“Thank you. I’ll try and handle the servants. There’s some things I am still in the dark about, myself.”

But the flustered group of five or six men and women whom he interviewed later was able to add little to his stock of information. All they could speak of was the sudden apparition of two or three men who, armed with pistols, had rounded them up one by one, and left them under guard in the servants’ hall breathing dire and fearful threats of what might happen if they attempted any resistance. There they had been held, a panic-stricken group, until with a final warning not to move for ten minutes, a thin-faced man who had taken chief control of them, had slipped away. The descriptions they gave of the men, as usual where the ordinary person is called upon for a test of observation, varied in immense degree. That did not so much matter as Labar imagined that he had himself seen most of the principals in the raid.

“We’ll have a look through the house, in case they’ve left anything behind,” observed the detective inspector to Malone. “They may have hurried a little too much.”