IN ROOM NUMBER EIGHTEEN
On the second landing I rapped at the door of room Number 18, feeling
considerable pleasure at the thought of giving my whilom friend an
unwelcome surprise.
There was no reply, but I fancied I heard a movement inside. I listened
eagerly.
I knocked again. Yes. I felt sure someone was within, but my knock met
with no response.
A third time I knocked and more loudly, but to no avail. I tried the
door--it was locked.
Five times I hammered with my fist, but there being no answer I
descended the stairs and found Mr. Seton.
“But he must be up there if his door is locked,” he said. “He never
takes his key but always leaves it on the peg here,” and he indicated a
board on the wall in a little box-like room off the hall where visitors
left their keys. To each key was attached a bulky ball of wood, in
order that the key should not be carried away accidentally in the
pocket.
With the landlord I reascended the stairs and Seton knocked at the
door, calling his guest by name. But there was still no response.
“Do you know, I believe I heard somebody inside when I first knocked,”
I remarked.
Seton bent and peered through the keyhole.
“At any rate the door is locked on the inside,” he said.
Then he thundered at the door, after which we both listened. There was
no sound, but I thought I detected the smell of burning paper.
All the other guests were apparently out at the time, for the noise we
made attracted only the servants.
“Baker!” Seton cried to a man who was in his shirtsleeves and wore an
apron of green baize, “we must force this door. There’s a crow-bar down
in the cellar. Go and get it.”
As the man addressed ran downstairs, the ex-butler turned to me with a
scared expression upon his face, saying----
“This is very peculiar, sir. Why has he locked himself in like this?
Did you really hear a noise?”
“Yes. I am sure I did, yet with the roar of the traffic out in the
road, I really couldn’t quite swear to it,” was my reply.
“What I heard was like a man bustling about hurriedly, and yet trying
to make no noise.”
“Surely he can’t have fainted--or--or committed suicide!” Seton
remarked.
For a few minutes we stood outside the door utterly mystified, until
the porter brought us a rusty bar of iron about three feet long, curved
and flattened at the end--a very serviceable crow-bar.
This, Seton inserted between the door and the jamb, close to the lock,
and then drew it back slowly. The woodwork groaned, creaked and cracked
and with a sudden jerk the wood round the mortice lock tore away and
the door flew open.
We stood amazed. The room was empty.
In a few seconds we had searched the big old-fashioned wardrobe and had
looked beneath the bed and behind the curtains. But nobody was there.
And, moreover, while the key was still in the door on the inside the
window was closed and latched!
The fireplace was a small one with a flue through which not even a
small boy could pass. In the grate were smoldering ashes of something,
apparently a coat that had been hastily burned. There was an odor of
consumed petrol, and it occurred to me at once that some clothing had
been hurriedly saturated from a bottle of motor-spirit and set fire
to--for the room was still heavy with smoke.
Seton crossed to the window and saw at once that it had not been
opened. I glanced out and down. From the narrow window-sill there was
a sheer drop to the paved basement forty or fifty feet below with not
even a stackpipe by which an active man might have escaped.
“Well, this is extraordinary,” cried Seton. “How could Mr. Graydon
possibly get out of the room and leave it still locked on the inside?”
Seton bent suddenly over the fireplace. “Well, we may as well see what
he was burning,” he said as he picked up a half charred piece of paper
that had apparently been crumpled up hastily and thrown into the grate.
He smoothed it out and looked at it in amazement.
It was a portion of a fifty-pound Bank of England note! It was partly
burned but quite enough was left to identify it without any possibility
of a mistake.
“Well,” I exclaimed, “burning fifty-pound notes is certainly a new kind
of pastime. What on earth can it mean?”
“I can’t imagine,” replied Seton. “And how can Mr. Graydon have gone?
Certainly not through the door or the window.”
“And before he went,” I added, “he burnt a coat or something of the
kind and a fifty-pound note!”
In front of the window was a small early Victorian escritoire. Upon
it were several loose sheets of paper from a new writing-pad, an
ink-stained envelope, and a couple of bills from a local chemist.
Seton opened two or three of the drawers and from one of them drew a
folded wad of papers. “More notes!” he ejaculated, as he felt with his
fingers the crisp familiar crackle.
There were three notes for fifty pounds each, obviously quite new.
Clearly Graydon, in his hurry, had forgotten that they were there.
“It seems to me,” I said to Seton, “that Graydon must have been
frightened by something and had to get away quickly.”
“Frightened, but of what?” Seton asked. “I saw him only half-an-hour
before you came, and he seemed all right then.”
“Do you think my visit might have frightened him?” I asked.
“Well, sir, I don’t know. But why did he burn a fifty-pound note and
how did he get out? That’s what puzzles me. I could have understood it
if he had locked his door on the outside.”
“It beats me, anyhow,” I said, looking round the room. I noticed
Graydon’s two suitcases stood open and some of his clothes were hanging
in the wardrobe. Why, and above all how had he vanished so suddenly?
But for the fact that he had actually called to see me--showing that
he certainly was not afraid of meeting me--I might well have thought
that he would be alarmed on recognizing my voice. But he had evidently
not done so and must have thought I was someone else whom he urgently
desired to avoid.
Those fifty-pound notes puzzled Lord Kenhythe’s ex-butler as completely
as they did myself. Men do not usually go about burning fifty-pound
notes. We knew that the young fellow who, in Switzerland, had posed
as a hard-working electrical engineer welcoming the prospect of a
“rise,” was on the contrary, a rich young man. But that he should burn
bank-notes of such value or leave them discarded as he had done, was
simply inexplicable on any hypothesis we could frame.
I was deeply chagrined. I had come within an ace of capturing the
truant bridegroom and yet he had eluded me. Could it really, I asked
myself, have been the same man? Again I carefully described to Seton
the man I had known as Stanley Audley. He was emphatic in his assertion
that it was Philip Graydon, the man who had been in that very room
barely half-an-hour before. And as if to make assurance doubly sure, I
found on one of his suitcases a label of the Kürhaus Hotel at Mürren
and another put on at Mürren station, registering this case through to
Victoria.
There could not be the slightest doubt as to the mystery man’s identity
as Thelma’s husband.
“Look here!” said Seton, suddenly, as he held up a towel he had taken
from the rail. It was stained with blood. The hand basin was half full
of water deeply tinged with blood.
“Evidently he had cut himself badly,” was Seton’s comment.
“Perhaps,” I said, “but is this his own blood or someone else’s?”
“Surely, sir, you don’t suspect he has been guilty of a crime?” gasped
Seton.
I pointed to the charred fragments of the coat. “It might be so,” I
rejoined.
A few moments later, however, on making a closer search of the room
we found in the waste-paper basket a broken medicine bottle and on
the edge of a piece of glass was a blood stain. It told its own
tale--he had cut his hand upon the glass. Further, close beside the
dressing-table were three or four dark spots. I touched one, and found
it to be blood.
“I wonder why he destroyed his coat?” Seton remarked. “He’s gone away
leaving everything behind.”
“But how did he get out?” I persisted. “The door and window were both
fastened and there is no fanlight.”
We again carefully examined the lock. It was intact, it had been
locked from the inside and the key was still there.
Together we went carefully through the fugitive’s belongings, but found
nothing of interest. They were merely clothes of good quality or the
wardrobe of a fashionable young man. From the pocket of the suitcase
that bore the label “B. O. B.”--or Bernese Oberland Bahn--I took out
three one-pound Treasury notes. But we found not a scrap of writing of
any sort. There was some burnt paper in the fireplace, suggesting that
with the coat he had destroyed all documents that might give a clue to
his identity. The broken bottle smelt of petrol and apparently he had
kept the spirit ready for use if he wanted quickly to destroy anything.
Our search concluded, Seton had all the things removed to an unoccupied
room and locked the door.
“The Bank will pay the halfnote,” said Seton. “I shall pay the lot in
and hold the money until Mr. Graydon turns up again. He has plenty of
money, of course, and may not have missed it. There is no doubt some
explanation. I cannot believe, knowing Mr. Graydon as I did, that there
can be anything very seriously wrong.”
“But why should the note be burned?” I queried.
“It might have been accidentally among the other papers he destroyed,
sir. Don’t you think so?”
This, of course, was possible. For a long time we sat in Seton’s room
discussing the strange affair. At first Seton thought he ought to tell
the police, but I urged him not to do so. It would get into the papers,
I argued, and that was the last thing desirable for a high-class
private hotel such as his. I did not want a public scandal that must
involve Thelma in most unpleasant publicity.
“I wonder whether he had an inkling that you’d called, sir?” suggested
Seton. “Perhaps he saw you from one of the front windows and then
rushed up and prepared to bolt.”
“But why should he? I have acted towards him only as a friend and I see
no reason why he should take such extreme steps to avoid me. Besides,
he actually called at my flat.”
“Yes, I had forgotten that,” Seton admitted. “But still, I think
something must have frightened him--and frightened him badly, too. He
wouldn’t have cut his hand in opening the bottle of petrol, burned his
clothes and papers, and got away so swiftly if there wasn’t some very
strong motive for doing so. What’s your opinion?”
“The same as yours, Seton,” I answered. “But the affair is full of
remarkable circumstances. How did he get out of that locked room? He
was certainly in there when I first knocked.”
“My own belief,” said Seton, “is that he must have started to destroy
his things as soon as you knocked. He was certainly in a great hurry
for he smashed the neck of the petrol bottle when he found he could not
get the cork out--it’s still in the neck of the broken bottle--and cut
his hand in doing so.”
“But there wouldn’t have been time,” I said, impatiently.
“I think so,” said Seton. “The coat was a light one and saturated with
petrol, it would burn very quickly. You stood at the door probably for
ten minutes before you called me and it was certainly another quarter
of an hour, or even more, before I forced the door. That coat would
burn in that time.”
“Yes, perhaps, but that doesn’t explain how he got away from the locked
room, or where he went to.”
Lord Kenhythe’s ex-butler shrugged his broad shoulders and with a
mystified look upon his clean-shaven face, replied--
“How he got out, sir, and where he has gone to, is to me a complete
mystery. But I feel sure he’ll come back, or he’ll write and tell me
about it. Besides, he’s not a gentleman to leave without settling his
bill.”
“Well,” I said, laughing, “you won’t lose much. He’s left you two
hundred odd pounds.”
I left, promising to call again on the following afternoon. This I did,
eager to know whether he had any further news of his missing guest.
As I entered the room, I saw that the man’s face was graver and more
puzzled than before.
“Well, Mr. Seton?” I asked. “What’s happened?”
“Happened, sir. Those bank-notes. When I took them to the bank this
morning the manager called me into his room and questioned me very
closely. They’re forgeries!”
“Forged notes!” I gasped, staring at him.
“Yes, sir. The manager told me that all banks here and abroad had
been warned about six months ago that a quantity of spurious five and
fifty-pound Bank of England notes were in circulation. They’ve been
printed in Argentina. The police made a raid on the factory, seized
the printing press and plates and six men were arrested. All of them
have been sent to prison for long terms, but at the trial it came out
that they were in league with certain confederates in Paris, Madrid
and London who were engaged in circulating them--mostly the five-pound
ones.”
“And what did you say?” I asked.
“Well, sir, I told the whole story. The manager took the notes, and I
believe he’s sent them to the Bank of England.”
“Then the police will start inquiries!” I cried, dismayed, for the
situation was becoming daily more complicated.
“Yes, sir,” he replied. “I understood from the manager that they will!”