“You got out of the Maze safely, then. What next?”
“I got on to my bicycle and rode away as hard as I could. What a blessing I had that machine there, eh? If I hadn’t, he might have run me down in the open quite easily. I was quite out of breath.”
“Then?”
“Then I went to the telephone and rang you up at the Grange. I had an idea you’d be there. If you hadn’t been, I’d have tried the police-station.”
“Quite right, Mr. Shandon. Now there are one or two points I must have cleared up. First of all, it seems you met no one either going to the Maze or coming back from it. Did you shout or call for assistance at all on your way to the house?”
“I couldn’t,” Ernest admitted, simply. “I hadn’t any breath left to shout with. You don’t understand what it was like, I assure you.”
“Was there no one about?”
“No,” Ernest answered after a pause. “Arthur had gone off somewhere. He generally seems to go off by himself, quite often one doesn’t see him for hours. I don’t know where he was. And Torrance was out of the road, too. I can’t tell you where he was. Perhaps he’d walked over to Stanningleigh. Or perhaps he’d gone somewhere else. I haven’t seen him since lunch-time.”
“And Mr. Stenness?”
To Wendover’s surprise the sound of Stenness’s name seemed to galvanise Ernest. His terror appeared to increase again, just when it had seemed to be dying down.