Superintendent Bell arrived to find Sam backing his own car to the kerb while he looked complacently at its shining sides. “Not a scratch, praise God,” he said.
Superintendent Bell pulled up. “You’re a wonder, you are,” he said, and gazed at the ruins. The smashed car was on its side in a jumble of twisted iron and bricks. The driver was underneath. They could not move him. There were reasons why that did not matter to him. “He’s got his,” said Sam. “Where’s the other? There were two of them.”
The other lay half hidden in a laurel hedge. He had been flung out, he had broken the railings with his head, he had broken the stone below, but his head was a gruesome shape.
In the hall of the Ferns Reggie Fortune stood still to listen. That muffled tapping was the only sound in the house. It came from below. He went down dark stairs into the kitchen. No one was there. The sound came from behind a doorway in the corner. He flung it open and looked down into the blackness of a cellar. He struck a light and saw a bundle lying on the ground, a bundle from which stuck out two feet that tapped at the cellar steps. He brought it up to the kitchen. It was a woman with her head and body in a sack. When he had cut her loose he saw the dark face of the woman of the shop and the flat. She sprang at him and grasped his arms.
“Who are you?” she cried. “Where is Lord Tetherdown?”
“My name is Fortune, madame. And yours?”
“I am Melitta Jacob. What is that to you? Where have you put Lord Tetherdown?”
“I am looking for him.”
“You! Is he not here? Oh, you shall pay for it, you and those others.”
But Reggie was already running upstairs. One room and another he tried in vain and at last at the top of the house found a locked door. The key was in the lock. Inside on a pallet bed, but clothed, lay a little man with some days’ beard. The woman thrust Reggie away and flung herself down by the bedside and gathered the man to her bosom moaning over him. “My lord, my lord.”