The dull, rasping voice stopped for a moment, and Abbershaw was about to speak when Dawlish again silenced him.
‘To recover that property,’ he repeated, ‘at whatever cost. I am not playing a game. I am not jumping out of cupboards in an attempt to be heroic. I am not pretending. I think the boy who attempted to drive off in his motor-car and the madman who escaped from the room upstairs where I had locked him understood me. The girl here, too, should begin to understand by now. And the rest of you shall be convinced even as they have been.’
Abbershaw’s anger had by no means died down under this harangue, and when he spoke his voice was frigid and very formal.
‘If you carry out those threats, Herr Eberhard von Faber,’ he said, ‘you will be wasting your time.’
Gideon started violently at the name, but the German did not appear even to have heard.
‘I had your packet,’ Abbershaw continued bitingly.
They were listening intently, and he fancied he discerned a change in Dawlish’s dull eyes.
‘And in the morning before you had the audacity to place us under this restraint I destroyed it in the grate in my bedroom.’ He paused, breathless; the truth was out now, they could do what they liked with him.
The German’s reply came, very cold and as contemptuous as his own.
‘In the present situation you cannot expect to be believed,’ he said. ‘Do not they tell me after every crime in which great public interest is taken at least four or five imbeciles approach the police, confessing to it? Forgive me if I say that you remind me of one of those imbeciles, Dr Abbershaw.’