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and peered at it.
    " From left at the front to right at the back," he murmured. *' The way a left-handed man would naturally hold cutters or pliers to obtain maximum leverage."
    " A left-handed man," I agreed. " Or a right handed man who wanted to confuse us. So a man who's either left-handed or clever or both."
    Hardanger looked at me in disgust and made his way slowly to the inner fence. No footprints, no marks between the fences. The inner fence had been cut in three places, whoever had wielded those cutters would have felt more secure from observation from the ring road. The point we had yet to establish was why he had felt so secure from the attention of the police dogs patrolling the area between the two fences.
    The trip-wires under the overhang of the second fence were intact.
    Whoever had cut that fence had been lucky indeed for not stumbling over them. Or he'd known their exact location. Our friend with the pliers didn't strike me as a man who would depend very much on luck.
    And the method he'd adopted to get through the electric fence proved it. Unlike most such fences, where only the top wire carried the current all the way, the others being made live by a vertical joining wire cable at each set of insulators, this fence was live in every wire throughout. The alarm bell would be rung by the shorting of any of those wires to earth, as when someone touched them, or by the cutting of any of the wires.
    This hadn't fazed our friend with the pliers—insulated pliers, quite obviously. The two strands of TRS cable lying on the ground between two posts showed this clearly enough. He'd bent one end of one strand on to the lowest insulator of one post, trailed it across the ground and done the same with the lowest insulator on the next post, so providing an alternate pathway for the current. He'd done the same with the pair of insulators above these, then simply cut away 'both lowermost wires and crawled through under the third wire.
    " An ingenious beggar," Hardanger commented. " Almost argues inside information, doesn't it?"
    " Or somebody just outside the outer fence with a powerful telescope or binoculars. The ring road is open to public traffic, remember. Wouldn't be hard to sit in a car and see what type of electric fence it was: and I dare say if the conditions were right he could have seen the trip-wires on the inner fence glistening in the sun."
    " I dare say," Hardanger said heavily. " Well, it's no damn good us staying here and staring at this fence. Let's get back and start asking questions."
    All the men Hardanger had asked to see were assembled in the reception hall. They were sitting on benches around the hall, fidgeting and restless. Some of them looked sleepy, all of them looked scared. I knew it would take Hardanger about half of one second to sum up their mental condition and act accordingly. He did. He took his seat behind a table and looked up under his shaggy brows, the pale blue eyes cold and penetrating and hostile. As an actor, he wasn't all that far behind Inspector Martin.
    " All right," he said brusquely. " The jeep crew. The ones who made the wild-goose chase last night. Let's have you."
    Three men—a corporal and two privates—rose slowly to their feet.
    Hardanger gave his attention to the corporal.
    "Your name, please?"
    " Muirfield, sir."
    "You in charge of the crew last night?"
    " Yes, sir."
    "Tell me what happened."
    "Yes, sir. We'd completed a circuit of the ring road, stopped to report everything O.K. at the main gate and then left again. It would be about eleven-fifteen, sir, give or take a minute or two. About two hundred and fifty yards past the gates we saw this girl running into the headlights.
    She looked wild, disheveled like, her hair all over the place. She was half-screaming, half-crying, a funny noise. I was driving. I stopped the jeep, jumped out, and the others came after me. I should have told them to stay where they-----"
    " Never mind about what you should have done.