Campion’s pale eyes flickered.
‘I fancy I could tell you that,’ he said. ‘You see, when they couldn’t get anything out of me, except banalities, they decided that I was about the fool I looked, and just before a couple of thugs, armed to the teeth, bundled me off to the box-room, I heard a certain amount of what they said. Jesse Gideon had apparently gone carefully over the crowd, and prepared a dossier about each one of us. I came first on the list of people about which nothing was known, and the next was a girl. She wasn’t a friend of Petrie’s apparently, and the enemy couldn’t place her at all.’
‘Who – who was that?’
Abbershaw was staring at the speaker, his eyes grown suddenly hard. A terrible apprehension had sent the colour to his face. Campion glanced at him curiously.
‘That red-haired girl who met us in the passage when we came back from the garage. What’s her name – Oliphant, isn’t it? Meggie Oliphant. She’s the next to be for it, I believe.’
CHAPTER XIII
Abbershaw Sees Red
‘My God, Abbershaw, he was right! They’ve got her!’
Ten minutes after Mr Campion had first suggested that Meggie might be the next victim, Prenderby ran into Abbershaw in the corridor outside the girl’s room. ‘I’ve been all over the house,’ he said. ‘The girls say that she went up to her room an hour ago to lie down. Now there’s not a sign of her about.’
Abbershaw did not speak.
In the last few minutes his face had lost much of its cherubic calm. An entirely new emotion had taken possession of him. He was wildly, unimaginably angry.