“He followed you, then?”
“It would be what he would do, wouldn’t it?”
“You mean that you didn’t actually hear him?”
“No, I didn’t hear him. I didn’t wait to hear anything. I was so busy getting out of the Maze. Of course, I know the Maze well, but it’s difficult to keep your head in a case like that, very difficult. But I did it,” he ended proudly. “I got away from the fellow. Never as much as saw him.”
His glasses slipped off again in the excitement of his peroration; and he adjusted them painfully.
“These things do give one a lot of bother,” he complained. “I expect it’s the perspiration on my nose, with all that running. I haven’t run for years.”
“You got out of the Maze safely, then. What next?”
“I got on to my bicycle and rode away as hard as I could. What a blessing I had that machine there, eh? If I hadn’t, he might have run me down in the open quite easily. I was quite out of breath.”
“Then?”
“Then I went to the telephone and rang you up at the Grange. I had an idea you’d be there. If you hadn’t been, I’d have tried the police-station.”
“Quite right, Mr. Shandon. Now there are one or two points I must have cleared up. First of all, it seems you met no one either going to the Maze or coming back from it. Did you shout or call for assistance at all on your way to the house?”
“I couldn’t,” Ernest admitted, simply. “I hadn’t any breath left to shout with. You don’t understand what it was like, I assure you.”
“Was there no one about?”
“No,” Ernest answered after a pause. “Arthur had gone off somewhere. He generally seems to go off by himself, quite often one doesn’t see him for hours. I don’t know where he was. And Torrance was out of the road, too. I can’t tell you where he was. Perhaps he’d walked over to Stanningleigh. Or perhaps he’d gone somewhere else. I haven’t seen him since lunchtime.”
“And Mr. Stenness?”
To Wendover’s surprise the sound of Stenness’s name seemed to galvanise Ernest. His terror appeared to increase again, just when it had seemed to be dying down.
“Stenness!” he repeated. “Oh, Stenness …”
He broke off short, as though afraid he had been heard.
“Just a moment,” he muttered, and rose from his chair.
Wendover could see that the man’s knees were trembling. Ernest walked across to the door, opened it gently, and peered out with a caution which had in it a touch of the ludicrous.
“Nobody there,” he explained, as he came back again. “You never know.”
“What’s behind this, Mr. Shandon?” Sir Clinton demanded, impatiently. “If you’ve any information, it’s your duty to give it to me at once. Have you anything to tell me about Mr. Stenness?”
Ernest made a gesture, appealing piteously for a lowering of Sir Clinton’s voice.
“You remember,” he continued, almost in a whisper, “that the other night—I mean last night, the night of the burglary—I was going through Roger’s papers. I think I told you before that I was doing that, didn’t I? And amongst his papers I came across his chequebooks and some stubs. I was looking through these, just to see what things he’d been spending money on—the firms he’d been dealing with, and so forth, you understand? And quite by accident, I noticed something funny. The counterfoil of the last missing cheque had been cut out of the book. I’d never have noticed it if it hadn’t been that I was looking at the numbers. It was cut away very carefully, very neatly indeed, you know. But there was the counterfoil for the cheque before it numbered something like 60072 and the next one in the book was numbered 60074 or some figures like these. There was a missing number in the series. And there was another funny thing. I happened to look at the last bundle of returned cheques in Roger’s drawer. He hadn’t destroyed them, it seems, for some reason or other. I can’t think why, myself. But there they were. And one of them was missing from the series.”
“There’s nothing mysterious in that,” Wendover objected. “It may have been a cheque that went abroad, and hasn’t been returned to the bank yet. Your brother had interests overseas.”
Ernest’s dull eyes brightened slightly in triumph.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Wendover. That’s a mistake. I was curious about the thing, it seemed to me so funny. So I looked up the counterfoil of that missing cheque in Roger’s stub; and it was a cheque for some hundreds and it was made payable to his stockbrokers. That seemed funnier than ever, didn’t it? A cheque like that would go right back to the bank with no delay. It would be paid in immediately, I’m sure it would. Wouldn’t it? Of course, sure to be, you know?”
Sir Clinton had been following this with keen interest.
“And where does Mr. Stenness come in?” he asked. Ernest looked round the room again as though he feared that Stenness might be concealed somewhere.
“Well,” he said, reluctantly, “Stenness had access to Roger’s papers. He could have got at this chequebook, I’m sure. Roger was a bit careless, sometimes. I’ve seen his chequebook lying about on the table often. I remember I saw it last Tuesday, was it? Or was it Wednesday? It was in the morning, I know that.”
Sir Clinton’s face showed uncommon interest now.
“And you think … ?” he prompted.
Ernest poured out another stiff glass of whiskey, this time unchecked by anyone.
“I can’t say I think anything, really. I shouldn’t like to go so far as that, you understand. That might be going too far. But I let slip to you that I’d found something funny amongst the cheques, last night. I mean I told you this morning what I’d found last night. Or rather …”
“I understand,” said Sir Clinton, rescuing him from his tangle. “And … ?”
“And Stenness was there when I mentioned it. He knew
