Cleek found young Trent an extremely handsome man of about
three-and-thirty; of a highly strung, nervous temperament, and
with an irritating habit of running his fingers through his hair
when excited. Also, it seemed impossible for him to sit still for
half a minute at a stretch; he must be constantly hopping up
only to sit down again, and moving restlessly about as if he were
doing his best to retain his composure and found it difficult
with Cleek's calm eyes fixed constantly upon him.
"I want to tell you something about that bloodstained sponge
business, Mr. Cleek," he said in his abrupt, jerky, uneasy manner.
"I never heard a word about it until last night, when Miss Larue
confessed her former suspicions of my dear old dad, and gave me all
the details of the matter. That sponge had nothing to do with the
affair at all. It was I that tucked it under the staircase where
it was found, and I did so on the day before James Colliver's
disappearance. The blood that had been on it was mine, not his."
"I see," said Cleek, serenely. "The explanation, of course, is the
good, old tried-and-true refuge of the story-writers--namely, a case
of nose-bleeding, is it not?"
"Yes," admitted Trent. "But with this difference: mine wasn't an
accidental affair at all--it was the result of getting a jolly good
hiding; and I made an excuse to get away and hop out of town, so that
the dad wouldn't know about it nor see how I'd been battered. The
fact is, I met one of our carmen in the upper hall. He was as drunk
as a lord, and when I took him to task about it and threatened him
with discharge, he said something to me that I thought needed a
jolly sight more than words by way of chastisement, so I nipped off
my coat and sailed into him. It turned out that he was the better
man, and gave me all that I'd asked for in less than a minute's
time; so I shook hands with him, told him to bundle off home and
sleep himself sober, and that if he wouldn't say anything about
the matter I wouldn't either, and he could turn up for work in the
morning as usual. Then I washed up, shoved the sponge under the
staircase, and nipped off out of town; because, you know, it would
make a deuced bad impression if any of the other workmen should find
out that a member of the firm had been thrashed by one of the
employees--and Draycott had done me up so beautifully that I was a
sight for the gods."
The thing had been so frankly confessed that, in spite of the fact
of having in the beginning been rather repelled by him, Cleek could
not but experience a feeling of liking for the man. "So that's
how it happened, is it?" he said, with a laugh. "It is a brave
man, Mr. Trent, that will resist the opportunity to make himself a
hero in the presence of the lady he loves; and I hope I may be
permitted to congratulate Miss Larue on the wisdom of her choice. But
now, if you please, let us get down at once to the details of the
melancholy business we have in hand. Mr. Narkom has been telling me
the amazing story of the boy's visit to the building and of his
strange disappearance therein, but I should like to have a few
further facts, if you will be so kind. What took the boy to the
building, in the first place? I am told he went there upon your
invitation, but I confess that that seems rather odd to me. Why
should a man of business want a boy to visit him during business
hours?"
"Good Lord, man! I couldn't have let him see what he wanted to
see if he didn't come during business hours, could I? But that's
rather ambiguous, so I'll make haste to put it plainer. Young
Stan--his Christian name is Stanley, as I suppose you know--young
Stan is mad to learn the business of theatrical property making,
and particularly that of the manufacture of those wax effigies, et
cetera, which we supply for the use of drapers in their show windows;
and as he is now sixteen and of an age to begin thinking of _some_
trade or profession for the future, I thought it would save Miss
Larue putting up a jolly big premium to have him taught outside if we
took him into our business free, so I invited him to come and look
round and see if he thought he'd like it when he came to look into
the messy details.
"Well, he came rather late yesterday afternoon, and I'd taken him
round for just about ten or a dozen minutes when word was suddenly
brought to me that the representative of one of the biggest managers
in the country had just called with reference to an important order,
so, of course, I put back to the office as quickly as I could foot
it, young Stan quite naturally following me, as he didn't know his
way about the place alone, and, being a modest, retiring sort of boy,
didn't like facing the possibility of blundering into what might
prove to be private quarters, and things of that sort. He said as
much to me at the time.
"Well, when I got back to the office, I soon found that the business
with my visitor was a matter that would take some time to settle--you
can't give a man an estimate all on a jump, and without doing a
bit of figuring, you know--so I told young Stan that he might cut
off and go over the place on his own, if he liked, as it had been
arranged that, when knocking-off time came, I was to go back with
him to Miss Larue's flat, where we all were to have supper together.
When I told him that, he asked eagerly if he might go up to the
wax-figure department, as he was particularly anxious to see Loti
at work, and so----"
"Loti!" Cleek flung in the word so sharply that Trent gave a nervous
start. "Just a moment, please, before you go any further, Mr. Trent.
Sorry to interrupt, but, tell me, please: is the man who models
your show-window effigies named Loti, then? Is, eh? Hum-m! Any
connection by chance with that once famous Italian worker in wax,
Giuseppe Loti--chap that used to make those splendid wax tableaux
for the Eden Musee in Paris some eighteen or twenty years ago?"
"Same chap. Went all to pieces all of a sudden--clear off his head
for a time, I've heard--in the very height of his career, because
his wife left him. Handsome French woman--years younger than he--ran
off with another chap and took every blessed thing of value she
could lay her hands upon when--but maybe you've heard the story?"
"I have," said Cleek. "It is one that is all too common on the
Continent. Also, it happened that I was in Paris at the time of the
occurrence. And so you have that great Giuseppe Loti at the head of
your waxwork department, eh? What a come-down in the world for
him! Poor devil! I thought he was dead ages ago. He dropped out
suddenly and disappeared from France entirely after that affair with
his unfaithful wife. The rumour was that he had committed suicide;
although that seemed as improbable as it now turns out to be, in
the face of the fact that on the night after his wife left him he
turned up at the Cafe Royal and publicly----No matter! Go on with
the case, please. What about the boy?"
"Let's see, now, where was I?" said Trent, knotting up his brow.
"Oh, ah! I recollect--just where he asked me if he could go up and
see Loti at work. Of course, I said that he could; there wasn't any
reason why I shouldn't, as the place is open to inspection always,
so I opened the door and showed him the way to the staircase leading
up to the glass-room, and then went to the speaking-tube and called
up to Loti to expect him, and to treat him nicely, as he was the
nephew of the great Miss Larue and would, in time, be mine also."
"Was there any necessity for taking that precaution, Mr. Trent?"
"Yes. Loti has developed a dashed bad temper since last autumn and is
very eccentric, very irritable--not a bit like the solemn, sedate old
johnnie he used to be. Even his work has deteriorated, I think, but
one daren't criticise it or he flies into a temper and threatens to
leave."
"And you don't wish him to, of course--his name must stand for
something."
"It stands for a great deal. It's one of our biggest cards. We can
command twice as much for a Loti figure as for one made by any other
waxworker. So we humour him in his little eccentricities and defer
to him a great deal. Also, as he prefers to live on the premises,
he saves us money in other ways. Serves for a watchman as well, you
understand."
"Oh, he lives on the premises, does he? Where? In the glass-room?"
"Oh, no; that would not be possible. The character as well as the
position of that renders it impossible as a place of habitation. He
uses it after hours as a sort of sitting-room, to be sure, and has
partly fitted it up as one, but he sleeps, eats, and dresses in a
room on the floor below."
"Not an adjoining one?"
"Oh, no; an adjoining room would be an impossibility. Our building
is an end one, standing on the corner of a short passage which
leads to nothing but a narrow alley running along parallel with
the back of our premises, and the glass-room covers nearly the entire
roof of it. As a matter of fact, Mr. Cleek, although we call it
that at the works, the term Glass Room is a misnomer. In reality,
it's nothing more nor less than a good sized 'lean-to' greenhouse
that the dad bought and had taken up there in sections, and its
rear elevation rests against the side wall of a still higher
building than ours, next door--the premises of Storminger the
carriage builder, to be exact. But look here: perhaps I can make
the situation clearer by a rough sketch. Got a lead pencil and a bit
of paper, anybody? Oh, thanks very much, dear. One can always rely
upon _you_. Now, look here, Mr. Cleek--this is the way of it. You
mustn't mind if it's a crude thing, because, you know, I'm a rotten
bad draughtsman and can't draw for nuts. But all the same, this will
do at a pinch."
Here he leaned over the table in the centre of the room and, taking
the pencil and the blank back of the letter which Miss Larue had
supplied, made a crude outline sketch thus:
[Illustration of a group of houses]
"There you are," he said suddenly, laying the crude drawing on
the table before Cleek, and with him bending over it. "You are
supposed to be looking at the houses from the main thoroughfare,
don't you know, and, therefore, at the front of them. This tall
building on the left marked 1 is Storminger's; the low one, number
2, adjoining, is ours; and that cagelike-looking thing, 3, on
the top of it, is the glass-room. Now, along the front of it here,
where I have put the long line with an X on the end, there runs a
wooden partition with a door leading into the room itself, so that
it's impossible for anybody on the opposite side of the main
thoroughfare to see into the place at all. But that is not the
case with regard to people living on the opposite side of the short
passage (this is here, that I've marked 4), because there's nothing
to obstruct the view but some rubbishy old lace curtains which Loti,
in his endeavour to make the place what he calls homelike, would
insist upon hanging, and _they_ are so blessed thin that anybody can
look right through them and see all over the place. Of course,
though, there are blinds, which he can pull down on the inside if
the sun gets too strong; and when they are down, nobody can see into
the glass-room at all. Pardon? Oh, we had it constructed of glass,
Mr. Narkom, because of the necessity for having all the light
obtainable in doing the minute work on some of the fine tableaux
we produce for execution purposes. We are doing one now--The Relief
of Lucknow--for the big exhibition that's to be given next month
at Olympia and----The place marked 6 at the back of our building?
Oh, that's the narrow alley of which I spoke. We've a back door
opening into it, but it's practically useless, because the alley
is so narrow one can't drive a vehicle through it. It's simply a
right of way that can't legally be closed and runs from Croom
Street on the right just along as far as Sturgiss Lane on the
left. Not fifty people pass through it in a day's time.
"But to come back to the short passage, Mr. Cleek. Observe, there
are no windows at all on the side of our building, here: Number
2. There were, once upon a time, but we had them bricked up, as
we use that side for a 'paint frame' with a movable bridge so
that it can be used for the purpose of painting scenery and
drop-curtains. But there _are_ windows in the side of the house
marked 5; and directly opposite the point where I've put the arrow
there is one which belongs to a room occupied by a Mrs. Sherman and
her daughter--people who do 'bushel work' for wholesale costume
houses. Now, it happens that at the exact time when the porter
says he showed young Stan into the glass-room those two women were
sitting at work by that window, and, the blinds not being drawn,
could see smack into the place, and are willing to take their oath
that there was no living soul in it."
"How do they fix it as being, as you say,'the exact time,' Mr. Trent?
If they couldn't see the porter come up to the glass-room with the
boy, how can they be sure of that?"
"Oh, that's easily explained: There's a church not a great way
distant. It has a clock in the steeple which strikes the hours,
halves, and quarters. Mrs. Sherman says that when it chimed half-past
four she was not only looking into the glass-room, but was calling
her daughter's attention to the fact that, whereas some few minutes
previously she had seen Loti go out of the place, leaving a great
pile of reference plates and scraps of material all over the
floor, and he had never, to her positive knowledge, come back into
it, there was the room looking as tidy as possible, and, in the
middle of it, a table with a vase of pink roses upon it, which
she certainly had not seen there when he left."
"Hallo! Hallo!" interjected Cleek rather sharply. "Let's have that
again, please!" and he sat listening intently while Trent repeated
the statement; then, of a sudden, he gave his head an upward twitch,
slapped his thigh, and, leaning back in his seat, added with a brief
little laugh, "Well, of all the blithering idiots! And a simple
little thing like that!"
"Like what, Mr. Cleek?" queried Trent, in amazement. "You don't
surely mean to say that you can make anything important out of a
table and a vase of flowers? Because, I may tell you that Loti is mad
on flowers, and always has a vase of them in the room somewhere."
"Does he, indeed? Natural inclination of the artistic temperament, I
dare say. But never mind, get on with the story. Mrs. Sherman fixes
the hour when she noticed this as half-past four, you say? How, then,
does the porter who showed the boy into the glass-room fix it, may
I ask?"
"By the same means precisely--the striking of the church clock. He
remembers hearing it just as he reached the partition door, and
was, indeed, at particular pains to take out his watch to see if it
tallied with it. Also, three of our scene painters were passing
along the hall at the foot of the short flight of steps leading up to
the glass-room at the time. They were going out to tea; and one of
them sang out to him laughingly, 'Hallo, Ginger, how does that
two-shilling turnip of yours make it? Time for tea at Buckingham
Palace?' for he had won the watch at a singing contest only the
night before, and his mates had been chaffing him about it all
day. In that manner the exact time of his going to the door with
the boy is fixed, and with three persons to corroborate it. A second
later the porter saw the boy push open the swing-door and walk into
the place, and as he turned and went back downstairs he distinctly
heard him say, 'Good afternoon, sir. Mr. Trent said I might come
up and watch, if you don't mind.'"
"Did he hear anybody reply?"
"No, he did not. He heard no one speak but the boy."
"I see. So, then, there is no actual proof that Loti _was_ in there
at the time, which, of course, makes the testimony of Mrs. Sherman
and her daughter appear reliable when they say that the room was
empty."
"Still the boy was there if Loti wasn't, Mr. Cleek. There's proof
enough that he did go into the place even though those two women
declare that the room was empty."
"Quite so, quite so. And when two and two don't make four, 'there's
something rotten in the state of Denmark.' What does Loti himself say
with regard to the circumstance? Or hasn't he been spoken to about
it?"
"My hat, yes! I went to him about it the very first thing. He says
the boy never put in an appearance, to _his_ knowledge; that he
never saw him. In fact, that just before half-past four he was
taken with a violent attack of sick headache, the result of the
fumes rising from the wax he was melting to model figures for the
tableau, together with the smell of the chemicals used in preparing
the background, and that he went down to his room to lie down for a
time and dropped off to sleep. As a matter of fact, he was there
in his room sleeping when, at half-past six, I went for the boy,
and, finding the glass-room vacated, naturally set out to hunt up
Loti and question him about the matter."
"When you called up to the glass-room through the speaking-tube, to
say that the boy was about to go up, who answered you--Loti?"
"Yes."
"At what time was that? Or can't you say positively?"
"Not to the fraction of a moment. But I should say that it was
about four or five minutes before the boy got there--say about
five-and-twenty minutes past four. It wouldn't take him longer to
get up to the top of the house, I fancy, and he certainly did not
stop at any of the other departments on the way."
"Queer, isn't it, that the man should not have stopped to so much as
welcome the boy after you had been at such pains to tell him to be
nice to him? Does he offer any explanation on that score?"
"Yes. He says that, as his head was so bad, he knew that he would
probably be cross and crotchety; so as I had asked him to be kind,
he thought the best thing he could do was to leave a note on the
table for the boy, telling him to make himself at home and to examine
anything he pleased, but to be sure not to touch the cauldron in
which the wax was simmering, as it tilted readily and he might get
scalded. He was sorry to have to go, but his head ached so badly that
he really had to lie down for a while.
"That note, I may tell you, was lying on the table when I went up to
the glass-room and failed to find the boy. It was that which told
me where to go in order to find Loti and question him. I'll do him
the credit of stating that when he heard of the boy's mysterious
disappearance he flung his headache and his creature comforts to
the winds and joined in the eager hunt for him as excitedly and as
strenuously as anybody. He went through the building from top to
bottom; he lifted every trapdoor, crept into every nook and corner
and hole and box into which it might be possible for the poor little
chap to have fallen. But it was all useless, Mr. Cleek--every
bit of it! The boy had vanished, utterly and completely; from the
minute the porter saw him pass the swing-door and go into the
glass-room we never discovered even the slightest trace of him, nor
have we been able to do so since. He has gone, he has vanished, as
completely as if he had melted into thin air, and if there is any
ghost of a clue to his whereabouts existing----"
"Let us go and see if we can unearth it," interrupted Cleek, rising.
"Mr. Narkom, is the limousine within easy reach?"
"Yes, waiting in Tavistock Street, dear chap. I told Lennard to be
on the lookout for us."
"Good! Then if Miss Larue will allow Mr. Trent to escort her as
far as the pavement, and he will then go on alone to his place of
business and await us there, you and I will leave the hotel by
the back way and join him as soon as possible. Leave by the front
entrance if you be so kind; and--pardon, one last word, Mr. Trent,
before you go. At the time when this boy's father vanished in much
the same way, eleven months ago, you had, I believe, a door porter
at your establishment name Felix Murchison. Is that man still in
your employ?"
"No, Mr. Cleek. He left about a week or so after James Colliver's
disappearance."
"Know where he is?"
"Not the slightest idea. As a matter of fact, he suddenly inherited
some money, and said he was going to emigrate to America. But I don't
know if he did or not. Why?"
"Oh, nothing in particular--only that I shouldn't be surprised if
the person who supplied that money was the pawnbroker who received in
pledge the jewels which your father handed over to James Colliver,
and that the sum which Felix Murchison 'inherited' so suddenly was
the L150 advanced upon those gems."
"How utterly absurd! My dear Mr. Cleek, you must surely remember
that the pawnbroker said the chap who pawned the jewels was a
gentlemanly appearing person, of good manners and speech, and
Murchison is the last man in the world to answer to that description.
A great hulking, bull-necked, illiterate _animal_ of that sort,
without an H in his vocabulary and with no more manners than a pig!"
"Precisely why I feel so certain _now_ that the pawnbroker's
'advance' was paid over to _him_," said Cleek, with a twitch of the
shoulder. "Live and learn, my friend, live and learn. Eleven
months ago I couldn't for the life of me understand why those
jewels had been pawned at all; to-day I realize that it was the only
possible course. Miss Larue, my compliments. Au revoir." And he
bowed her out of the room with the grace of a courtier, standing
well out of sight from the hallway until the door had closed
behind her and her companion and he was again alone with the
superintendent.
"Now for it! as they used to say in the old melodramas," he
laughed, stepping sharply to a wardrobe and producing, first, a
broad-brimmed cavalry hat, which he immediately put on, and then a
pair of bright steel handcuffs. "We may have use for this very
effective type of wristlets, Mr. Narkom; so it's well to go
prepared for emergencies. Now then, off with you while I lock the
door. That's the way to the staircase. Nip down it to the American
bar. There's a passage from that leading out to the Embankment
Gardens. A taxi from there will whisk us along Savoy Street,
across the Strand and up Wellington Street to Tavistock in less
than no time; so we may look to be with Lennard inside of another
ten minutes."
"Righto!" gave back the superintendent. "And I can get rid of this
dashed rig as soon as we're in the limousine. But, I say; any ideas,
old chap--eh?"
"Yes, two or three. One of them is that this is going to be one
of the simplest cases I ever tackled. Lay you a sovereign to a
sixpence, Mr. Narkom, that I solve the riddle of that glass-room
before they ring up the curtain of any theatre in London to-night.
What's that? Lying? No, certainly not. There's been no lying in the
matter at all; it isn't a case of that sort. The pawnbroker did
not lie; the porter who says he showed the boy into the room did
not lie; and the two women who looked into it and saw nothing but
an empty room did not lie either. The only thing that _did_ lie was a
vase of pink roses--a bunch of natural Ananiases that tried to
make people believe that they had been blooming and keeping fresh
ever since last August!"
"Good Lord! you don't surely think that that Loti chap----"
"Gently, gently, my friend; don't let yourself get excited. Besides,
I _may_ be all at sea, for all my cocksureness. I don't think I am,
but--one never knows. I'll tell you one thing, however: The man
with whom Madame Loti eloped had, for the purpose of carrying on the
intrigue, enlisted as a student under her husband, and gulled the
poor fool by pretending that he wished to learn waxwork making, when
his one desire was to make love to the man's worthless wife. When
they eloped, and Loti knew for the first time what a dupe he had
been, he publicly swore, in the open room of the Cafe Royal, that he
would never rest until he had run that man down and had exterminated
him and every living creature in whose veins his blood flowed. The
man was an English actor, Mr. Narkom. He posed under the _nom de
theatre_ of Jason Monteith--his real name was James Colliver! Step
livelier, please--we're dawdling!"