Prenderby opened his mouth to speak again, but a sign from Abbershaw silenced him.
‘Dawlish got you, of course?’ he said, with an unwonted touch of severity in his tone.
Mr Campion nodded.
‘Did they search you?’ Abbershaw persisted.
‘Search me?’ said he. A faintly weary expression came into the pale eyes behind the large spectacles. ‘My dear sir, they almost had my skin off in their investigations. That Hun talks like comic opera but behaves like the Lord High Executioner. He nearly killed me.’ He took his coat off as he spoke, and showed them a shirt cut to ribbons and stained with blood from great weals across his back.
‘Good God!’ said Abbershaw. ‘Thrashed!’ Instantly his magisterial manner vanished and he became the professional man with a case to attend to.
‘Michael,’ he said, ‘there’s a white shirt amongst my things in that cupboard, and water and boracic on the washstand. What happened?’ he continued briefly, as Prenderby hurried to make all preparations for dressing the man’s injuries.
Mr Campion stirred painfully.
‘As far as I can remember,’ he said weakly, ‘about four hundred years ago I was standing by the fire-place talking to Anne What’s-her-name, when suddenly the panel I was leaning against gave way, and the next moment I was in the dark with a lump of sacking in my mouth.’ He paused. ‘That was the beginning,’ he said. ‘Then I was hauled up before old Boanerges and he put me through it pretty thoroughly; I couldn’t convince him that I hadn’t got his packet of love-letters or whatever it is that he’s making such a stink about. A more thorough old bird in the questioning line I never met.’
‘So I should think,’ murmured Prenderby, who had now got Campion’s shirt off and was examining his back.