Then he
silently pointed with his lean forefinger at the open page of the
large notebook. The writer had suddenly stopped writing, even in the
middle of a word.
"I said it was like an explosion," said Sir Walter Carey at last.
"And really the man himself seems to have suddenly exploded. But he
has blown himself up somehow without touching the tower. He's burst
more like a bubble than a bomb."
"He has touched more valuable things than the tower," said Wilson,
gloomily.
There was a long silence, and then Sir Walter said, seriously:
"Well, Mr. Wilson, I am not a detective, and these unhappy
happenings have left you in charge of that branch of the business.
We all lament the cause of this, but I should like to say that I
myself have the strongest confidence in your capacity for carrying
on the work. What do you think we should do next?"
Wilson seemed to rouse himself from his depression and acknowledged
the speaker's words with a warmer civility than he had hitherto
shown to anybody. He called in a few of the police to assist in
routing out the interior, leaving the rest to spread themselves in a
search party outside.
"I think," he said, "the first thing is to make quite sure about the
inside of this place, as it was hardly physically possible for him
to have got outside.
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