He felt no inclination to sleep.

The menace was coming very near now… Six out often!

For all his sagacity, for all his caution and astuteness, the old judge had gone the way of the rest.

Blore snorted with a kind of savage satisfaction.

«What was it the old geezer had said?» «We must be very careful…»

Self-righteous smug old hypocrite. Sitting up in court feeling like God Almighty. He’d got his all right… No more being careful for him.

And now there were four of them. The girl, Lombard, Armstrong and himself.

Very soon another of them would go… But it wouldn’t be William Henry Blore. He’d see to that all right.

(But the revolver… What about the revolver? That was the disturbing factor – the revolver!)

Blore sat on his bed, his brow furrowed, his little eyes creased and puckered while he pondered the problem of the revolver…

In the silence he could hear the clocks strike downstairs.

Midnight.

He relaxed a little now – even went so far as to lie down on his bed. But he did not undress.

He lay there, thinking. Going over the whole business from the beginning, methodically, painstakingly, as he had been wont to do in his police officer days. It was thoroughness that paid in the end.

The candle was burning down. Looking to see if the matches were within easy reach of his hand, he blew it out.

Strangely enough, he found the darkness disquieting. It was as though a thousand age-old fears awoke and struggled for supremacy in his brain. Faces floated in the air – the judge’s face crowned with that mockery of grey wool – the cold dead face of Mrs. Rogers – the convulsed purple face of Anthony Marston…

Another face – pale, spectacled, with a small straw-coloured moustache…

A face he had seen sometime or other – but when? Not on the island. No, much longer ago than that.

Funny, that he couldn’t put a name to it… Silly sort of face really – fellow looked a bit of a mug.

Of course!

It came to him with a real shock.

Landor!

Odd to think he’d completely forgotten what Landor looked like. Only yesterday he’d been trying to recall the fellow’s face, and hadn’t been able to.

And now here it was, every feature clear and distinct, as though he had seen it only yesterday…

Landor had had a wife – a thin slip of a woman with a worried face. There’d been a kid too, a girl about fourteen. For the first time, he wondered what had become of them…

(The revolver. What had become of the revolver? That was much more important…)

The more he thought about it the more puzzled he was… He didn’t understand this revolver business…

Somebody in the house had got that revolver…

Downstairs a clock struck one.

Blore’s thoughts were cut short. He sat up on the bed, suddenly alert. For he had heard a sound – a very faint sound – somewhere outside his bedroom door.

There was some one moving about in the darkened house.

The perspiration broke out on his forehead. Who was it, moving secretly and silently along the corridors? Some one who was up to no good, he’d bet that!

Noiselessly, in spite of his heavy build, he dropped off the bed and with two strides was standing by the door listening.