“Highly so,” agreed Coram. “The police are hopelessly mystified, and as I know you are keen on this class of copy I thought you might like to run down and have a chat with Pettigrew. Shall I tell him you are coming?” “By all means,” I said, and made an arrangement forthwith. Accordingly, about eleven o’clock, I presented myself at a gloomy Georgian house standing well back from the high road and screened by an unkempt shrubbery. Mr. Mark Pettigrew, a familiar figure at Sotheby auctions, was a little shrivelled man, clean-shaven, and with the complexion of a dried apricot. His big spectacles seemed to occupy a great proportion of his face, but his eyes twinkled merrily and his humour was as dry as his appearance. “Glad to see you, Mr. Searles,” he said. “You’ve had some experience of the _outré_, I believe, and where two constables, an imposing inspector, and a plain-clothes gentleman who looked like a horse have merely upset my domestic arrangements, you may be able to make some intelligent suggestion.” He conducted me to a large gloomy room in which relics, principally Egyptian, were arranged and ticketed with museum-like precision. Before a wooden sarcophagus containing the swathed figure of a mummy he stopped, pointing. He looked as though he had come out of a sarcophagus himself. “Hor-ankhu,” he said, “a priestess of Sekhet; a very fine specimen, Mr. Searles. I was present when it was found. See--here is her head!” Stooping, he picked up the head of the mummy. Very cleanly and scientifically it had been unwrapped and severed from the trunk. It smelt strongly of bitumen, and the shrivelled features reminded me of nothing so much as of Mr. Mark Pettigrew. “Did you ever hear of a more senseless thing?” he asked. “Come over and look at the window where he got in.” We crossed the dark apartment, and the collector drew my attention to a round hole which had been drilled in the glass of one of the French windows opening on a kind of miniature prairie which once had been a lawn. “I am having shutters fitted,” he went on. “It is so easy to cut a hole in the glass and open the catch of these windows.” “Very easy,” I agreed. “Was any one disturbed?” “No one,” he replied, excitedly; “that’s the insane part of the thing. The burglar, with all the night before him and with cases containing portable and really priceless objects about him, contented himself with decapitating the priestess. What on earth did he want her head for? Whatever he wanted it for, why the devil didn’t he _take_ it?” We stared at each other blankly. “I fear,” said Pettigrew, “I have been guilty of injustice to my horsey visitor, the centaur. You look as stupid as the worst of us!” “I feel stupid,” I said. “You are!” Pettigrew assured me with cheerful impertinence. “So am I, so are the police; but the biggest fool of the lot is the fool who came here last night and cut off the head of my mummy.”