link. No human being could have broken those apart. And Bhag had escaped—from whom? How? And why had he not returned to Griff Towers and to his master?
When he had dropped the director at the studio he went straight on to Gregory’s house, and found the baronet playing clock-golf on a strip of lawn that ran by the side of the house. The man was still heavily bandaged, but he was making good recovery.
“Yes, Bhag is back. He returned half an hour ago. Where he has been, heaven knows! I’ve often wished that chap could talk, but I’ve never wished it so much as I do at this moment. Somebody had put irons on him: I’ve just taken them off.”
“Can I see them?”
“You knew it, did you?”
“I saw him. He came out of the old tower on the hill.” Michael pointed; from where they stood, the tower was in sight.
“Is that so? And what the devil was he doing there?”
Sir Gregory scratched his chin thoughtfully.
“He’s been away before, but mostly he goes to a shoot of mine about three miles away, where there’s plenty of cover and no intruders. I discovered that when a poacher saw him, and, like a fool, shot at him—that poacher was a lucky man to escape with his life. Have you found the body of Foss?”
The baronet had resumed his playing, and was looking at the ball at his feet.
“No,” said Michael quietly.
“Expect to find it?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Sir Gregory stood, his hands leaning on his club, looking across the wold.
“What’s the law in this country, suppose a man accidentally kills a servant who tried to knife him?”
“He would have to stand his trial,” said Michael, “and a verdict of ‘justifiable homicide’ would be returned and he would be set free.”
“But suppose he didn’t reveal it? Suppose he—well, did away with the body—buried it—and let the matter slide?”
“Then he would place himself in a remarkably dangerous position,” said Michael. “Particularly”—he watched the man closely—“if a woman friend, who is no longer a woman friend, happened to be a witness or had knowledge of the act.”
Gregory Penne’s one visible eye blinked quickly, and he went that curious purple colour which Michael had seen before when he was agitated.
“Suppose she tried to get money out of him by threatening to tell the police?”
“Then,” said the patient Michael, “she would go to prison for blackmail, and possibly as an accessory to or after the fact.”
“Would she?” Sir Gregory’s voice was eager. “She would be an accessory if she saw—him cut the man down? Mind you, this happened years ago. There’s a Statute of Limitations, isn’t there?”
“Not for murder,” said Michael.
“Murder! Would you call that murder?” asked the other in alarm. “In self-defence? Rot!”
Things were gradually being made light to Michael. Once Stella Mendoza had called the man a murderer, and Michael’s nimble mind, which could reconstruct the scene with almost unerring precision, began to grow active. A servant, a coloured man, probably, one of his Malayan slaves, had run amok, and Penne had killed him—possibly in self-defence—and then had grown frightened of the consequences. He remembered Stella’s description—“Penne is a bluffer and a coward at heart.” That was the story in a nutshell.
“Where did you bury your unfortunate victim?” he asked coolly, and the man started.
“Bury? What do you mean?” he blustered. “I didn’t murder or bury anybody. I was merely putting a hypothetical case to you.”
“It sounded more real than hypothesis,” said Michael, “but I won’t press the question.”
In truth, crimes of this character bored Michael Brixan; and, but for the unusual and curious circumstances of the Headhunter’s villainies, he would have dropped the case almost as soon as he came on to it.
There was yet another attraction, which he did not name, even to himself. As for Sir Gregory Penne, the grossness of the man and his hobbies, the sordid vulgarity of his amours, were more than a little sickening. He would gladly have cut Sir Gregory out of life, only—he was not yet sure.
“It is very curious how these questions crop up,” Penne was saying, as he came out of his reverie. “A chap like myself, who doesn’t have much to occupy his mind, gets on an abstract problem of that kind and never leaves it. So she’d be an accessory after the fact, would she? That would mean penal servitude.”
He seemed to derive a great deal of satisfaction from this thought, and was almost amiable by the time Michael parted from him, after an examination of the broken handcuffs. They were British and of an old pattern.
“Is Bhag hurt very much?” asked Michael as he put them down.
“Not very much; he’s got a
