They found the little vapour lamp and lit it.
“What’s that?” The detective officer pointed to the hook that still hung in the beam with the pulley beneath, and his eyes narrowed. “I can’t understand that,” he said slowly. “What was that for?”
Jack Knebworth uttered an exclamation.
“Here’s Brixan’s gun!” he said, and picked it up from the floor.
One glance the inspector gave, and then his eyes went back to the hook and the pulley.
“That beats me,” he said. “See if you fellows can find anything anywhere. Open every cupboard, every drawer. Sound the walls—there may be secret doors; there are in all these old Tudor houses.”
The search was futile, and Inspector Lyle came back to a worried contemplation of the hook and pulley. Then one of his men came in to say that he had located the garage.
It was an unusually long building, and when it was opened, it revealed no more than the old-fashioned car which was a familiar object in that part of the country. But obviously, this was only half the accommodation. The seemingly solid whitewashed wall behind the machine hid another apartment, though it had no door, and an inspection of the outside showed a solid wall at the far end of the garage.
Jack Knebworth tapped the interior wall.
“This isn’t brickwork at all, it’s wood,” he said.