In the preliminary hasty search over the house, it had fallen to Higgs
to reach the first floor earlier than his master. Gimblet had left it to
him to examine, while he himself hurried to the upper stories; so that
he now entered the drawing-room for the first time.
He stood for a moment turning his head to right and left, taking in
the principal features of the apartment with quick, comprehensive
glances. Then, of a sudden, the whole figure of the man stiffened; and
it was hard to recognise Mr. Gimblet, the dilettante, the frequenter
of curiosity shops, the lounger in picture galleries, in the tense,
motionless form of Gimblet, the detective, at this moment. He stood, as
a pointer stands when it catches the wind of game, erect and stiff, in
an attitude of interrupted movement, one knee still bent for the step
he had been in the very act of making; his whole form absolutely still,
save for a series of short, successive intakings of the breath, as,
with head thrown back and his eyes shining with the keen, well-balanced
excitement of the hunter, he sniffed the air.
What was it he smelt? Something so faint, so indefinite, that after
the first arresting instant he had lost it altogether; and with it the
knowledge of what it was--which in that one second had seemed almost
his--slipped away and was gone, nor could his most strenuous effort
recall it. Oh, for one more whiff of that evasive, troubling odour! But
sniff as he might he could no longer detect anything, and slowly his
attitude relaxed, and he brought other senses to bear upon the scene.
The room was divided, by its shape, into a front and back drawing-room,
as is commonly the case in London houses; but the two had been thrown
into one and the door led into the narrower back part, so that the
light from the window overlooking the garden, which was obscured by
trees, while it still illumined all that lay on Gimblet's right, hardly
penetrated into the front and larger portion of the place. There the
closed shutters of the three windows leading to the balcony prevented
the light from finding an entrance, and it was very dark. The detective
lit the gas and looked around him.
It was a cheerful, pleasant room; not overcrowded with furniture, and
showing taste and judgment in its arrangement and decoration, though
there was nothing very original about it. On the walls, which were
covered with some light coloured paper, were hung three or four good
modern pictures; the mantelpiece was an eighteenth century one, and
on either side of it was placed a Chippendale cabinet, with shelves
for china, of which some good pieces could be seen through the small
panes of the glass doors. At the opposite end of the room was a long,
low bookcase and, except for a large writing bureau, the rest of the
furniture consisted of sofas and chairs, with one or two small tables.
It was a room at once dainty and desolate, gay and forlorn. The empty
flower vases which stood on the tables, the absence of stray books,
work, papers, or other signs of human occupancy, gave it a look of
discomfort and dreariness; but it was plain, from the bright chintzes
and curtains and the soft luxury of the carpet, that it only needed the
presence of its owners to assume a cheerful and lively aspect.
Gimblet began his examination in his usual methodical manner, working
his way over the floor on hands and knees, gazing at the carpet through
his lens at any place where there appeared a doubtful mark or change in
the appearance of its surface from that of the surrounding parts. As
he came to chairs or tables he moved them to one side, and continued
his quest on the spot where they had stood. There were two small
Chesterfield sofas, one of which jutted out at right angles to the
fire-place before the right hand window of the front part of the room,
the other facing the door with its back against the wall.
When the detective came to the sofa by the fireplace, he pushed it to
one side as he had pushed each piece of furniture in its turn, and as
his eyes fell on the floor beneath it a low whistle escaped him: there
was a patch of reddish stain on the green Wilton carpet, about three
inches in diameter, and a smaller spot or two near by of the same rusty
colour.
With his head on one side, and his lips still pursed as if to emit a
whistling sound, but with no audible noise issuing from them, Gimblet
gazed at the stain on the carpet; and the longer he looked the sterner
his face became; the whistling expression vanished, and he opened and
shut his mouth with a grinding sound as the teeth met. He rubbed his
finger over the marks, and the patch seemed to crumble away at his
touch, till a hole appeared in the carpet and the white boards of the
flooring were exposed to view. He applied his lens to the edges of the
hole and plucked at the frayed wool with his fingers. A small piece that
he pulled off he bestowed in one of the little specimen boxes with which
he had provided himself.
Then he replaced the sofa in its original position, and continued his
examination of the floor. Under the fender he discovered another of
the little objects he had picked up on the stairs, but nothing else
did he find of any interest till he began to turn his attention to
the furniture. Almost the first thing he looked at was the sofa that
concealed the hole in the carpet; he was drawn back to it with an
irresistible attraction. A careful scrutiny, however, did not reveal
much more than the fact that the chintz cover was rather tumbled.
Gimblet dug his hand down at the back of the seat, and pulled out the
part of it which was tucked down. As he did so he felt a little lump
under his fingers, and holding it up saw that it was yet another tiny
shining thing for his pill-box collection, and as he looked at the piece
of chintz he had pulled out he perceived several more of the same kind.
They glittered in the gaslight like little diamonds, but had evidently
come off the spangled tulle of a lady's dress. Gimblet remembered
that Mrs. Vanderstein's dress had been described by her maid as
"_diamantée_"; but then it was possible, indeed probable, that Mrs.
Mill, or her friends, possessed gowns of similar material. Gimblet
stooped again, and tugged up the rest of the sofa covering from the
depths behind the cushions. This time he pulled it all up; the whole
covering lay spread before him in an untidy, unwieldy mass, and from the
end, as he plucked it out, there shot two small objects, which fell to
the floor at his feet. In a moment he had lifted them from the ground
and stood staring at them: they were a piece of crushed and folded paper
and a minute powder puff.
The detective unfolded the paper, and held it to the light; it was a
sheet of thick white notepaper, and on it was embossed a crown and
device in heavy gold lettering. Below these was written in a fine,
slanting foreign hand
"Most adored, I count the hours, the minutes, till I shall hear for
the first time the sound of your voice. Heaven be praised that I have
not long to wait, and you, whom heaven has sent to me, accept the
thanks of my grateful heart. I send this by Madame Q."
The signature that followed made Gimblet open his eyes. "Felipe," in
conjunction with the crown at the head of the paper and the foreign
character of the penmanship, could refer to one person only. Gimblet
was well aware that the Prince of Targona was honouring London with his
presence. He glanced carefully round the room to make sure no one was
near, folded the paper carefully, and placed it in his notebook. Then he
turned his attention to the powder puff.
It was an ordinary little powder puff of pink silk and white down--very
small, very dainty, if very commonplace. Gimblet turned it over and
over, but could see nothing about it which stamped it as different
from other powder puffs. Not that it was a curio in the peculiarities
of which he was very well versed; he could not help realising that in
the matter of powder puffs his education had been neglected. A French
detective, he told himself sadly, would have read a whole history in
this soft toy. He brushed it across the back of his hand, but it left
no mark; he shook it into the palm, but no powder fell from it. It was
plain to him that, whatever uses it might have served in the white
hands that had formerly clasped it, it was not of any use at all in
his, and in his irritation he was inclined to hurl it from him. But his
methodical habits prevailed and he felt in his coat for a box to contain
it. And suddenly, with what seemed like an involuntary movement, he
lifted the hand that held the powder puff, and held it to his nose.
"Ah," he sighed, and it was a sigh of deep content. Then he stored
away the precious fluffy thing, and put it in his pocket. He finished
the tour of the furniture without further discovery; at the end of
it he requested Tremmels to read out the contents of the room from
the inventory, as he had done at the conclusion of his visits to each
room or landing, checking off each object as the clerk read out its
description.
"I am in hopes," he said to Sir Gregory, "of finding something not
mentioned in the inventory, which we might take to be the property
of Mr. West. But so far there is nothing that can possibly be his,
not so much as a toothbrush. He certainly seems to be a leader of the
simple life." Then he turned to Tremmels again. "Is there no mention
of the chair covers?" he asked. But the young man only stared at him
open-mouthed, and he seized the book from his hand.
"Let me see," he murmured, running a finger down the page. "Here we are.
'Two Chesterfield sofas and five arm-chairs with loose chintz covers.'
Might mean anything. Look here!" he turned to the clerk again, "you went
over the inventory. What do you remember about that sofa?" He pointed to
the one opposite the door, which, unlike the other sofas and chairs, had
no chintz covering. Tremmels was flurried by the detective's sharp tone.
"I--I don't remember anything at all," he stammered.
"What, don't you remember that it had a cover?"
Gimblet's second question was still more sharply spoken. The clerk shot
a glance at him in which suspicion, timidity, and bewilderment were
oddly mixed, and he answered stubbornly, repeating his former words as
if he imagined a trap were being laid for him.
"I don't remember anything about it." His pale face wore an expression
more wooden than ever.
The detective turned from him with an impatient movement, and stood
looking down at the sofa with a frown on his face. It was exactly the
same as the one in the front part of the room, but, instead of a cover
of pink and white chintz, it displayed only the upholstery with which
it had been originally covered by the makers: a kind of white tapestry
with grey flowers and flecks of red, in general colouring not unlike
the chintz on the other sofas and chairs, but tightly fitting and
leaving exposed the bare legs of brown varnished wood, which were of a
particularly ugly shape.
"Come," said Gimblet at last, "I must go downstairs."
"What did you find?" Sir Gregory asked him anxiously as they went down,
followed at a distance by the clerk, "what did you find by the other
sofa?"
The detective hesitated an instant.
"Sir Gregory," he said, "there is something here, some story to be read,
if I can read it. The walls are trying to speak to me, I believe, if I
could only listen rightly. There are things very plain that I can see,
but not enough of them, and there is something that I don't understand.
But what I have seen points to sinister things, and I must warn you that
I don't like the look of them."
"Mr. Gimblet!" cried Sir Gregory. "What do you mean?"
"Yes, Sir Gregory," said the detective. "I am very much more--uneasy
about your friend than I have yet been. I fear that, when I am in a
position to give you news of her, it may be very bad. You may have to
stand a shock. Don't you think it would be best if you went home and
waited till I came to you?"
But, though on Sir Gregory's face there crept a look of terrified grief,
he would not go.
The dining-room told nothing, Gimblet's researches there were vain, and
he soon adjourned to the room behind it, which seemed to be a library
or smoking-room. The shutters, as they had seen from the garden, were
fastened, but by this time the last of the long summer twilight was
fading and the night promised to fall dark and windy. Gimblet's first
act was to light the gas.
It was a small room, this back room, where, no doubt, Mr. Mill, when
he was at home, was accustomed to smoke his pipe and attend to his
correspondence. Two of the walls were lined with bookshelves; one side
was taken up by the window; and on the fourth, opposite the door and
above the fire-place, were hung a quantity of mezzotints framed in
sombre black. They surrounded a small oil painting that filled the place
of honour immediately over the chimney piece, and which caught Gimblet's
interested eye directly. It appeared to be an example of the early Dutch
school, and he was seized with the desire to examine it more closely.
The fire-place below it was lined with old blue and white tiles, and at
these too he cast an envious glance, but the feelings of the collector
were subservient just now to those of the detective, and he turned to
the more everyday furniture of the room.
There was not very much in it: a couple of arm-chairs stood one on each
side of the fire-place, and before the window was a large writing table
with inkstand and blotting book disposed upon it, together with a few
odds and ends. Even with these the table looked empty; one missed the
papers that by rights should have been scattered there. As Gimblet stood
beside it, he was conscious of the cold draught that whistled by his
ear, and it was then that he first looked toward the window.
"It must be open," he said to himself, and then, as he looked closer:
"By Jingo!"
It was a sash window of the old-fashioned kind, with a dozen or so
wood-framed panes to each half of it, and the usual metal catch holding
the top and bottom in position together when the window was shut. It
was shut now, and the cold air that pervaded the place entered through
cracks in the shutters, and after that encountered no further obstacle,
for the top middle pane of the lower sash was destitute of glass.
Gimblet pushed away the table and examined the empty framework
carefully, touching the edges with an incautious finger, which, however,
he withdrew rather hurriedly and transferred to his mouth. He looked
at the floor; and then, following his usual custom, knelt down on it,
lens in hand. The gaslight was obscured by the shadow of the writing
table, and he had recourse to the aid of a pocket electric torch. He was
satisfied with what he saw, apparently, for he soon rose and turned to
the window again. He unfastened the catch, and placing one hand on the
framework sought to raise the sash, but it stuck stiffly, and both hands
and a good deal of strength had to be exerted before he was able to lift
it.
Then he flashed the light of the little torch on the window sill, and
took from it a splinter of broken glass. After this he pursued his
inspection of the room and its contents. There was, as has been said,
little enough in it except books, but everything there was came in for
the usual close scrutiny; the waste paper basket was not forgotten, nor
were the empty grate and coal scuttle. In the end, after comparing the
things mentioned in the inventory with those in the room, Gimblet shut
the door into the hall, and ran his lens hastily over its woodwork.
Apparently he saw on it more than he expected, for he returned more
slowly to the task and spent several minutes examining some small spots
of dirt, which were visible to the naked eye on the white paint.
At last he had done, and there only remained the basement to be
investigated. This took some time, and the results disappointed him,
with the exception of a cupboard under the stairs where he discovered a
housemaid's dustpan full of pieces of broken glass. He seized on it with
eager excitement, and examined the surface of the tin very carefully
with his lens; only to put it down again with an irritated clicking of
the tongue.
Sir Gregory watched these proceedings in a stricken silence; his
hopes had turned to lead at the words Gimblet had addressed to him on
leaving the drawing room; as each successive door was thrown open he
felt a tightening of the heart and a sick fear of being confronted
with some terrible sight. Now he would almost have preferred that the
detective should find no clue, so much he dreaded the solution to which
he instinctively felt that these small discoveries were irresistibly
leading.
The face of the clerk, who equally shared the rôle of silent onlooker,
wore an expression of excited interest, except when he was addressed,
when it relaxed into its usual wooden apathy. At other times he peered
over Sir Gregory's shoulder with feverish, straining eyes, evidently
possessed by all the passion for sensation in any form which is common
to his class; though, that he was as much in the dark as Sir Gregory,
with regard to the conclusions suggested to the detective by the
various objects he examined, was clear from the look of something like
elation with which he watched the minute attention bestowed upon the
unprofitable dustpan.
Gimblet returned this article to its place, and drew out, one by one,
the other things in the cupboard: a water-can, a bucket, a scrubbing
brush, and other odds and ends. The last thing he brought to light was
a crumpled ball of newspaper, stuffed away at the back of some brooms
and pails. This did not look interesting; and, while Sir Gregory saw
with relief the handling of anything which gave him breathing space,
Tremmel's face fell.
Gimblet, however, was too methodical to ignore anything, even so
unpromising an object as an old newspaper. He opened it out on the floor
of the passage, unrolling the crumpled pages and spreading them flat on
the boards. In the middle of the ball was a small quantity of dust, or
rather what looked more like earth. Gimblet scooped it up in one hand
and let it fall through his fingers into the palm of the other; it was
black and fine, but gritty to the touch. With a puzzled expression he
stowed some of it away in one of his little boxes, and put the rest in
his pocket, wrapped in a piece of the newspaper. Then he disappeared
into the coal cellar, which was the only place left that he had not
visited. He found nothing there.
By this time it was nearly ten o'clock.
They went back into the hall and Gimblet opened the door of the little
library.
"Sit down in here, Sir Gregory," he said, "you have been on your feet
for hours"--and indeed the baronet was dropping with fatigue--. "I am
just going out into the garden, and you may as well rest a little. As
for you," he added to Tremmels, "you can go home if you like. I've done
with the inventory."
"There's the key," the clerk reminded him, "and, if you don't mind my
sitting down here in the hall for a few minutes before I go ... I'm
feeling a bit tired myself, sir."
He certainly looked it, but then he had looked so ill from the
beginning that the effect of these hours of standing about and the
lack of food, which told heavily upon Sir Gregory, hardly added to the
miserable aspect of Tremmels, whatever he might be feeling.
Gimblet told him to sit down, and leaving them went out into the
garden. He walked round to the back, and along the path which led to
the toolshed. Going into it he hunted, by the light of his torch, among
the implements that leant against the wall; but what he sought was not
there, and he retreated, unsatisfied. As he returned slowly to the
house, he moved his lamp from side to side, so that the light shone on
the flower beds between which he walked and not on the path beneath his
feet; it was as if he hoped to find what he wanted among the flowers.
Turning the corner of the wall, he saw a dark figure in the act of
shutting the further gate; it came towards him and he recognised the
artist, Brampton.
"You work late, Mr. Gimblet," he said, as he met the detective. "Any
discoveries?"
Gimblet did not reply; he was looking at his watch.
"It _is_ late," he said after a pause; and then half to himself, "late!
too late, and too dark," he murmured; and again, "perhaps it is just
as well. It will do Sir Gregory no harm to wait till to-morrow for bad
news."
"What," said Brampton, "you have bad news for him?"
"I fear there will be bad news--to-morrow," said Gimblet.
The night was very dark, for clouds had gathered afresh, and the wind
was getting up again. The leaves of the trees in the street rustled
loudly as if in protest; from a distance the tinkle of a barrel organ
sounded fitfully in the intervals between gusts of wind.
"It's as cold as winter," grumbled Brampton.
Gimblet was staring up at the front of the house, and when he spoke
Brampton was struck by the change in his voice.
"Of course!" he cried, "the crumpled newspaper! What have I been about?
Now, ah, now I know! Mr. Brampton," he said, moving, so that he faced
the other in the darkness, "there is something very terrible here;
something to be done that is quite unfit for Sir Gregory to take part
in. I am only too well convinced that a crime has been committed in this
house, a gruesome and dastardly crime, which but for the merest accident
might not have been discovered for weeks. No ordinary criminals have
been at work here; we have to deal with some scoundrel so cold-blooded
and resourceful, so prudent, and so full of forethought and vile
cunning, as I do not think I have ever encountered before. What is your
nerve like, Mr. Brampton? I see you are muscularly a strong man, and I
shall have need of help. What do you say? Can you give me the assistance
I want, or shall I go and find the policeman on this beat?"
The solemn words of the detective, and still more acutely the grave and
urgent note in his voice, thrilled the imagination of the artist, and
awoke in him a horrified perception of the seriousness of the situation,
which hitherto he had looked on with an eye, half amused, half derisive,
as we may contemplate a game of Red Indians played by some earnest
and dramatic children. The spirit of adventure cried aloud in him,
and overcame the shrinking of a refined nature from contact with the
horrible.
"You can rely on me," was all he said, and thereupon Gimblet ran up to
the door, calling to Higgs to open it.
The other men were sitting as he had left them, Sir Gregory in an
arm-chair by the library fire-place, and the clerk in the hall; both
drooped in attitudes of extreme weariness.
"Will you please stay where you are a little longer?" Gimblet said to
Sir Gregory. "I am going upstairs with Mr. Brampton, to see if he can
tell me one or two things I want to know about the ordinary disposal of
the furniture; and after that we will go home, unless you will be guided
by me and do so at once. No? Well, we shall not be long. We shall not
want you," he added to Tremmels, who was struggling stiffly to rise from
his seat.
At Gimblet's words he sank back again, and leant his head weakly against
the wall.
With a sign to Higgs and Brampton to follow him, Gimblet went upstairs.
The gas was still burning in the drawing-room, and the door stood open
as he had left it. Gimblet paused on the threshold and drew Brampton's
attention to the sofa opposite.
"Do you remember," he asked, "whether that sofa had a cover like the
other before Mr. Mill went away?"
Brampton looked at it doubtfully.
"I can't say I do really," he said. "I ought to know, of course, but
I don't feel quite sure. You see, the colouring is so much like that
of the chintzes. One might never notice it. Still, the legs are very
ugly; I think I should have observed them. And it is not like Mrs. Mill
to leave an ugly thing so plainly displayed. But on the whole I'm not
certain about it."
"Don't you feel," said Gimblet, "that there is something terrible,
something fearful, in those shining brown pieces of wood? Their ugliness
should be decently covered. Unfortunately, I am afraid I know where to
look for their covering."
He led the way to one of the French windows of the front room and threw
it open. Unfastening the shutters, which still barred the way, he flung
them back and went out on to the balcony, followed by the two men.
It was, as he had seen from the ground, an unusually broad one, and
extended across the whole width of the house. A low wall about nine
inches high ran round its edge, supporting a balustrade of stone. A
large green painted wooden box, or trough, about ten feet long by a yard
wide, and as tall as the balustrade, was planted with flowers, which did
not appear to be in a very flourishing condition.
By the light of the street lamp they could see that the geraniums'
petals were turning black, and that the marguerites hung their heads
on stalks from which all vigour seemed to have departed. Within the
balustrade the black shadows lay like a pool of ink, and the floor of
the balcony was quite invisible, except where the open window through
which they had stepped let out a narrow stream of light.
"Open the shutters of the other windows," Gimblet said to Higgs.
When this was done they could see better. To Brampton's amazement
Gimblet's next act was to grasp one of the geraniums and pull it up by
the roots; a daisy followed, and in a few minutes he had torn up every
plant. Brampton, as he stood watching, noticed how easily they came up.
Then Gimblet called to him.
"Now, Mr. Brampton, if you and Higgs will take that end of the box, I
can manage this one. I want to tilt it up a little."
It needed all the efforts of the three men to move the box, full to the
brim of soil as it was. Panting and heaving, they shifted it first away
from the balustrade, and tilted it towards the wall of the house. The
earth poured out as the angle increased, and in a minute the floor was
deep in it.
"Gently, gently," said Gimblet. "Look, what is that?" and he pointed to
something white, which was poking out through the earth in the box.
His electric torch flashed upon it, and the others, balancing the tilted
flower box on its edge, peered in, and saw that it was a bit of pink and
white chintz.
It seemed a long while before Gimblet spoke. He stood as if turned to
stone, and Brampton felt an indefinable horror stealing over him, a
dread of he knew not what, but which he seemed to be conscious was in
some way a reflection or telepathic transference of the other's unspoken
thoughts.
At last with an obvious effort Gimblet straightened himself.
"We must tilt out a little more earth," he said in a low tone, "very
carefully now."
Very cautiously they raised the side of the stand again, and a rush of
soil poured over the edge; the little patch of white they had seen in a
corner became a large piece, and almostly instantly it was plain to them
all that the greater part of the box was full of it. Leaving the others
to manage the box, which was now easily steadied, Gimblet ran round and
knelt at its side, scooping out handfuls of garden mould and disclosing
what looked like a very long, bulky bundle of flowered chintz.
Suddenly, in a voice hardly above a whisper, Brampton broke the silence.
"My God!" he said, pointing, and staring with horrified eyes.
From the corner of the wrapper a hand protruded, half covered with
earth; it was a white and shapely hand, the hand of a woman.
"Do you see it?" whispered Brampton again, and leant shaking against the
wall.
"It's a hand," said Higgs, troubled but stolid.
Gimblet was very pale, and he took a quick breath as he braced himself
to lift the enveloping chintz. The lighted windows cast three streaks
of light out into the darkness and threw grotesque distorted shadows of
the men upon the coping of the balcony. A sudden gust of wind made the
trees in the street moan and shiver as though they had been swept by the
passing broom of some night-riding hag; all around them the darkness
gathered close like a wicked thing that would if it dared swallow up the
tiny protecting lights men burn in self-defence.
Gimblet felt himself struggling against some such malevolent influences;
half conscious fears, some sensation of evil presences in the air,
gibing, mocking, clustering round to gloat over the results of earthly
villainy, seemed to paralyse him; and he had to call up his reserves
of will power before, after a moment's hesitation, he bent forward and
unrolled the chintz covering.
Inside it was the body of a young woman. Long black hair lay in masses
on her shoulders and streamed over the single white garment she wore.
The face was so terribly disfigured as to be quite unrecognisable.
With a shudder Gimblet drew the wrapping over her again.
"Vitriol," he muttered, and became aware, as he spoke, of some one
behind him in the opening of the window.
Before he could turn, a heartstricken cry sounded in his ear, and he was
not in time to catch Sir Gregory, who staggered back in the embrasure,
and from there slid fainting to the ground. As Gimblet sprang to his
help, he had a fleeting vision of a ghastly face and a crouching figure
in the back of the drawing-room: it was the face of Tremmels, the clerk,
but so wild and white with terror, so distorted by the shock of what he
had seen as to be almost like that of another man.
Suspecting from the noise made by the opening shutters, followed by the
sudden and prolonged silence, that something was happening on the floor
above them, and unable any longer to bear the suspense and curiosity
accentuated by waiting and inactivity, Sir Gregory, followed by the
clerk, had crept upstairs into the drawing-room without attracting the
attention of Gimblet or his assistants, and the horror of what they had
seen was too much for both of them.
As with the help of Higgs Gimblet lifted the inanimate form of the
baronet from where it had dropped, a sudden loud noise from the street
below made them nearly let fall their burden; and it was a second before
any of them realised that the sound was only the first jangling bar of
a popular music hall tune. The barrel organ they had heard a quarter of
an hour earlier had wandered into Scholefield Avenue, and, attracted
without doubt by the lighted windows, had thought fit to draw up before
No. 13 and there begin its headlong plunge into melody. Half the
rollicking air it was playing had been thumped forth, with all the usual
din of banging bass and clanking scales, before any one of those who
stood above it in the grim presence of death sufficiently recovered his
presence of mind to be able to stop it.
Telling the clerk curtly not to be an ass, but to pull himself together
and follow them, Gimblet, with the help of Higgs and Brampton, carried
Sir Gregory out of the fatal house and into No. 15, the home of the
artist. Here they gave him over to the care of Mrs. Brampton, a capable,
bustling woman with common-sense written all over her, to whom her
husband explained in guarded terms as much of the situation as was
inevitable.
"There has been a terrible tragedy next door, my dear," he told her.
"This poor gentleman has fainted on learning of the death of his
friend," and the kind-hearted, sensible creature took charge of Sir
Gregory without wasting precious time in questions.
At his request, Brampton conducted the detective to the telephone, while
Higgs was sent out to look for a policeman.
"Is that Scotland Yard?" Gimblet was asking, as the artist shut the door
on him and returned to his wife.
By the time the detective had finished telephoning, Higgs was back with
two policemen, the one he had found in the next street having whistled
for a comrade. Gimblet went with them to No. 13, and together they
entered the silent drawing-room, where the gas was still flaring and the
windows stood open to the night like three black doors to a villainous
and tragic world. With the help of the new-comers the body of the dead
woman was lifted out of the flower box and carried into the house,
where, still enveloped in the chintz cover, it was gently deposited on
one of the sofas. For a moment they turned back the wrapping, while
Gimblet searched hastily for some clue that should have inadvertently
been enclosed in it, but there was nothing besides the body and the one
garment in which it was clad.
"See," he murmured in a low voice, pointing to an oblong incision at
the edge of the chemise, "they have cut away the linen there. No doubt
the name, or initial, was embroidered in that place. What fine linen
it is; and this lace trimming is as delicate as a cobweb! If we had
nothing else to go by, this would show that the murdered woman was rich
and luxury-loving. Most women, if they had such lace, would keep it to
adorn their dresses with."
He drew the covering over her again; and, going back to the balcony,
stood looking at the half-empty box and the mound of earth that was
heaped upon the floor.
"They must have had a job to clear away the surplus soil," he remarked
to Higgs, who had followed him. "I suspect it was carried down to the
garden, bucketful by bucketful, and the last handful or two were swept
up into a newspaper. I found some trace of it in a cupboard downstairs."
Leaving the police to guard the house, they went in search of Sir
Gregory, and found him so far recovered as to be sent home in a taxi in
the care of Higgs. The clerk also was seen safely started on the way to
his lodgings, where, Gimblet thought to himself, he would probably take
the brandy bottle to bed with him.
"You will have to attend the inquest, you know," he said to him as he
was departing. "It may be to-morrow or the next day. Good evening, and
don't stay awake all night."
After renewed thanks and apologies to the Bramptons, Gimblet found
another taxi, and, getting in, gave the driver the address of Joe
Sidney's rooms.
"I think," he said to himself, "it's just about time I paid that young
gentleman a visit."