The Return Of Bulldog Drummond by Sapper Page A

you must have known that his statement was a lie.”
    “My brain was moving on those lines,” said Drummond mildly, “when we saw the stain on the ceiling.”
    “What did you do when you saw the stain?”
    “We took Morris with us upstairs and went and investigated. And we then found the murdered man.”
    “Did Morris show any reluctance to going upstairs with you?”
    “The very strongest.”
    “What did he say when he saw the body?”
    For a moment or two Drummond hesitated; then he shrugged his shoulders.
    “He said something about a ghost,” he remarked.
    The Coroner smiled.
    “Ghosts seem to have been popular that night. Now, Captain Drummond,” he went on severely, “are you seriously asking the jury to believe that when you found a man foully murdered on the floor, and an escaped convict, with a record like Morris, wearing the dead man’s clothes in an empty house at that hour of the night, you still harped on the subject of ghosts?”
    “I come of a very superstitious family,” said Drummond with the utmost gravity. “My mother was the thirteenth child of a thirteenth child, and I suppose I have inherited a strain of the whimsical, of the mystical, one might almost say a Puck-like, elfin streak which at times has had the strangest results in my life.”
    The Coroner looked at him suspiciously, while Jerningham was suddenly shaken with a bad fit of coughing.
    “Would you kindly answer my question, Captain Drummond?” said the Coroner. “These family details, though interesting, are hardly relevant. Did you, or did you not, attach any importance to this story of Morris’?”
    “He certainly seemed to attach a great deal of importance to it himself,” answered Drummond. “And then, before we realised what he intended to do, he bolted. I knew it would be useless to pursue him in the fog, and that sooner or later he would certainly be caught. And we were just going to ring up the police when we met Mr Hardcastle and Mr Slingsby here in the hall.”
    “Now, Captain Drummond, I am going to put a leading question to you. You and your friends are the only people who actually saw and spoke to Morris. I dismiss the brief glimpse that Mr Hardcastle got of him as he dashed through the hall. Have you any doubts in your mind that Morris was the murderer of Robert Marton?”
    “The evidence on the point appears conclusive, Mr Coroner,” said Drummond, and the jury nodded their heads in agreement. They were getting bored: the case was such an obvious one. But the Coroner – a man of stern determination – was not to be baulked. First Darrell, then Jerningham, was called to substantiate Drummond’s story. Then Penton deposed to what he had seen when working on the car in the garage. And finally the Inspector put forward his reconstruction of the crime.
    “The only thing wanting, sir, for absolute proof,” he concluded, “is the discovery of the weapon with which the murder was committed. The doctor has told us that the crime took place round about nine o’clock; he also says that in his opinion the weapon used was something in the nature of a meat-chopper. On the handle of that weapon, if we find it, will be the fingerprints – the fingerprints of the murderer: the fingerprints of Morris. But so far the most exhaustive search has failed to bring it to light.”
    “Is it possible that he had it with him the whole time?” suggested the Coroner, glancing at Drummond.
    “An axe is a difficult thing to conceal about one’s person,” remarked the latter mildly. “In fact, I feel almost sure we should have noticed it.”
    “You have searched the grounds?” continued the Coroner to the witness.
    “Yes, sir. But they are, of course, extensive, and we have not given up hope of discovering it. As Captain Drummond says, it is almost impossible that he should have had it on him, and in all probability, therefore, it is either hidden in the house, or he threw it from the window of the room in which he