He found Prenderby sitting up for him, the ashtray at his side filled with cigarette-stubs.
“So you’ve turned up at last,” he said peevishly. “I wondered if they’d done a sensational disappearing act with you. This house is such a ghostly old show I’ve been positively sweltering with terror up here. Anything transpired?”
Abbershaw sat down by the fire before he spoke.
“I signed the certificate,” he said at last. “I was practically forced into it. They had the whole troupe there, old Uncle Tom Beethoven and all.”
Prenderby leant forward, his pale face becoming suddenly keen again.
“They are up to something, aren’t they?” he said.
“Oh, undoubtedly.” Abbershaw spoke with authority. “I saw the corpse’s face. There was no heart trouble there. He was murdered—stuck in the back, I should say.” He paused, and hesitated as if debating something in his mind.
Prenderby looked at him curiously. “Of course, I guessed as much,” he said, “but what’s the other discovery? What’s on your mind?”
Abbershaw looked up at him, and his round grey-blue eyes met the boy’s for an instant.
“A darned queer thing, Prenderby,” he said. “I don’t understand it at all. There’s more mystery here than you’d think. When I twitched back the sheet and looked at the dead man’s face it was darkish in that four-poster, but there was light enough for me to see one thing. Extreme loss of blood had flattened the flesh down over his bones till he looked dead—very dead—and that plate he wore over the top of his face had slipped out of place and I saw something most extraordinary.”
Prenderby raised his eyes inquiringly. “Very foul?” he said.
“Not at all. That was the amazing part of it.”
Abbershaw leaned forward in his chair and his eyes were very grave and hard. “Prenderby, that man had no need to wear that plate. His face was as whole as yours or mine!”
“Good God!” The boy sat up, the truth slowly dawning on him. “Then it was simply—”
Abbershaw nodded.
“A mask,” he said.
VI
Mr. Campion Brings the House Down
Abbershaw sat up for some time, smoking, after Prenderby left him, and when at last he got into bed he did not sleep at once, but lay staring up into the darkness of the beamed ceiling—thinking.
He had just fallen into a doze in which the events of the evening formed themselves into a fantastic nightmare, when a terrific thud above his head and a shower of plaster upon his face brought him hurriedly to his senses.
He sat up in bed, every nerve alert and tingling, waiting for the next development.
It came almost immediately.
From the floor directly above his head came a series of extraordinary sounds. It seemed as if heavy pieces of furniture were being hurled about by some infuriated giant, and between the crashes Abbershaw fancied he could discern the steady murmur of someone cursing in a deep, unending stream.
After a second or so of this he decided that it was time to get up and investigate, and slipping on his dressing-gown he dashed out into the corridor, where the grey light of morning was just beginning to pierce the gloom.
Here the noise above was even more distinct. A tremendous upheaval seemed to be in progress.
Not only Abbershaw had been awakened by it; the whole house appeared to be stirring. He ran up the staircase in the direction from which the noise was coming to discover that an old-time architect had not built another room above the one in which he slept but a wide gallery from which a second staircase descended. Here he was confronted by an extraordinary scene.
The manservant he had noticed so particularly on the evening before was grappling with someone who was putting up a very stout resistance. The man was attacking his opponent with an amazing ferocity. Furniture was hurled in all directions, and as Abbershaw came up he caught a stream of oaths from the infuriated footman.
His first thought was that a burglar had been surprised red-handed, but as the two passed under a window in their violent passage round the place, the straggling light fell upon the face of the second combatant and Abbershaw started with surprise, for in that moment he had caught a glimpse of the vacant and peculiarly inoffensive features of Mr. Albert Campion.
By this time there were many steps on the stairs, and the next moment half the house-party came crowding round behind Abbershaw; Chris Kennedy in a resplendent dressing-gown was well to the fore.
“Hullo! A scrap?” he said, with something very near satisfaction in his voice, and threw himself upon the two without further preliminaries.
As the confusion increased with this new development Abbershaw darted forward and, stooping suddenly, picked up something off the floor by the head of the second staircase. It was very swiftly done, and no one noticed the incident.
Chris Kennedy’s weight and enthusiasm brought the fight to an abrupt finish.
Mr. Campion picked himself up from the corner where he had been last hurled. He was half strangled, but still laughing idiotically. Meanwhile, Chris Kennedy inspected the butler, whose stream of rhetoric had become much louder but less coherent.
“The fellow’s roaring tight,” he announced, upon closer inspection. “Absolutely fighting-canned, but it’s wearing off a bit now.”
He pushed the man away from him contemptuously, and the erstwhile warrior reeled against the stairhead and staggered off down out of sight.
“What’s happened? What’s the trouble?” Wyatt Petrie came hurrying up the passage, his voice anxious and slightly annoyed.
Everybody looked at Mr. Campion. He was leaning up against the balustrade, his fair hair hanging over his eyes, and for the first time it dawned upon Abbershaw that he was fully dressed, and not, as might have been expected, in the dinner-jacket he had worn on the previous evening.
His explanation was characteristic.
“Most extraordinary,” he said, in his slightly high-pitched voice. “The fellow set on me. Picked me up and started doing exercises with me as if I were a
