“Are there cellars?”
“I should imagine so,” said Michael. “That type of house usually has.”
“Outhouses where——?”
Michael shook his head.
“There are none, so far as I have been able to see.”
Michael walked down to the railway station with his chief, who told him he was leaving in a much more cheerful frame of mind than he had been in when he arrived.
“There’s one warning I’ll give to you, Mike,” said Staines as the train was about to pull out of the station, “and it is to watch out for yourself! You’re dealing with a ruthless and ingenious man. For heaven’s sake do not underrate his intelligence. I don’t want to wake up one morning to learn that you have vanished from the ken of man.”
CHAPTER XXI
THE ERASURE
Mike’s way back did not lead through the little street where Adele Leamington lived—at least, not his nearest road. Yet he found himself knocking at the door, and learnt, with a sense of disappointment, that the girl had been out since seven o’clock in the morning. Knebworth was shooting on the South Downs, and the studio, when he arrived, was empty, except for Knebworth’s secretary and the new scenario editor, who had arrived late on the previous evening.
“I don’t know the location, Mr. Brixan,” said Dicker, the secretary, “but it’s somewhere above Arundel. Miss Mendoza was here this morning, asking the same question. She wanted Miss Leamington to go out to lunch with her.”