"He wasn't taken, your Worship," replied the man. "Leastways, not in what you'd call the proper way. He came back to his house half an hour or so ago--when it was just getting nicely light--and two of our men that were there told him what was going on, and he appeared to come straight down with them. He says he knows naught, your Worship." "That's what you'd expect," remarked Mallalieu, drily. "He'd be a fool if he said aught else." He put his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and, followed by the others, strolled into the police-station as if he were dropping in on business of trifling importance. And there was nothing to be seen there which betokened that a drama of life and death was being constructed in that formal-looking place of neutral-coloured walls, precise furniture, and atmosphere of repression. Three or four men stood near the superintendent's desk; a policeman was writing slowly and laboriously on a big sheet of blue paper at a side-table, a woman was coaxing a sluggish fire to burn. "The whole thing's ridiculous!" said a man's scornful voice. "It shouldn't take five seconds to see that." Brereton instinctively picked out the speaker. That was Harborough, of course--the tall man who stood facing the others and looking at them as if he wondered how they could be as foolish as he evidently considered them to be. He looked at this man with great curiosity. There was certainly something noticeable about him, he decided. A wiry, alert, keen-eyed man, with good, somewhat gipsy-like features, much tanned by the weather, as if he were perpetually exposed to sun and wind, rain and hail; sharp of movement, evidently of more than ordinary intelligence, and, in spite of his rough garments and fur cap, having an indefinable air of gentility and breeding about him. Brereton had already noticed the pitch and inflection of his voice; now, as Harborough touched his cap to the Mayor, he noticed that his hands, though coarsened and weather-browned, were well-shaped and delicate. Something about him, something in his attitude, the glance of his eye, seemed to indicate that he was the social superior of the policemen, uniformed or plain-clothed, who were watching him with speculative and slightly puzzled looks. "Well, and what's all this, now?" said Mallalieu coming to a halt and looking round. "What's he got to say, like?" The superintendent looked at Harborough and nodded. And Harborough took that nod at its true meaning, and he spoke--readily.