Henry shrugged his shoulders in mute acquiescence. There was, it seemed, nothing else to be said. Shelley had a forceful personality, and when he chose to assert himself in this way, no one—least of all, the meek and mild little Henry Fairhurst—dared to offer him any sustained opposition.

“I’m going upstairs,” Shelley announced. “If I fire this”—he held up the automatic—“I want you, Cunningham, to come upstairs as quickly as you can. It will mean that I have the man cornered.”

“What do I do?” asked Henry plaintively.

“You, Mr. Fairhurst,” announced Shelley, “stay here whatever happens. I hope that I have made that perfectly clear—whatever happens. Do you understand exactly what I mean?”

“Yes,” said Henry, and sighed deeply. It seemed, in spite of his ambition to become a real detective, that he was to be kept out of the way when anything really exciting was happening.

“Right,” said Shelley. “I hope that’s all clear. Wish me good hunting, Cunningham. We’ll have Mr. Wallace under lock and key before very long.”

“Good luck, sir,” said Cunningham, and Shelley, his automatic firmly gripped in his right hand, made his way to the staircase, which branched off the back of the entrance hall of the house.

At the top of the first flight of stairs he paused. A long corridor ran the length of the house, and there were half a dozen doors off it, any one of which might be hiding the killer. It was a ticklish job chasing a man in these conditions, but Shelley had undertaken many ticklish jobs in his time, and he was quite prepared to do his best with this one.

He opened the first door, to see an empty room, bare boards, shabby, broken walls, and a dirty ceiling. Obviously Mr. Ramsbottom, living alone in this great barracks of a house, did not attempt to use it all or to furnish all the rooms. He clearly preferred to live in a few rooms, leaving the others in this empty, untidy, dirty state.

Still, it simplified Shelley’s task. Three of the six rooms on that floor were completely uninhabited in this fashion, their gloomy emptiness adding to the uncanny effect which the house seemed to be having on Shelley’s mind. At no time a very sensitive man, Shelley found himself shivering as his feet woke ancient echoes on the rough boards of the third room. How many more rooms like this was he to find?

The others were different, however. The first was a bedroom—or rather, it had been a bedroom at some time in the more or less remote past. The bed, the dressing-table, the old-fashioned wash-stand, were all draped in ghost-like dust-sheets. Spiders’ webs descended from the corners of the richly ornamented ceilings. The place could not have been lived in for years.