I had read in books of a man’s appearance being altered so completely that even his best friends failed to recognize him, but it had never occurred to me that such a thing could be done in real life—­let alone in the simple fashion outlined by the doctor.  Of course, if he was speaking the truth, there seemed no reason why his plan, fantastic as it might sound, should not turn out perfectly successful.  A private hut on the Thames marshes was about the last place in which you would look for an escaped Dartmoor convict, especially when he had vanished into thin air within a few miles of Devonport.

What worried me most in the matter was my apparent good luck in having fallen on my feet in this amazing fashion.  There is a limit to one’s belief in coincidences, and the extraordinary combination of chances suggested by McMurtrie’s smooth explanations was just a little too stiff for me to swallow.  I felt sure that he was lying in some important particulars—­but precisely which they were I was unable to guess for certain.

That he wanted the secret of the new explosive, and wanted it badly, there could be no doubt, but neither he nor Savaroff in the least suggested to me a successful manufacturer of cordite or anything else.  They seemed to me to belong to a much more interesting if less conventional type, and I couldn’t help wondering what on earth such a curious trio as they and Sonia could be doing tucked away in an ill-furnished, deserted-looking country house in a corner of South Devon.

However it was no good worrying, for as far as I was concerned it was painfully clear that there was no alternative.  If I declined their offer and refused to let McMurtrie carve my face about, they had only to turn me out, and in a few hours I should probably be back in my cell with the cheerful prospect of chains, a flogging, and six months’ semi-starvation in front of me.

Anything was better than that—­even the wildest of plunges in the dark.  Indeed I am not at all sure that the mystery that surrounded McMurtrie’s offer did not lend it a certain charm in my eyes.  My life had been so infernally dull for the last three years that the prospect of a little excitement, even of an unpleasant kind, was by no means wholly disagreeable.

At least I had my week’s “fun” in London to look forward to, and the thought of that alone would have been quite enough to make me go through with anything.  I had lied to McMurtrie about my object, but the falsehood, such as it was, did not sit very heavily on my conscience.  The precise meaning of “fun” is purely a matter of opinion, and I was as much entitled to my definition as he was to his.  After all, if a convicted murderer can’t be a little careless about the exact truth, who the devil can?

CHAPTER VI

THE FACE OF A STRANGER

McMurtrie had left me under the impression that he meant to start work on my face the next day, but as it turned out the impression was a mistaken one.  Both the paraffin wax and the X-ray outfit had to be procured from London, and according to Sonia it was to see about these that her father went off to town early the following morning.  She told me this when she brought me up my breakfast, just after I had heard the car drive away from the house.