I did not tell him that I needed him as a witness in case I had to fire in self-defense. I knew he distrusted the box as much as the dock.

Jim switched on the light and I walked through his stores with my hand in my pocket. There was indeed a broken flowerpot on the floor, and a tarpaulin had fallen — if that wasn’t its usual place — on the top of two upright rolls of wire. Behind them was possible cover for a man, provided nobody looked for him.

“This will do the job,” I said, extracting a piece of two-by-four from a pile of loose timber.

We shut the shed and went out. And yet I felt my enemy. That is difficult to analyze. I suppose that only years of living on one’s nerves can teach the difference between imagination which is out of control and the quite dependable instinct of the hunted.

The instinct at any rate was strong enough for me to search about for some logical reason which could justify it. I asked what the stables at Woburn were like.

Jim described a Victorian farmhouse with its back facing a yard round which, on the other three sides, were stables and cowsheds with a second story of lofts over them.

“When you were leading them on to tell you about fforde-Crankshaw, where actually were you?”

“Bang under the gable with the clock in it.”

“What’s up there?”

“Nothing except rats, I’d say.”

It was a far-fetched theory; but what about that vanishing while the horse was being unsaddled? If Mr. fforde-Crankshaw were wanted by name or description, the last place the police would look for him would be the livery stables. And if he had decided to he up there for a day he could probably see and possibly overhear all visitors to the yard.

“When you were talking to the chaps there, did you give your address?”

“They knows it,” Jim replied. “Ah, but didn’t I? Bought a nice load of manure, you see. Mushroom farmers, they’ll pay anything for well-rotted stuff. Yes, they had a new man, and I told him the nearest way.”

It was working out. Mr. fforde-Crankshaw, scenting danger but partially convinced he was imagining it, must have been very tempted to check up. There had been no police inquiries, but who was Jim? What was behind his interest?

There was one grave objection to this picture of my opponent’s board. He must have calculated on leaving the stable lofts after dark. Yet he had left in broad daylight. Was that possible without being seen and inviting questions?

“What’s behind the gable with the clock in it?”

“Company director’s place it was once,” Jim said, “before he went bust and ‘ad to run for it with all the money he’d lost farming. Other side of the stables is all his fancy trees and rhododendrons.”

That too fitted. It was now worthwhile to test the only available fact which could prove my hypothesis — or, if not worthwhile, it had to be done. I told Jim to stay where he was, and I would find his missing spade for him. I would have liked to have him alongside me, but it was not a fair risk for the father of a family —even though I was pretty sure the tiger would not have returned to the sandpit from which he could no longer see anything at all.

I crawled up the slope behind the shed and put my head cautiously over the edge of the depression. The working floor of sand, some eight or nine feet beneath me, was bare and the light still good enough to distinguish any object on the flat surface. The spade was there all right.

To see anything else I should have had to go down with a torch. That was asking for trouble, since I could not know what was on the opposite side of the excavation; so I contented myself with taking a close look at the wet, packed sand within a few feet of my nose. I found fresh footmarks — of a rather pointed shoe which certainly did not belong to any of the Melton family. For the weight of the tiger it was a small foot. The tracks pointed straight downhill for the shed until they were wiped out by the furrows of my knees and forearms.

It was all very interesting, but of no immediate use. Tiger impulsively but sensibly reconnoiters Jim’s cottage from above. Finds convenient sandpit for observation post. Hunch pays off, for he hasn’t been there long before he sees me arrive. Is tempted by spade which he can approach without being seen. A bad mistake, though doubtless it would help if my body wasn’t found for a week. Shelters from rain in shed. Could easily have explained that was just what he was doing and got away with it. But his reconstruction of my unseen board is alarming. And Jim is still an enigma. So when he is nearly caught he first hides and then clears out.

“Your spade is in the sandpit,” I told Jim. “Get it in the morning.”

“Not now?”

“Not now.”

“When you went into the shed, I noticed you kept your ‘and in your pocket,” he said. “Now it’s none of my business what you got in it. And what Ferrin tells me is all lies. And me and the colonel, we don’t get on. But if you feel lonely up at the Warren, you’ve only got to say.”

I assured him that I was only going to stay there that night, and it was unlikely I should be disturbed.

“And what do you want the missus to tell Fred?” he asked.

“That nobody has made any inquiries about the rider, and that I left the Warren in a hurry.”

I gratefully accepted his offer to drive me home, and said good-by to Mrs. Melton and the children. The front seat of the hearse was luxurious. It was a remarkable vehicle. The panels all round the body, where plate glass had been, were filled in by neatly overlapping planks attached by angle brackets to the black and gold pillars, and varnished black to match. The roof was of stout canvas on bentwood ribs. It made a discreet and efficient van for shifting livestock or any of Jim’s less reputable bargains.

“Got it dirt cheap,” he said. “There ain’t no market for used ‘earses. And the bloke threw in some nice elm boards for the conversion.”

I avoided offering a silhouette against the naked electric bulbs on the cottage porch and the shed, and kept well down in my seat until we were out on the road. Yet somehow I knew that it was utterly impossible for the tiger to be about, though my mind, very tired by now, could not see on what I based this certainty.

As we drove towards Hernsholt I ran over the probabilities again and at last got at what was bothering me. If the shelterer from the rain had dived for the cover of those two rolls of wire on Jim’s sudden arrival, how had he ever got out of the shed? He had no chance of escaping under the eyes of both Mr. and Mrs. Melton and Jim had locked the door behind him. So there was something as wrong and incredible as a conjuring trick.

And then I saw it. By all that unriddling of the unintelligible I had been distracted from what was perfectly plain and obvious. I slid instantly off the front seat and fitted as much of my body as I could into the floor of the cab, putting a finger on my lips as a sign to Jim to notice nothing.

“Drive for the nearest lights and police station,” I whispered. “Don’t stop on any account! If anything happens to me, keep going!”

He looked at me in astonishment. I jerked my thumb at the shiny black boards behind the driving seat. He thought for a second and saw what I meant. There was only one place where fforde-Crankshaw could be. When he heard us coming back to the shed and unlocking the door, he had quietly taken refuge in the van. And he was still in it —with nothing but a wooden panel between me and his gun.

There was no means of covering all of myself. If he fired a burst through the partition at the level of heart and lungs he would miss; but if he aimed below where my waist ought to be he would almost certainly score on my head or shoulders. I never felt so coldly exposed. As for slowing down or stopping — that, I thought, would give him just the chance he was waiting for in order to let me have it, jump out and vanish. He was hardly likely to take action while Jim continued to bucket over country roads at a steady forty-five. The only comfort was that if he missed me I could be out of the front seat as quickly as he could drop from the double door at the back, and at last shoot to kill without fear of the law.