“They brought me straight up here, and tied me up,” she answered. “They haven’t hurt me—and they’ve given me food, but I’ve been terrified—simply terrified—as to what they were going to do next.” She clung to him, and he kissed her reassuringly. “There’s a man below with red hair and a straggling beard, who came and stared at me in the most horrible way. He was in his shirt sleeves and his arms were all covered with chemical stains.”
“Did he touch you?” asked Hugh grimly.
“No—he just looked horrible,” she said, with a shudder. “And then he repeated the other man’s threat—the one who had been in the car—that if I shouted or made any fuss he’d lash me up and gag me. He spoke in a sort of broken English—and his voice never seemed to rise above a whisper.”
She was trembling now, and Hugh made a mental note of another gentleman on whom he proposed to lay hands in the near future. Red hair and a straggling beard should not prove hard to recognise.
He glanced at the watch on Phyllis’s wrist, and saw that it was very nearly one o’clock. The noise of the engine was still going monotonously on; except for that the house seemed absolutely silent. And he began to wonder how long it would be wise to continue the vigil. Supposing no one did come; supposing somebody came who hadn’t got the key; supposing two or three of them came at the same time. Would it be better, even now, to drop through the window—and try to find a telephone or the police? If only he knew where he was; it might take him hours to find either at that time of night. And his whole being revolted at the idea of leaving Phyllis absolutely defenceless in such a house.
He rose and paced softly up and down the room trying to think what was the best thing to do. It was a maddening circle whichever way he looked at it, and his fists clenched and unclenched as he tried to make up his mind. To go or to wait; to go at once or to stop in the hope that one man would come up and have the key on him. Common sense suggested the first course; something far more powerful than common sense prompted the latter. He could not and would not leave Phyllis alone. And so he decided on a compromise. If when daylight came no one had been up to the room, he would go; but he would wait till then. She’d feel safer once the night was over, and in the dawn he would be able to find his way outside more easily.
And he was just going to tell Phyllis what he had decided, when he heard a sound that killed the words on his lips. A door had opened below, and men’s voices came floating up the stairs.
“Lie down, darling,” he breathed in her ear, “and pretend to be asleep.”
Without a word she did as he told her, while Hugh tiptoed over towards the door. There were steps coming up the stairs, and he flattened himself against the wall—waiting. The period of indecision was passed; unless he was very much mistaken the time of action had arrived. How it would pan out—whether luck would be in, or whether luck would fail was on the lap of the gods. All he could do was to hit hard and if necessary hit often, and a tingle of pure joy spread over him. Even Phyllis was almost forgotten at the moment; he had room in his mind for one thought only—the man whose steps he could hear coming along the passage.
There was only one of them, he noted with a sigh of relief—but for all that silence would be essential. It would take time to find the key; it would take even longer to get Phyllis free and out of the house. So there must be no risk of an alarm whatever happened.
The steps paused outside the door, and he heard a muttered ejaculation in Italian. It was his own particular friend of the motor right enough, and he grinned gently to himself. Apparently he was concerned over something, and it suddenly dawned on Drummond that it was the absence from duty of the long-armed bird that was causing the surprise. In the excitement of the moment he had forgotten all about him, and for one awful second his heart stood still. Suppose the Italian discovered the body before he entered the room, then the game was up with a vengeance. Once the alarm was given he’d have to run the gauntlet of the whole crowd over ground he didn’t know.
But his fears were groundless; the non-discovery of the watcher by the door took the Italian the other way. His first thought was to make sure that the girl was safe, and he flung open the door and came in. He gave a grunt of satisfaction as he saw her lying on the bed; then like a spitting cat he swung round as he felt Drummond’s hand on his shoulder.
“E pericoloso sporgersi,” muttered Hugh pleasantly, recalling the only Italian words he knew.
“Dio mio!” stammered the other, with trembling lips. Like most southerners he was superstitious, and to be told that it was dangerous to lean out of the window by a man whom he knew to be drowned was too much for him. It was a ghost; it could be nothing else, and his knees suddenly felt strangely weak.
“You didn’t know I was a linguist, did you?” continued Hugh, still more pleasantly; and with every ounce of weight in his body behind the blow, he hit the Italian on the point of the jaw. Without a sound the man crumpled up and pitched on his face.
And now there was not a moment to be lost. At any moment one of his pals might come upstairs, and everything depended on speed and finding the key. Hugh shut the door and locked it; then feverishly he started to search through the Italian’s pockets. Everything up to date had panned out so wonderfully that he refused to believe that luck was going to fail him now, and sure enough he discovered the bunch in one of the unconscious man’s waistcoat pockets. There were four of them, and the second he tried was the right one. Phyllis was free, and he heard her give a little sob of pure excitement.
“You perfectly wonderful boy!” she whispered, and Hugh grinned.
“We’ll hurl floral decorations afterwards, my angel,” he remarked. “Just at the moment it seems a pity not to replace you with someone.”
He heaved the Italian on to the bed, and snapped the steel bracelet on to his arm. Then he slipped the keys into his own pocket, and crossed to the window. The engine was still humming gently; the thudding noise was still going on; nothing seemed in any way different. No light came from the room below them, everything had worked better than he had dared to hope. He had only to lower Phyllis out of the window, and let her drop on to the flower-bed and then follow himself. After that it was easy.
“Come along, darling,” he said urgently, “I’m going to lower you out first—then I’ll follow. And once we’re down, you’ve got to trice up your skirts and run like a stag across the lawn till we’re under cover of those bushes. We aren’t quite out of the wood yet.”
They were not indeed. It was just as Phyllis let go, and he saw her pick herself up and dart across the lawn, that he heard a terrific uproar in the house below, and several men came pounding up the stairs. There were excited voices in the passage outside, and for a moment he hesitated, wondering what on earth had caused the sudden alarm. Then realising that this was no time for guessing acrostics, he vaulted over the window-sill himself, and lowered himself to the full extent of his arms. Then he too let go and dropped on to the flower-bed below. And it was as he was picking himself up, preparatory to following Phyllis—whom he could see faintly across the lawn waiting for him, that he heard someone in the house shout an order in a hoarse voice.
“Switch on the power at once, you damned fool; switch it on at once!”
CHAPTER XVI
In Which Things Happen at Maybrick HalL
Had the Italian come up five minutes sooner—a minute even—all would have been well. As it was, at the very moment when Drummond’s crashing blow took him on the point of the jaw with mathematical precision, another mathematical law began to operate elsewhere—the law of gravity. Something fell from a ceiling on to a table in the room below that ceiling, even as in days gone by an apple descended into the eye of the discoverer of that law.
The two men seated in the room below the ceiling in question failed to notice it at first. They were not interested in mathematics but they were interested in their conversation. One was the red-headed man of whom Phyllis had spoken: the other was a nondescript type of individual who