“No. I’m on my own. Bert’s gone into town, with the barman.”
“No servants here ?”
“No. What on earth . . .”
“You wait out in the garden,” Rollison said. “It’s vital.” She would never know how much she had been exposed to death. “Which room is this man in?”
“Number 3, at the head of the stairs.”
“Thanks,” Rollison said.
He went in.
The inn was absolutely silent except for the faint sounds of his own movements. He reached a narrow flight of stairs, and crept up them. The police filed into the passage, and he heard the muted sounds they made.
He reached the door of the room numbered 3, listened for a moment, but heard nothing.
He rapped sharply on the door.
There was no response.
He called : “Crane, I’ve got news for you. You’re handling a deadly radio-active unit that will kill you if you keep close to it any longer. Open the door, and get rid of it.”
There was still no response.
Every moment held its own danger. If the unit were in this inn, then already its deadly rays had penetrated walls and ceiling, the air Rollison breathed and the air about him was active with an unseen killer.
“Crane, you heard me.”
Then there was a movement; a squeak of sound. Rollison felt sure that a window was being opened. He stood aside as Bishop arrived, a great axe in his hands.
Bishop smashed a blow at the door, wrenched the axe out, and smashed again. A wooden panel split. Through the gap, Rollison saw a fattish man by the window, standing there and holding a small metal container in his hand.
He was fat and big; exactly as Tex Brandt had described Abner Crane.
The axe crashed again.
“If you don’t let me go I’ll throw this down and break it,” Crane said, in a strangely quiet, southern voice. “And if it breaks, no one in this village will live the week out.”
“Including Abner Crane,” Rollison said. “I don’t have a thing to live for, without this,” retorted Crane, and he rolled the unit on the palm of his hand. “Are you going to do a deal ?”
Rollison said, as if half-persuaded: “I’ll talk to the police.”
“You’d better be quick.”
Rollison moved back a foot. Bishop was holding the axe as if he would hurl it through the door and into the American’s face. Abner Crane was staring at them both.
Then, Tex Brandt’s face appeared at the open window. He was a yard away from Crane, who still held the unit loosely on his palm. Tex was standing on a ladder or a window sill. All the time, those unseen radiations were coming from the unit; and if it were broken then so much unseen power would be released that no one here would live.
Tex stretched out his arm, the fingers of the hand crooked. He was within a foot of the man in the room.
Rollison said: “Bishop, we’ve got to let Crane through, or he’ll kill hundreds of people.”
“It’s impossible!” Bishop rasped, and playing his part with absolute conviction. “Crane, if you don’t . . .”
Tex grabbed.
For a dreadful moment Rollison thought the unit would fall, but instead Tex held it, and backed from the window, while Rollison and Bishop rushed the smashed door, and caught a struggling, kicking, dying man.
• • • • • •
In another room here, without Mildred’s knowledge, were the man and woman who had attacked Morne. They made no attempt to escape, and even seemed eager to make a statement. The statement told how right Rollison had been; how treacherous Alan Selby was; how Crane had murdered both Lodwin and Charlie Habden, believing they, not Selby, were double-crossing him.
In Crane’s room was a small outer container for the unit, in his car, a stronger one still. Had he been able to escape at once, he might have been safe from the radiation, but he had been exposed to it for so long that within two days he was dead.
No one else was seriously affected.
• • • • • •
It was Old Smith who told the final story: a scared old man, who had believed that the safe contained stolen jewels, and had allowed it to be buried in the farmhouse by the original thief, the partner of Abner Crane.
The partner’s name was Lodwin.
• • • • • •
Jolly appeared, as if by magic, wraithlike from the kitchen. A moment later, he opened the big room door and announced:
