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“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. I suppose poor Nolan would have brought in his banshee and said it was supernaturally possible. But I’ve got no use for disembodied spirits when I’m dealing with facts. And the facts before me are an empty tower with a ladder, a chair, and a table.”

“The spiritualists,” said Sir Walter, with a smile, “would say that spirits could find a great deal of use for a table.”

“I dare say they could if the spirits were on the table–in a bottle,” replied Wilson, with a curl of his pale lip. “The people round here, when they’re all sodden up with Irish whisky, may believe in such things. I think they want a little education in this country.”

Horne Fisher’s heavy eyelids fluttered in a faint attempt to rise, as if he were tempted to a lazy protest against the contemptuous tone of the investigator.

“The Irish believe far too much in spirits to believe in spiritualism,” he murmured. “They know too much about ’em. If you want a simple and childlike faith in any spirit that comes along you can get it in your favorite London.”

“I don’t want to get it anywhere,” said Wilson, shortly. “I say I’m dealing with much simpler things than your simple faith, with a table and a chair and a ladder. Now what I want to say about them at the start is this. They are all three made roughly enough of plain wood. But the table and the chair are fairly new and comparatively clean. The ladder is covered with dust and there is a cobweb under the top rung of it. That means that he borrowed the first two quite recently from some cottage, as we supposed, but the ladder has been a long time in this rotten old dustbin. Probably it was part of the original furniture, an heirloom in this magnificent palace of the Irish kings.”

Again Fisher looked at him under his eyelids, but seemed too sleepy to speak, and Wilson went on with his argument.

“Now it’s quite clear that something very odd has just happened in this place. The chances are ten to one, it seems to me, that it had something specially to do with this place. Probably he came here because he could do it only here; it doesn’t seem very inviting otherwise. But the man knew it of old; they say it belonged to his family, so that altogether, I think, everything points to something in the construction of the tower itself.”

“Your reasoning seems to me excellent,” said Sir Walter, who was listening attentively. “But what could it be?”

“You see now what I mean about the ladder,” went on the detective; “it’s the only old piece of furniture here and the first thing that caught that cockney eye of mine. But there is something else. That loft up there is a sort of lumber room without any lumber. So far as I can see, it’s as empty as everything else; and, as things are, I don’t see the use of the ladder leading to it. It seems to me, as I can’t find anything unusual down here, that it might pay us to look up there.”