ssing?"

"We're not absolutely sure. The professor's gold watch can't be
found; but the butler is not certain that he had it on him."

For some time there was silence. Malcolm Sage appeared to be
pondering over the additional facts he had just heard.

"What do you want me to do, Mr. Sage?" enquired the inspector at
length.

"I was wondering whether you would run down with me this afternoon
to Gorling."

"I'd be delighted," was the hearty response. "Somehow or other I
feel it's not an ordinary murder. There's something behind it all."

"What makes you think that?" Malcolm Sage looked up sharply.

"Frankly, I can't say, Mr. Sage," he confessed a little shamefacedly,
"it's just a feeling I have."

"The laboratory has been locked up?"

"Yes; and I've sealed the door. Nothing has been touched."

Malcolm Sage nodded his head approvingly and, for fully five minutes,
continued to gaze down at his hands spread out on the table before
him.

"Thank you, Carfon. Be here at half-past two."

"The funeral's to-day, by the way," said the inspector as he rose
and, with a genial "good morning," left the room.

For the next hour Malcolm Sage was engaged in reading the newspaper
accounts of the McMurray Mystery, which he had already caused to be
pasted up in the current press-cutting book; he gathered little more
from them, however, than he already knew.

That afternoon, accompanied by Inspector Carfon, Malcolm Sage
motored down to "The Hollows," which lies at the easternmost end of
the village of Gorling.

The inspector stopped the car just as it entered the drive. The two
men alighted and, turning sharply to the right, walked across the
lawn towards an ugly red-brick building, screened from the house by
a belt of trees. Malcolm Sage had expressed a wish to see the
laboratory first.

It was a strange-looking structure, some fifty feet long by about
twenty feet wide, with a door on the further side. In the red-brick
wall nearer the house there was nothing to break the monotony except
the small wicket through which the professor's meals were passed.

Malcolm Sage twice walked deliberately round the building. In the
meantime the inspector had removed the seal from the padlock and
opened the door.

"Did you photograph the position of the body?" enquired Malcolm Sage,
as they entered.

"I hadn't a photographer handy," said the inspector apologetically,
as he closed the door behind him; "but I managed to get a man to