“How’s the leg?” he enquired.

“Pretty nearly all right again,” Furley answered cheerfully.  “Seems to me I was frightened before I was hurt.  What about your head?”

“No inconvenience at all,” Julian declared, stretching himself out.  “I suppose I must have a pretty tough skull.”

“Any news?”

“News enough, of a sort, if you haven’t heard it.  They caught the man who sandbagged me, and who I presume sawed your plank through, and shot him last night.”

“The devil they did!” Furley exclaimed, taking his pipe from his mouth.  “Shot him?  Who the mischief was he, then?”

“It appears,” Julian replied, “that he was a German hairdresser, who escaped from an internment camp two years ago and has been at large ever since, keeping in touch, somehow or other, with his friends on the other side.  He must have known the game was up as soon as he was caught.  He didn’t even attempt any defence.”

“Shot, eh?” Furley repeated, relighting his pipe.  “Serves him damned well right!”

“You think so, do you?” Julian remarked pensively.

“Who wouldn’t?  I hate espionage.  So does every Englishman.  That’s why we are such duffers at the game, I suppose.”

Julian watched his friend with a slight frown.

“How in thunder did you get mixed up with this affair, Furley?” he asked quietly.

Furley’s bewilderment was too natural to be assumed.  He removed his pipe from his teeth and stared at his friend.

“What the devil are you driving at, Julian?” he demanded.  “I can assure you that I went out, the night before last, simply to make one of the rounds which falls to my lot when I am in this part of the world and nominated for duty.  There are eleven of us between here and Sheringham, special constables of a humble branch of the secret service, if you like to put it so.  We are a well-known institution amongst the initiated.  I’ve plodded these marshes sometimes from midnight till daybreak, and although one’s always hearing rumours, until last night I have never seen or heard of a single unusual incident.”

“You had no idea, then,” Julian persisted, “what it was that you were on the look-out for the night before last?  You had no idea, say, from any source whatever, that there was going to be an attempt on the part of the enemy to communicate with friends on this side?”

“Good God, no!  Even to have known it would have been treason.”

“You admit that?”

Furley drew himself stiffly up in his chair.  His mass of brown hair seemed more unkempt than usual, his hard face sterner than ever by reason of its disfiguring frown.

“What the hell do you mean, Julian?”

“I mean,” Julian replied, “that I have reason to suspect you, Furley, of holding or attempting to hold secret communication with an enemy country.”

The pipestem which he was holding snapped in Furley’s fingers.  His eyes were filled with fury.