Here Stannard made a chopping motion with his hand.
During this time neither Ruth Callice nor John Stannard had glanced at the third person in the gill-and-silver room: a young man who sat some distance away from them, his head down and his hands on his knees, near the empty fireplace and the grand piano. At the barrister's last words he did look up.
"Your dead man," continued Stannard, "in a spiritual sense is chained there, He's what the books call earthbound. Is that correct?"
Ruth gave a quick little nod of absorbed attention. "Yes. That, you see," she threw out her hands, "is what would make some of these houses so horribly dangerous, if it were true. It wouldn't be like an ordinary haunting. It would be like… like a man-eating tiger."
"Then why don't your psychical researchers do the obvious thing?’
The obvious thing? I don't follow you."
With the cigar Stannard gestured round at the bookshelves.
"You tell me," he retorted, "that at Something-Old-Hall there's a psychic strangler, and at Somewhere-Low-Grange there's an earthbound force that can crush you to death. It may be so; I can't say. But I can tell you a far better place to look for evidence. If what you say is true, what would be the most dangerously haunted place on earth?"
"Well?"
"The execution shed of any prison," replied Stannard.