Gaunt said: ‘What’s the good of all this? It seems to me you’re running round in circles. Questing’s gone. He’s dead in a nightmarish, an unspeakable manner and I for one believe that, like many a drunken man before him, he stumbled and fell. I won’t listen to any other theory. And this drivelling about footprints! The track must be covered in footprints. My God, it’s too much. What sort of country is this that I’ve landed in? A purple-faced policeman to speak to me like that! I can promise you there’s going to be a full-dress thumping row when I get away from here.’ His voice broke. He struck his hand on the table. ‘It was an accident. I won’t have anything else. An accident. An accident. He’s dead. Let him lie.’

‘That is precisely where I differ from you,’ said Dr Ackrington crisply. ‘In my opinion Questing is very far from being dead.’

Chapter 11
The Theory of a Put-Up Job

The sensation he had created seemed to mollify Dr Ackrington. After a moment’s utter silence his hearers all started together to exclaim or expostulate. Dikon was visited by one of those chance notions that startle us by their vividness and their irrelevancy. He actually thought for a moment that Ackrington, of all people, had suggested some return from death. A horrific picture of a resurrection from the seething mud rose in his mind and was violently dismissed. From this fantasy he was aroused by Gaunt, who cried out with extraordinary vehemence: ‘You’re demented! What idiocy is this!’ and by Falls who, with an air of concentration, raised his hand and succeeded, unexpectedly, in quelling the rumpus.

‘I assure you,’ he said, ‘if he was uninjured and moving, I must have seen him. But perhaps, Dr Ackrington, you think that he was uninjured and still.’

‘I see you take my point,’ said Ackrington, who, as usual, seemed ready to tolerate Falls. ‘In my opinion the whole thing was an elaborately staged disappearance.’

‘Do you mean he’s still hangin’ about?’ cried the Colonel, looking acutely uncomfortable.

‘Of course,’ Mrs Claire said, ‘we should all be only too thankful if we could believe…’

‘Gosh!’ said Simon under his breath. ‘I wish to God you were right.’

‘Same here,’ agreed Smith fervently. ‘Suit me all right, never mind what happened before.’ His hand moved to the breast pocket of his coat. He opened the coat and looked inside. An unpleasant thought seemed to strike him. ‘Here!’ he said angrily. ‘Do you mean he’s hopped it altogether?’

‘I mean that taking into consideration the profound incompetence of the authorities, he has every chance of doing so,’ said Ackrington.