"Do you mean," asked Jarvis with a rather ghastly look, "that the unknown visitor has got in here again? Do you think it's ... anything serious?" After a moment he added: "I may be able to push back the bolt; I know the fastening on these doors."
He knelt down and pulled out a pocket knife with a long steel implement, manipulated it for a moment, and the door swung open on the manager's study. Almost the first thing they noticed was that there was no other door and even no window, but a great electric lamp stood on the table. But it was not quite the first thing that they noticed; for even before that they had seen that Mandeville was lying flat on his face in the middle of the room and the blood was crawling out from under his fallen face like a pattern of scarlet snakes that glittered evilly in that unnatural subterranean light.
They did not know how long they had been staring at each other when Jarvis said, like one letting loose something that he had held back with his breath:
"If the stranger got in somehow, she has gone somehow."
"Perhaps we think too much about the stranger," said Father Brown. "There are so many strange things in this strange theatre that you rather tend to forget some of them."
"Why, which things do you mean?" asked his friend quickly.
"There are many," said the priest. "There is the other locked door, for instance."
"But the other door is locked," cried Jarvis staring.
"But you forgot it all the same," said Father Brown. A few moments afterwards he said thoughtfully: "That Mrs. Sands is a grumpy and gloomy sort of card."
"Do you mean," asked the other in a lowered voice, "that she's lying and the Italian did come out?"