WHAT WAS HIDDEN UNDER THE FLOOR
The cab pulled up in front of a tumbledown cheap ‘villa’ in an
unfinished cheap neighbourhood,--the whole place a living monument of
the defeat of the speculative builder.
Atherton leaped out on to the grass-grown rubble which was meant for a
footpath.
‘I don’t see Marjorie looking for me on the doorstep.’
Nor did I,--I saw nothing but what appeared to be an unoccupied
ramshackle brick abomination. Suddenly Sydney gave an exclamation.
‘Hullo!--The front door’s closed!’
I was hard at his heels.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why, when I went I left the front door open. It looks as if I’ve made
an idiot of myself after all, and Marjorie’s returned,--let’s hope to
goodness that I have.’
He knocked. While we waited for a response I questioned him.
‘Why did you leave the door open when you went?’
‘I hardly know,--I imagine that it was with some dim idea of Marjorie’s
being able to get in if she returned while I was absent,--but the truth
is I was in such a condition of helter skelter that I am not prepared
to swear that I had any reasonable reason.’
‘I suppose there is no doubt that you did leave it open?’
‘Absolutely none,--on that I’ll stake my life.’
‘Was it open when you returned from your pursuit of Holt?’
‘Wide open,--I walked straight in expecting to find her waiting for me
in the front room,--I was struck all of a heap when I found she wasn’t
there.’
‘Were there any signs of a struggle?’
‘None,--there were no signs of anything. Everything was just as I had
left it, with the exception of the ring which I trod on in the passage,
and which Lessingham has.’
‘If Miss Lindon has returned, it does not look as if she were in the
house at present.’
It did not,--unless silence had such meaning. Atherton had knocked
loudly three times without succeeding in attracting the slightest
notice from within.
‘It strikes me that this is another case of seeking admission through
that hospitable window at the back.’
Atherton led the way to the rear. Lessingham and I followed. There was
not even an apology for a yard, still less a garden,--there was not
even a fence of any sort, to serve as an enclosure, and to shut off the
house from the wilderness of waste land. The kitchen window was open. I
asked Sydney if he had left it so.
‘I don’t know,--I dare say we did; I don’t fancy that either of us
stood on the order of his coming.’
While he spoke, he scrambled over the sill. We followed. When he was
in, he shouted at the top of his voice,
‘Marjorie! Marjorie! Speak to me, Marjorie,--it is I,--Sydney!’
The words echoed through the house. Only silence answered. He led the
way to the front room. Suddenly he stopped.
‘Hollo!’ he cried. ‘The blind’s down!’ I had noticed, when we were
outside, that the blind was down at the front room window. ‘It was up
when I went, that I’ll swear. That someone has been here is pretty
plain,--let’s hope it’s Marjorie.’
He had only taken a step forward into the room when he again stopped
short to exclaim.
‘My stars!--here’s a sudden clearance!--Why, the place is
empty,--everything’s clean gone!’
‘What do you mean?--was it furnished when you left?’
The room was empty enough then.
‘Furnished?--I don’t know that it was exactly what you’d call
furnished,--the party who ran this establishment had a taste in
upholstery which was all his own,--but there was a carpet, and a bed,
and--and lots of things,--for the most part, I should have said,
distinctly Eastern curiosities. They seem to have evaporated into
smoke,--which may be a way which is common enough among Eastern
curiosities, though it’s queer to me.’
Atherton was staring about him as if he found it difficult to credit
the evidence of his own eyes.
‘How long ago is it since you left?’
He referred to his watch.
‘Something over an hour,--possibly an hour and a half; I couldn’t swear
to the exact moment, but it certainly isn’t more.’
‘Did you notice any signs of packing up?’
‘Not a sign.’ Going to the window he drew up the blind,--speaking as he
did so. ‘The queer thing about this business is that when we first got
in this blind wouldn’t draw up a little bit, so, since it wouldn’t go
up I pulled it down, roller and all, now it draws up as easily and
smoothly as if it had always been the best blind that ever lived.’
Standing at Sydney’s back I saw that the cabman on his box was
signalling to us with his outstretched hand. Sydney perceived him too.
He threw up the sash.
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘Excuse me, sir, but who’s the old gent?’
‘What old gent?’
‘Why the old gent peeping through the window of the room upstairs?’
The words were hardly out of the driver’s mouth when Sydney was through
the door and flying up the staircase. I followed rather more
soberly,--his methods were a little too flighty for me. When I reached
the landing, dashing out of the front room he rushed into the one at
the back,--then through a door at the side. He came out shouting.
‘What’s the idiot mean!--with his old gent! I’d old gent him if I got
him!--There’s not a creature about the place!’
He returned into the front room,--I at his heels. That certainly was
empty,--and not only empty, but it showed no traces of recent
occupation. The dust lay thick upon the floor,--there was that mouldy,
earthy smell which is so frequently found in apartments which have been
long untenanted.
‘Are you sure, Atherton, that there is no one at the back?’
‘Of course I’m sure,--you can go and see for yourself if you like; do
you think I’m blind? Jehu’s drunk.’ Throwing up the sash he addressed
the driver. ‘What do you mean with your old gent at the window?--what
window?’
‘That window, sir.’
‘Go to!--you’re dreaming, man!--there’s no one here.’
‘Begging your pardon, sir, but there was someone there not a minute
ago.’
‘Imagination, cabman,--the slant of the light on the glass,--or your
eyesight’s defective.’
‘Excuse me, sir, but it’s not my imagination, and my eyesight’s as good
as any man’s in England,--and as for the slant of the light on the
glass, there ain’t much glass for the light to slant on. I saw him
peeping through that bottom broken pane on your left hand as plainly as
I see you. He must be somewhere about,--he can’t have got away,--he’s
at the back. Ain’t there a cupboard nor nothing where he could hide?’
The cabman’s manner was so extremely earnest that I went myself to see.
There was a cupboard on the landing, but the door of that stood wide
open, and that obviously was bare. The room behind was small, and,
despite the splintered glass in the window frame, stuffy. Fragments of
glass kept company with the dust on the floor, together with a choice
collection of stones, brickbats, and other missiles,--which not
improbably were the cause of their being there. In the corner stood a
cupboard,--but a momentary examination showed that that was as bare as
the other. The door at the side, which Sydney had left wide open,
opened on to a closet, and that was empty. I glanced up,--there was no
trap door which led to the roof. No practicable nook or cranny, in
which a living being could lie concealed, was anywhere at hand.
I returned to Sydney’s shoulder to tell the cabman so.
‘There is no place in which anyone could hide, and there is no one in
either of the rooms,--you must have been mistaken, driver.’
The man waxed wroth.
‘Don’t tell me! How could I come to think I saw something when I
didn’t?’
‘One’s eyes are apt to play us tricks;--how could you see what wasn’t
there?’
‘That’s what I want to know. As I drove up, before you told me to stop,
I saw him looking through the window,--the one at which you are. He’d
got his nose glued to the broken pane, and was staring as hard as he
could stare. When I pulled up, off he started,--I saw him get up off
his knees, and go to the back of the room. When the gentleman took to
knocking, back he came,--to the same old spot, and flopped down on his
knees. I didn’t know what caper you was up to,--you might be bum
bailiffs for all I knew!--and I supposed that he wasn’t so anxious to
let you in as you might be to get inside, and that was why he didn’t
take no notice of your knocking, while all the while he kept a eye on
what was going on. When you goes round to the back, up he gets again,
and I reckoned that he was going to meet yer, and perhaps give yer a
bit of his mind, and that presently I should hear a shindy, or that
something would happen. But when you pulls up the blind downstairs, to
my surprise back he come once more. He shoves his old nose right
through the smash in the pane, and wags his old head at me like a
chattering magpie. That didn’t seem to me quite the civil thing to
do,--I hadn’t done no harm to him; so I gives you the office, and lets
you know that he was there. But for you to say that he wasn’t there,
and never had been,--blimey! that cops the biscuit. If he wasn’t there,
all I can say is I ain’t here, and my ’orse ain’t here, and my cab
ain’t neither,--damn it!--the house ain’t here, and nothing ain’t!’
He settled himself on his perch with an air of the most extreme ill
usage,--he had been standing up to tell his tale. That the man was
serious was unmistakable. As he himself suggested, what inducement
could he have had to tell a lie like that? That he believed himself to
have seen what he declared he saw was plain. But, on the other hand,
what could have become--in the space of fifty seconds!--of his ‘old
gent’?
Atherton put a question.
‘What did he look like,--this old gent of yours?’
‘Well, that I shouldn’t hardly like to say. It wasn’t much of his face
I could see, only his face and his eyes,--and they wasn’t pretty. He
kept a thing over his head all the time, as if he didn’t want too much
to be seen.’
‘What sort of a thing?’
‘Why,--one of them cloak sort of things, like them Arab blokes used to
wear what used to be at Earl’s Court Exhibition,--you know!’
This piece of information seemed to interest my companions more than
anything he had said before.
‘A burnoose do you mean?’
‘How am I to know what the thing’s called? I ain’t up in foreign
languages,--’tain’t likely! All I know that them Arab blokes what was
at Earl’s Court used to walk about in them all over the
place,--sometimes they wore them over their heads, and sometimes they
didn’t. In fact if you’d asked me, instead of trying to make out as I
sees double, or things what was only inside my own noddle, or something
or other, I should have said this here old gent what I’ve been telling
you about was a Arab bloke,--when he gets off his knees to sneak away
from the window, I could see that he had his cloak thing, what was over
his head, wrapped all round him.’
Mr Lessingham turned to me, all quivering with excitement.
‘I believe that what he says is true!’
‘Then where can this mysterious old gentleman have got to,--can you
suggest an explanation? It is strange, to say the least of it, that the
cabman should be the only person to see or hear anything of him.’
‘Some devil’s trick has been played,--I know it, I feel it!--my
instinct tells me so!’
I stared. In such a matter one hardly expects a man of Paul
Lessingham’s stamp to talk of ‘instinct.’ Atherton stared too. Then, on
a sudden, he burst out,
‘By the Lord, I believe the Apostle’s right,--the whole place reeks to
me of hankey-pankey,--it did as soon as I put my nose inside. In
matters of prestidigitation, Champnell, we Westerns are among the
rudiments,--we’ve everything to learn,--Orientals leave us at the post.
If their civilisation’s what we’re pleased to call extinct, their
conjuring--when you get to know it!--is all alive oh!’
He moved towards the door. As he went he slipped, or seemed to, all but
stumbling on to his knees.
‘Something tripped me up,--what’s this?’ He was stamping on the floor
with his foot. ‘Here’s a board loose. Come and lend me a hand, one of
you fellows, to get it up. Who knows what mystery’s beneath?’
I went to his aid. As he said, a board in the floor was loose. His
stepping on it unawares had caused his stumble. Together we prised it
out of its place,--Lessingham standing by and watching us the while.
Having removed it, we peered into the cavity it disclosed.
There was something there.
‘Why,’ cried Atherton, ‘it’s a woman’s clothing!’
[IMAGE: images/img_279.jpg
CAPTION: THEY STARED AT ME IN SILENCE AS I DRAGGED THESE OUT AND LAID
THEM ON THE FLOOR.]