Sir Clinton leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment or two.
“I see what’s in your mind, Mr. Shandon,” he said at length. “Well, that can be put straight easily enough. So long as you were the only person who knew of this affair, you might be a danger to the fellow who was responsible for what you call the hanky-panky. It might be worth his while to put you out of the way—silence you, eh? and cover the business up.”
Ernest’s starting eyes showed that he had no liking for such plain discourse.
“Then,” continued Sir Clinton, “the remedy’s simple. Just tell whoever it is—we needn’t drag in names, need we?—that you’ve mentioned the matter to me. Then there will be no point in disturbing you further, you see? You’ll be quite safe, once you’ve done that. Doubly safe, in fact, for any further attack on you would be a bit too suspicious. That’s your best course.”
“I never thought of that,” said Ernest, gratefully. “It’s a relief, I can tell you. Such a relief! And you think there’ll be no chance of another attack on me?”
“I’d take almost any odds against it,” Sir Clinton reassured him.
“Well, I shall stay inside the house altogether for a week or two, at any rate,” Ernest decided, his fears returning suddenly. “That ought to be safe enough.”
He applied himself again to the decanter.
Sir Clinton had one last question to put.
“Where was Stenness while you were down at the Maze?”
Ernest stood with his tumbler arrested on the road to his mouth while he pondered over the matter.
“I don’t know,” he admitted finally. “I really can’t say. I left him here, working at Roger’s papers; and I told him I was going to Helen’s Bower. But when I came back again he wasn’t here. He’d put the papers away. I don’t know where he’d gone.”
“Ah, indeed?” said Sir Clinton ruminatively. But he made no further comment.
XI
The Squire’s Theories
“We’ll have another look at the Maze, Squire, if you don’t mind stopping there.”
Wendover nodded. He had expected the suggestion.
“You didn’t seem to overflow with sympathy for Shandon,” he commented.
“Friend Ernest raises my gorge,” admitted Sir Clinton frankly. “Did you ever see a man in such a state? I never could stand that sort of thing.”
Then, as though he felt he had been too hard on Ernest, he added perfunctorily:
“Of course, he’d had rather a bad half hour of it.”
“I admire the restraint of your language,” said Wendover with a smile. “But, you know, Clinton, I think you’re a bit hard on the beggar. What could he do but run? I’d have run myself, and I make no bones about it either.”
“Oh, so would I,” Sir Clinton conceded carelessly. “It wasn’t the running that put my back up.”
“You mean that there’s running and running, so to speak?”
“Exactly. Look at the case of that girl who was in the Maze when the murders were done—Miss Forrest, I mean. She had just as much right as Ernest to get hysterical. I won’t say she was as cool as a cucumber when we saw her; one couldn’t expect that. But she kept her nerves in order. She didn’t arrive at the house afterwards in a state of whimpering panic.”
“No, that’s true,” Wendover confirmed. “She’s worth a dozen of Ernest Shandon at a pinch, that girl. She kept her head and did exactly what was wanted.”
“Quite so. She wasn’t thinking of her own skin all the time like friend Ernest.”
“What’s all this about Stenness?” Wendover demanded. “Is it merely some rot that Ernest’s squirted out in the middle of his funk, or is there anything in it?”
“Here’s the Maze,” Sir Clinton interrupted, cutting him short. “Suppose we postpone discussion till after dinner tonight, Squire. I don’t want to be distracted for the next few minutes if you don’t mind.”
They entered the Maze and made their way towards Helen’s Bower. Near the door into it Wendover stopped suddenly and pointed to the pathway at their feet.
“Hullo! Look, Clinton! There’s a bit of black thread lying on the ground.”
They stooped over it and examined the fibre.
“Ordinary sewing-silk off a reel, obviously,” was all that Sir Clinton vouchsafed.
Wendover thought he had seen more in the matter.
“Don’t you see what it is, Clinton? Ariadne’s clue! It’s a thread that the murderer must have been using to find his way out of the Maze in a hurry.”
“I showed you before that there’s no difficulty in the Maze if you’ve once been taken to the centre.”
Wendover had his answer in readiness.
“Yes. But suppose you were the murderer, you would have to get out in a hurry, wouldn’t you? And you might lose your head. Anybody might get confused in the flurry. So he took the precaution of laying the thread to the exit; and all he had to do was to follow it and reel it up as he went. And this time a bit of it caught somewhere—see, this end’s tangled in the hedge—and so broke off and he had to leave it behind. When the Shandons were murdered he probably managed to reel up the whole of it and so left no trace behind him.”
“Sounds plausible,” Sir Clinton commented curtly. “We may as well collect the specimen, though really there’s nothing distinctive about it. One bit of thread’s very much like another.”
“Sherlock Holmes might have made more out of it than that,” said Wendover, rather resentful at the way his discovery had been treated.
“Doubtless. But as he isn’t here, what can we do? Just bumble along to the best of our poor abilities. That’s what I’m doing, Squire.”
They entered the tiny enclosure of Helen’s Bower, and Wendover’s eye was at once caught by a sparkle from the grass near one of the chairs. He stepped across and picked up a silver cigar-case. Sir Clinton held out his hand for it and glanced at the outside.
“It’s got a monogram, E. S., engraved on it,” he said.
