Prenderby opened his mouth to speak again, but a sign from Abbershaw silenced him.
“Dawlish got you, of course?” he said, with an unwonted touch of severity in his tone.
Mr. Campion nodded.
“Did they search you?” Abbershaw persisted.
“Search me?” said he. A faintly weary expression came into the pale eyes behind the large spectacles. “My dear sir, they almost had my skin off in their investigations. That Hun talks like comic opera but behaves like the Lord High Executioner. He nearly killed me.” He took his coat off as he spoke, and showed them a shirt cut to ribbons and stained with blood from great weals across his back.
“Good God!” said Abbershaw. “Thrashed!” Instantly his magisterial manner vanished and he became the professional man with a case to attend to.
“Michael,” he said, “there’s a white shirt amongst my things in that cupboard, and water and boracic on the washstand. What happened?” he continued briefly, as Prenderby hurried to make all preparations for dressing the man’s injuries.
Mr. Campion stirred painfully.
“As far as I can remember,” he said weakly, “about four hundred years ago I was standing by the fireplace talking to Anne What’s-her-name, when suddenly the panel I was leaning against gave way, and the next moment I was in the dark with a lump of sacking in my mouth.” He paused. “That was the beginning,” he said. “Then I was hauled up before old Boanerges and he put me through it pretty thoroughly; I couldn’t convince him that I hadn’t got his packet of love-letters or whatever it is that he’s making such a stink about. A more thorough old bird in the questioning line I never met.”
“So I should think,” murmured Prenderby, who had now got Campion’s shirt off and was examining his back.
“When they convinced themselves that I was as innocent as a newborn babe,” continued the casualty, some of his old cheerfulness returning, “they gave up jumping on me and put me into a box-room and locked the door.” He sighed. “I sleuthed round for a bit,” he went on, while they listened to him eagerly. “The window was about two thousand feet from the ground with a lot of natty ironwork on it—and finally, looking round for a spot soft enough for me to lie down without yowling, I perceived an ancient chest, under the other cardboard whatnots and fancy basketwork about the place, and I opened it.” He paused, and drank the tooth-glass of water which Prenderby handed to him.
“I thought some grandmotherly garment might be there,” he continued. “Something I could make a bed of. All I found, however, was something that I took to be a portion of an ancient bicycle—most unsuitable for my purpose. I was so peeved that I jumped on it with malicious intent, and immediately the whole show gave way and I made a neat but effective exit through the floor. When I got the old brain working again, I discovered that I was standing on the top of a flight of steps, my head still half out of the chest. The machinery was the ancients’ idea of a blind, I suppose. So I shut the lid of the trunk behind me, and lighting a match toddled down the steps.”
He stopped again. The two men were listening to him intently.
“I don’t see how you got into the cupboard, all the same,” said Prenderby.
“Nor do I, frankly,” said Mr. Campion. “The steps stopped after a bit and I was in a sort of tunnel—a ratty kind of place; the little animals put the wind up me a bit—but eventually I crawled along and came up against a door which opened inwards, got it open, and sneaked out into your cupboard. That didn’t help me much,” he added dryly. “I didn’t know where I was, so I just sat there reciting ‘The Mistletoe Bough’ to myself, and confessing my past life—such sport!” He grinned at them and stopped. “That’s all,” he said.
Abbershaw, who had been watching him steadily as he talked, came slowly down the room and stood before him.
“I’m sorry you had such a bad time,” he said, and added very clearly and distinctly, “but there’s really no need to keep up this bright conversation, Mr. Mornington Dodd.”
For some seconds Mr. Campion’s pale eyes regarded Abbershaw blankly. Then he started almost imperceptibly, and a slow smile spread over his face.
“So you’ve spotted me,” he said, and, to Abbershaw’s utter amazement, chucked inanely. “But,” went on Mr. Campion cheerfully, “I assure you you’re wrong about my magnetic personality being a disguise. There is absolutely no fraud. I’m like this—always like this—my best friends could tell me.”
This announcement took the wind out of Abbershaw’s sails; he had certainly not expected it.
Mr. Campion’s personality was a difficult one to take seriously; it was not easy, for instance, to decide when he was lying and when he was not. Abbershaw had reckoned upon his thrust going home, and although it had obviously done so he did not seem to have gained any advantage by it.
Prenderby, however, was entirely in the dark, and now he broke in upon the conversation with curiosity.
“Here, I say, I don’t get this,” he said. “Who and what is Mr. Mornington Dodd?”
Abbershaw threw out his hand, indicating Mr. Albert Campion.
“That gentleman,” he said, “is Mornington Dodd.”
Albert Campion smiled modestly. In spite of his obvious pain he was still lively.
“In a way yes, and in a way no,” he said, fixing his eyes on Abbershaw. “Mornington Dodd is one of my names. I have also been called the ‘Honourable Tootles Ash,’ which I thought was rather neat when it occurred to me. Then there was a girl who used to call me ‘Cuddles’ and a man at the Guards Club called me something quite different—”
“Campion, this is not a joke,” Abbershaw spoke sternly. “However many and varied your aliases
