The change in Mr. Campion was extraordinary; he pulled himself together with an effort.
“This is horrible,” he said. “I suppose they got him when they discovered that he had parted with the package. Pretty quick work,” he added thoughtfully. “I wonder how they rumbled him so soon.”
There was silence for a moment or two after he had spoken, then Prenderby looked up.
“The store they set by that package must be enormous, on the face of it,” he said. “Clearly they’ll do anything for it. I wonder what their next move will be?”
“He’s searched our rooms,” said Abbershaw, “and I believe he intended to lock us in the dining-room and search us immediately after, but his experiences in the bedrooms taught him the utter impossibility of ever making a thorough search of a house like this. It couldn’t be done in the time he had at his disposal. I think he realizes that his only chance of getting hold of what he wants is to terrorize us until someone hands it over.”
“Then I hope to goodness whoever has got it gets the wind up soon,” said Prenderby.
Campion nodded and sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed. “I expect he’ll have you people up one at a time and bully the truth out of you until he gets what he wants,” he said.
“For a great crook he hasn’t proved very methodical, so far,” said Abbershaw. “He might have known from the first that there’d be no point in churning everybody’s clothes up.”
Albert Campion leaned forward. “You know, you fellows don’t understand this bright specimen of German culture,” he said, with more gravity than was usual in his falsetto voice. “He’s not used to little details of this sort. He’s the laddie at the top—the big fellow. He just chooses his men carefully and then says, ‘You do this,’ and they do it. He doesn’t go chasing round the country opening safes or pinching motorcars. I don’t believe he even plans the coups himself. He just buys criminal brains, supplies the finance, and takes the profits. That’s why I can’t understand him being here. There must have been something pretty big afoot, or he’d have had a minion in for it. Gosh! I wish I was well out of it.”
Abbershaw and Prenderby echoed his wish devoutly in their hearts, and Prenderby was the first to speak.
“I wonder whom he’ll start on first,” he said thoughtfully.
Campion’s pale eyes flickered.
“I fancy I could tell you that,” he said. “You see, when they couldn’t get anything out of me, except banalities, they decided that I was about the fool I looked, and just before a couple of thugs, armed to the teeth, bundled me off to the box-room, I heard a certain amount of what they said. Jesse Gideon had apparently gone carefully over the crowd, and prepared a dossier about each one of us. I came first on the list of people about which nothing was known, and the next was a girl. She wasn’t a friend of Petrie’s apparently, and the enemy couldn’t place her at all.”
“Who—who was that?”
Abbershaw was staring at the speaker, his eyes grown suddenly hard. A terrible apprehension had sent the colour to his face. Campion glanced at him curiously.
“That red-haired girl who met us in the passage when we came back from the garage. What’s her name—Oliphant, isn’t it? Meggie Oliphant. She’s the next to be for it, I believe.”
XIII
Abbershaw Sees Red
“My God, Abbershaw, he was right! They’ve got her!”
Ten minutes after Mr. Campion had first suggested that Meggie might be the next victim, Prenderby ran into Abbershaw in the corridor outside the girl’s room. “I’ve been all over the house,” he said. “The girls say that she went up to her room an hour ago to lie down. Now there’s not a sign of her about.”
Abbershaw did not speak.
In the last few minutes his face had lost much of its cherubic calm. An entirely new emotion had taken possession of him. He was wildly, unimaginably angry.
Never, in all his life before, had he experienced anything that could compare with it, and even as Prenderby watched him he saw the last traces of the cautious methodical expert vanish and the new, impulsive, pugnacious fighter come into being.
“Michael,” he said suddenly, “keep an eye on Campion. His story may be absolutely true—it sounds like it—but we can’t afford to risk anything. Keep him up in my room so that he can hide in the passage if need be. You’ll have to smuggle food up to him somehow. Cheer the others up if you can.” Prenderby looked at him anxiously.
“What are you going to do?” he said.
Abbershaw set his teeth.
“I’m going to see them,” he said. “There’s been enough of this mucking about. There is going to be some sort of understanding, anyway. Damn it all! They’ve got my girl!” Turning on his heel he strode off down the passage.
A green-baize door cut off that portion of the house where Dawlish had established his headquarters. He passed through it without any interruption, and reached the door of the room that had once been Colonel Coombe’s bedchamber.
He tapped on it loudly, and it was opened immediately by a
