A guillotine!

Standing in the middle of the cave, its high framework lifted starkly. It was painted blood-red, and its very simplicity had a horror of its own.

Michael looked, fascinated. The basket, the bright, triangular knife suspended at the top of the frame, the tilted platform with its dangling straps, the black-painted lunette shaped to receive the head of the victim and hold it in position till the knife fell in its oiled groove. He knew the machine bolt by bolt, had seen it in operation on grey mornings before French prisons, with soldiers holding back the crowd, and a little group of officials in the centre of the cleared space. He knew the sound of it, the clop! as it fell, sweeping to eternity the man beneath.

“ ‘The Widow’!” said Longvale humorously. He touched the frame lovingly.

“Oh God, I’m not fit to die!” It was Penne’s agonized wail that went echoing through the hollow spaces of the cavern.

“The Widow,” murmured the old man again.

He was without a hat; his bald head shone in the light, yet there was nothing ludicrous in his appearance. His attitude toward this thing he loved was in a sense pathetic.

“Who shall be her first bridegroom?”

“Not me, not me!” squealed Penne, wriggling back against the wall, his face ashen, his mouth working convulsively. “I’m not fit to die⁠—”

Longvale walked slowly over to him, stooped and raised him to his feet.

“Courage!” he murmured. “It is the hour!”

Jack Knebworth was pacing the road when the police car came flying back from Chichester.

“He’s not there, hasn’t been to the station at all,” said the driver breathlessly as he flung out of the car.

“He may have gone into Longvale’s house.”

“I’ve seen Mr. Longvale: it was he who told me that the Captain had gone into Chichester. He must have made a mistake.”

Knebworth’s jaw dropped. A great light suddenly flashed upon his mind. Longvale! There was something queer about him. Was it possible⁠—?

He remembered now that he had been puzzled by a contradictory statement the old man had made; remembered that, not once but many times, Sampson Longvale had expressed a desire to be filmed in a favourite part of his own, one that he had presented, an episode in the life of his famous ancestor.

“We’ll go and knock him up. I’ll talk to him.”

They hammered at the door without eliciting a response.

“That’s his bedroom.” Jack Knebworth pointed to a latticed window where a light shone, and Inspector Lyle threw up a pebble with such violence that the glass was broken. Still there was no response.

“I don’t like that,” said Knebworth suddenly.

“You don’t like it any better than I do,” growled the officer. “Try that window, Smith.”

“Do you want me to open it, sir?”

“Yes, without delay.”

A second later, the window of the long dining-room was prized open; and then they came upon an obstacle which could not be so readily forced.

“The shutter is steel-lined,” reported the detective. “I think I’d better try one of the upper rooms. Give me a leg up, somebody.”

With the assistance of a fellow, he reached up and caught the sill of an open window, the very window from which Adele had looked down into the grinning face of Bhag. In another second he was in the room, and was reaching down to help up a second officer. A few minutes’ delay, and the front door was unbarred and opened.

“There’s nobody in the house, so far as I can find out,” said the officer.

“Put a light on,” ordered the inspector shortly.

They found the little vapour lamp and lit it.

“What’s that?” The detective officer pointed to the hook that still hung in the beam with the pulley beneath, and his eyes narrowed. “I can’t understand that,” he said slowly. “What was that for?”

Jack Knebworth uttered an exclamation.

“Here’s Brixan’s gun!” he said, and picked it up from the floor.

One glance the inspector gave, and then his eyes went back to the hook and the pulley.

“That beats me,” he said. “See if you fellows can find anything anywhere. Open every cupboard, every drawer. Sound the walls⁠—there may be secret doors; there are in all these old Tudor houses.”

The search was futile, and Inspector Lyle came back to a worried contemplation of the hook and pulley. Then one of his men came in to say that he had located the garage.

It was an unusually long building, and when it was opened, it revealed no more than the old-fashioned car which was a familiar object in that part of the country. But obviously, this was only half the accommodation. The seemingly solid whitewashed wall behind the machine hid another apartment, though it had no door, and an inspection of the outside showed a solid wall at the far end of the garage.

Jack Knebworth tapped the interior wall.

“This isn’t brickwork at all, it’s wood,” he said.

Hanging in a corner was a chain. Apparently it had no particular function, but a careful scrutiny led to the discovery that the links ran through a hole in the roughly plastered ceiling. The inspector caught the chain and pulled, and, as he did so, the “wall” opened inwards, showing the contents of the second chamber, which was a second car, so sheeted that only its radiator was visible. Knebworth pulled off the cover, and:

“That’s the car.”

“What car?” asked the inspector.

“The car driven by the Headhunter,” said Knebworth quickly. “He was in that machine when Brixan tried to arrest him. I’d know it anywhere! Brixan is in the Dower House somewhere, and if he’s in the hands of the Headhunter, God help him!”

They ran back to the house, and again the hook and pulley drew them as a magnet. Suddenly the police officer bent down and jerked back the carpet. The trap-door beneath the pulley was plainly visible. Pulling it open, he knelt down and gazed through. Knebworth saw his face grow haggard.

“Too late, too late!” he muttered.