managing clerk and two coltish youths in charge. Mr Carlyle’s name
produced an appreciable flutter.
“The governor isn’t here just now, but I have this matter in hand,” said
the clerk with an easy air of responsibility--an effect unfortunately
marred by a sudden irrepressible giggle from the least overawed of the
colts. “Will you kindly step into our private room?” He turned at the
door of the inner office and dropped a freezing eye on the offender.
“Get those letters copied before you go out to lunch, Binns,” he
remarked in a sufficiently loud voice. Then he closed the door quickly,
before Binns could find a suitable retort.
So far it had been plain sailing, but now, brought face to face with the
necessity of explaining, the clerk began to develop some hesitancy in
beginning.
“It’s a funny sort of business,” he remarked, skirting the difficulty.
“Perhaps,” admitted Mr Carlyle; “but that will not embarrass us. Many of
the cases that pass through my hands are what you would call ‘funny
sorts of business.’”
“I suppose so,” responded the young man, “but not through ours. Well,
this is at No. 11 Massingham. A few nights ago--I suppose it must be
more than a week now--Willett, the estate porter, was taking up some
luggage to No. 75 Northanger for the people there when he noticed a
light in one of the rooms at 11 Massingham. The backs face, though about
twenty or thirty yards away. It struck him as curious, because 11
Massingham is empty and locked up. Naturally he thought at first that
the porter at Massingham or one of us from the office had gone up for
something. Still it was so unusual--being late at night--that it was his
business to look into it. On his way round--you know where Massingham
Mansions are?--he had to pass here. It was dark, for we’d all been gone
hours, but Willett has duplicate keys and he let himself in. Then he
began to think that something must be wrong, for here, hanging up
against their number on the board, were the only two keys of 11
Massingham that there are supposed to be. He put the keys in his pocket
and went on to Massingham. Green, the resident porter there, told him
that he hadn’t been into No. 11 for a week. What was more, no one had
passed the outer door, in or out, for a good half-hour. He knew that,
because the door ‘springs’ with a noise when it is opened, no matter how
carefully. So the two of them went up. The door of No. 11 was locked and
inside everything was as it should be. There was no light then, and
after looking well round with the lanterns that they carried they were
satisfied that no one was concealed there.”
“You say lanterns,” interrupted Mr Carlyle. “I suppose they lit the gas,
or whatever it is there, as well?”
“It is gas, but they could not light it because it was cut off at the
meter. We always cut it off when a flat becomes vacant.”
“What sort of a light was it, then, that Willett saw?”
“It was gas, Mr Carlyle. It is possible to see the bracket in that room
from 75 Northanger. He saw it burning.”
“Then the meter had been put on again?”
“It is in a locked cupboard in the basement. Only the office and the
porters have keys. They tried the gas in the room and it was dead out;
they looked at the meter in the basement afterwards and it was dead
off.”
“Very good,” observed Mr Carlyle, noting the facts in his pocket-book.
“What next?”
“The next,” continued the clerk, “was something that had really happened
before. When they got down again--Green and Willett--Green was rather
chipping Willett about seeing the light, you know, when he stopped
suddenly. He’d remembered something. The day before the servant at 12
Massingham had asked him who it was that was using the bathroom at No.
11--she of course knowing that it was empty. He told her that no one
used the bathroom. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we hear the water running and
splashing almost every night and it’s funny with no one there.’ He had
thought nothing of it at the time, concluding--as he told her--that it
must be the water in the bathroom of one of the underneath flats that
they heard. Of course he told Willett then and they went up again and
examined the bathroom more closely. Water had certainly been run there,
for the sides of the bath were still wet. They tried the taps and not a
drop came. When a flat is empty we cut off the water like the gas.”
“At the same place--the cupboard in the basement?” inquired Carlyle.
“No; at the cistern in the roof. The trap is at the top of the stairs
and you need a longish ladder to get there. The next morning Willett
reported what he’d seen and the governor told me to look into it. We
didn’t think much of it so far. That night I happened to be seeing some
friends to the station here--I live not so far off--and I thought I
might as well take a turn round here on my way home. I knew that if a
light was burning I should be able to see the window lit up from the
yard at the back, although the gas itself would be out of sight. And,
sure enough, there was the light blazing out of one of the windows of
No. 11. I won’t say that I didn’t feel a bit home-sick then, but I’d
made up my mind to go up.”
“Good man,” murmured Mr Carlyle approvingly.
“Wait a bit,” recommended the clerk, with a shamefaced laugh. “So far I
had only had to make my mind up. It was then close on midnight and not a
soul about. I came here for the keys, and I also had the luck to
remember an old revolver that had been lying about in a drawer of the
office for years. It wasn’t loaded, but it didn’t seem quite so lonely
with it. I put it in my pocket and went on to Massingham, taking another
turn into the yard to see that the light was still on. Then I went up
the stairs as quietly as I could and let myself into No. 11.”
“You didn’t take Willett or Green with you?”
The clerk gave Mr Carlyle a knowing look, as of one smart man who will
be appreciated by another.
“Willett’s a very trustworthy chap,” he replied, “and we have every
confidence in him. Green also, although he has not been with us so long.
But I thought it just as well to do it on my own, you understand, Mr
Carlyle. You didn’t look in at Massingham on your way? Well, if you had
you would have seen that there is a pane of glass above every door,
frosted glass to the hall doors and plain over each of those inside.
It’s to light the halls and passages, you know. Each flat has a small
square hall and a longish passage leading off it. As soon as I opened
the door I could tell that one of the rooms down the passage was lit up,
though I could not see the door of it from there. Then I crept very
quietly through the hall into the passage. A regular stream of light was
shining from above the end door on the left. The room, I knew, was the
smallest in the flat--it’s generally used for a servant’s bedroom or
sometimes for a box-room. It was a bit thick, you’ll admit--right at the
end of a long passage and midnight, and after what the others had said.”
“Yes, yes,” assented the inquiry agent. “But you went on?”
“I went on, tiptoeing without a sound. I got to the door, took out my
pistol, put my hand almost on the handle and then----”
“Well, well,” prompted Mr Carlyle, as the narrator paused provokingly,
with the dramatic instinct of an expert raconteur, “what then?”
“Then the light went out. While my hand was within an inch of the handle
the light went out, as clean as if I had been watched all along and the
thing timed. It went out all at once, without any warning and without
the slightest sound from the beastly room beyond. And then it was as
black as hell in the passage and something seemed to be going to
happen.”
“What did you do?”
“I did a slope,” acknowledged the clerk frankly. “I broke all the
records down that passage, I bet you. You’ll laugh, I dare say, and
think you would have stood, but you don’t know what it was like. I’d
been screwing myself up, wondering what I should see in that lighted
room when I opened the door, and then the light went out like a knife,
and for all I knew the next second the door would open on me in the dark
and Christ only knows what come out.”
“Probably I should have run also,” conceded Mr Carlyle tactfully. “And
you, Max?”
“You see, I always feel at home in the dark,” apologised the blind man.
“At all events, you got safely away, Mr----?”
“My name’s Elliott,” responded the clerk. “Yes, you may bet I did.
Whether the door opened and anybody or anything came out or not I can’t
say. I didn’t look. I certainly did get an idea that I heard the bath
water running and swishing as I snatched at the hall door, but I didn’t
stop to consider that either, and if it was, the noise was lost in the
slam of the door and my clatter as I took about twelve flights of stairs
six steps at a time. Then when I was safely out I did venture to go
round to look up again, and there was that damned light full on again.”
“Really?” commented Mr Carlyle. “That was very audacious of him.”
“Him? Oh, well, yes, I suppose so. That’s what the governor insists, but
he hasn’t been up there himself in the dark.”
“Is that as far as you have got?”
“It’s as far as we can get. The bally thing goes on just as it likes.
The very next day we tied up the taps of the gas-meter and the water
cistern and sealed the string. Bless you, it didn’t make a ha’peth of
difference. Scarcely a night passes without the light showing, and
there’s no doubt that the water runs. We’ve put copying ink on the door
handles and the taps and got into it ourselves until there isn’t a man
about the place that you couldn’t implicate.”
“Has anyone watched up there?”
“Willett and Green together did one night. They shut themselves up in
the room opposite from ten till twelve and nothing happened. I was
watching the window with a pair of opera-glasses from an empty flat
here--85 Northanger. Then they chucked it, and before they could have
been down the steps the light was there--I could see the gas as plain as
I can see this ink-stand. I ran down and met them coming to tell me that
nothing had happened. The three of us sprinted up again and the light
was out and the flat as deserted as a churchyard. What do you make of
that?”
“It certainly requires looking into,” replied Mr Carlyle diplomatically.
“Looking into! Well, you’re welcome to look all day and all night too,
Mr Carlyle. It isn’t as though it was an old baronial mansion, you see,
with sliding panels and secret passages. The place has the date over the
front door, 1882--1882 and haunted, by gosh! It was built for what it
is, and there isn’t an inch unaccounted for between the slates and the
foundation.”
“These two things--the light and the water running--are the only
indications there have been?” asked Mr Carlyle.
“So far as we ourselves have seen or heard. I ought perhaps to tell you
of something else, however. When this business first started I made a
few casual inquiries here and there among the tenants. Among others I
saw Mr Belting, who occupies No. 9 Massingham--the flat directly beneath
No. 11. It didn’t seem any good making up a cock-and-bull story, so I
put it to him plainly--had he been annoyed by anything unusual going on
at the empty flat above?
“‘If you mean your confounded ghost up there, I have not been
particularly annoyed,’ he said at once, ‘but Mrs Belting has, and I
should advise you to keep out of her way, at least until she gets
another servant.’ Then he told me that their girl, who slept in the
bedroom underneath the little one at No. 11, had been going on about
noises in the room above--footsteps and tramping and a bump on the
floor--for some time before we heard anything of it. Then one day she
suddenly said that she’d had enough of it and bolted. That was just
before Willett first saw the light.”
“It is being talked about, then--among the tenants?”
“You bet!” assented Mr Elliott pungently. “That’s what gets the
governor. He wouldn’t give a continental if no one knew, but you can’t
tell where it will end. The people at Northanger don’t half like it
either. All the children are scared out of their little wits and none of
the slaveys will run errands after dark. It’ll give the estate a bad
name for the next three years if it isn’t stopped.”
“It shall be stopped,” declared Mr Carlyle impressively. “Of course we
have our methods for dealing with this sort of thing, but in order to
make a clean sweep it is desirable to put our hands on the offender _in
flagranti delicto_. Tell your--er--principal not to have any further
concern in the matter. One of my people will call here for any further
details that he may require during the day. Just leave everything as it
is in the meanwhile. Good-morning, Mr Elliott, good-morning.... A fairly
obvious game, I imagine, Max,” he commented as they got into the car,
“although the details are original and the motive not disclosed as yet.
I wonder how many of them are in it?”
“Let me know when you find out,” said Carrados, and Mr Carlyle promised.
Nearly a week passed and the expected revelation failed to make its
appearance. Then, instead, quite a different note arrived:
“MY DEAR MAX,--I wonder if you formed any conclusion of that
Massingham Mansions affair from Mr Elliott’s refined narrative of the
circumstances?
“I begin to suspect that Trigget, whom I put on, is somewhat of an
ass, though a very remarkable circumstance has come to light which
might--if it wasn’t a matter of business--offer an explanation of the
whole business by stamping it as inexplicable.
“You know how I value your suggestions. If you happen to be in the
neighbourhood--not otherwise, Max, I protest--I should be glad if you
would drop in for a chat. Yours sincerely,
“LOUIS CARLYLE.”
Carrados smiled at the ingenuous transparency of the note. He had
thought several times of the case since the interview with Elliott,
chiefly because he was struck by certain details of the manifestation
that divided it from the ordinary methods of the bogy-raiser, an aspect
that had apparently made no particular impression on his friend. He was
sufficiently interested not to let the day pass without “happening” to
be in the neighbourhood of Bampton Street.
“Max,” exclaimed Mr Carlyle, raising an accusing forefinger, “you have
come on purpose.”
“If I have,” replied the visitor, “you can reward me with a cup of that
excellent beverage that you were able to conjure up from somewhere down
in the basement on a former occasion. As a matter of fact, I have.”
Mr Carlyle transmitted the order and then demanded his friend’s serious
attention.
“That ghost at Massingham Mansions----”
“I still don’t believe in that particular ghost, Louis,” commented
Carrados in mild speculation.
“I never did, of course,” replied Carlyle, “but, upon my word, Max, I
shall have to very soon as a precautionary measure. Trigget has been
able to do nothing and now he has as good as gone on strike.”
“Downed--now what on earth can an inquiry man down to go on strike,
Louis? Notebooks? So Trigget has got a chill, like our candid friend
Elliott, Eh?”
“He started all right--said that he didn’t mind spending a night or a
week in a haunted flat, and, to do him justice, I don’t believe he did
at first. Then he came across a very curious piece of forgotten local
history, a very remarkable--er--coincidence in the circumstances, Max.”
“I was wondering,” said Carrados, “when we should come up against that
story, Louis.”
“Then you know of it?” exclaimed the inquiry agent in surprise.
“Not at all. Only I guessed it must exist. Here you have the
manifestation associated with two things which in themselves are neither
usual nor awe-inspiring--the gas and the water. It requires some
association to connect them up, to give them point and force. That is
the story.”
“Yes,” assented his friend, “that is the story, and, upon my soul, in
the circumstances--well, you shall hear it. It comes partly from the
newspapers of many years ago, but only partly, for the circumstances
were successfully hushed up in a large measure and it required the
stimulated memories of ancient scandalmongers to fill in the details. Oh
yes, it was a scandal, Max, and would have been a great sensation too, I
do not doubt, only they had no proper pictorial press in those days,
poor beggars. It was very soon after Massingham Mansions had been
erected--they were called Enderby House in those days, by the way, for
the name was changed on account of this very business. The household at
No. 11 consisted of a comfortable, middle-aged married couple and one
servant, a quiet and attractive young creature, one is led to
understand. As a matter of fact, I think they were the first tenants of
that flat.”
“The first occupants give the soul to a new house,” remarked the blind
man gravely. “That is why empty houses have their different characters.”
“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” assented Mr Carlyle in his incisive
way, “but none of our authorities on this case made any reference to the
fact. They did say, however, that the man held a good and responsible
position--a position for which high personal character and strict
morality were essential. He was also well known and regarded in quiet
but substantial local circles where serious views prevailed. He was, in
short, a man of notorious ‘respectability.’
“The first chapter of the tragedy opened with the painful death of the
prepossessing handmaiden--suicide, poor creature. She didn’t appear one
morning and the flat was full of the reek of gas. With great promptitude
the master threw all the windows open and called up the porter. They
burst open the door of the little bedroom at the end of the passage, and
there was the thing as clear as daylight for any coroner’s jury to see.
The door was locked on the inside and the extinguished gas was turned
full on. It was only a tiny room, with no fireplace, and the ventilation
of a closed well-fitting door and window was negligible in the
circumstances. At all events the girl was proved to have been dead for
several hours when they reached her, and the doctor who conducted the
autopsy crowned the convincing fabric of circumstances when he mentioned
as delicately as possible that the girl had a very pressing reason for
dreading an inevitable misfortune that would shortly overtake her. The
jury returned the obvious verdict.
“There have been a great many undiscovered crimes in the history of
mankind, Max, but it is by no means every ingenious plot that carries.
After the inquest, at which our gentleman doubtless cut a very proper
and impressive figure, the barbed whisper began to insinuate and to grow
in freedom. It is sheerly impossible to judge how these things start,
but we know that when once they have been begun they gather material
like an avalanche. It was remembered by someone at the flat underneath
that late on the fatal night a window in the principal bedroom above had
been heard to open, top and bottom, very quietly. Certain other sounds
of movement in the night did not tally with the tale of sleep-wrapped
innocence. Sceptical busybodies were anxious to demonstrate practically
to those who differed from them on this question that it was quite easy
to extinguish a gas-jet in one room by blowing down the gas-pipe in
another; and in this connection there was evidence that the lady of the
flat had spoken to her friends more than once of her sentimental young
servant’s extravagant habit of reading herself to sleep occasionally
with the light full on. Why was nothing heard at the inquest, they
demanded, of the curious fact that an open novelette lay on the
counterpane when the room was broken into? A hundred trifling
circumstances were adduced--arrangements that the girl had been making
for the future down to the last evening of her life--interpretable hints
that she had dropped to her acquaintances--her views on suicide and the
best means to that end: a favourite topic, it would seem, among her
class--her possession of certain comparatively expensive trinkets on a
salary of a very few shillings a week, and so on. Finally, some rather
more definite and important piece of evidence must have been conveyed to
the authorities, for we know now that one fine day a warrant was issued.
Somehow rumour preceded its execution. The eminently respectable
gentleman with whom it was concerned did not wait to argue out the
merits of the case. He locked himself in the bathroom, and when the
police arrived they found that instead of an arrest they had to arrange
the details for another inquest.”
“A very convincing episode,” conceded Carrados in response to his
friend’s expectant air. “And now her spirit passes the long winter
evenings turning the gas on and off, and the one amusement of his
consists in doing the same with the bath-water--or the other way, the
other way about, Louis. Truly, one half the world knows not how the
other half lives!”
“All your cheap humour won’t induce Trigget to spend another night in
that flat, Max,” retorted Mr Carlyle. “Nor, I am afraid, will it help me
through this business in any other way.”
“Then I’ll give you a hint that may,” said Carrados. “Try your
respectable gentleman’s way of settling difficulties.”
“What is that?” demanded his friend.
“Blow down the pipes, Louis.”
“Blow down the pipes?” repeated Carlyle.
“At all events try it. I infer that Mr Trigget has not experimented in
that direction.”
“But what will it do, Max?”
“Possibly it will demonstrate where the other end goes to.”
“But the other end goes to the meter.”
“I suggest not--not without some interference with its progress. I have
already met your Mr Trigget, you know, Louis. An excellent and reliable
man within his limits, but he is at his best posted outside the door of
a hotel waiting to see the co-respondent go in. He hasn’t enough
imagination for this case--not enough to carry him away from what would
be his own obvious method of doing it to what is someone else’s equally
obvious but quite different method. Unless I am doing him an injustice,
he will have spent most of his time trying to catch someone getting into
the flat to turn the gas and water on and off, whereas I conjecture that
no one does go into the flat because it is perfectly simple--ingenious
but simple--to produce these phenomena without. Then when Mr Trigget has
satisfied himself that it is physically impossible for anyone to be
going in and out, and when, on the top of it, he comes across this
romantic tragedy--a tale that might psychologically explain the ghost,
simply because the ghost is moulded on the tragedy--then, of course, Mr
Trigget’s mental process is swept away from its moorings and his feet
begin to get cold.”
“This is very curious and suggestive,” said Mr Carlyle. “I certainly
assumed----But shall we have Trigget up and question him on the point? I
think he ought to be here now--if he isn’t detained at the Bull.”
Carrados assented, and in a few minutes Mr Trigget presented himself at
the door of the private office. He was a melancholy-looking middle-aged
little man, with an ineradicable air of being exactly what he was, and
the searcher for deeper or subtler indications of character would only
be rewarded by a latent pessimism grounded on the depressing probability
that he would never be anything else.
“Come in, Trigget,” called out Mr Carlyle when his employee diffidently
appeared. “Come in. Mr Carrados would like to hear some of the details
of the Massingham Mansions case.”
“Not the first time I have availed myself of the benefit of your
inquiries, Mr Trigget,” nodded the blind man. “Good-afternoon.”
“Good-afternoon, sir,” replied Trigget with gloomy deference. “It’s very
handsome of you to put it in that way, Mr Carrados, sir. But this isn’t
another Tarporley-Templeton case, if I may say so, sir. That was as
plain as a pikestaff after all, sir.”