"I bet it's our man," said Gimblet, as Jennins dismissed the constable.
"Well, he must have altered his appearance if he is Mr. West, the
gentleman from South America, unless Matterson's account is very wrong
indeed," was Jennins' only comment. "Aren't you going a bit out of your
way, Mr. Gimblet," he asked, "to see any connection between this violent
attempt on Miss Turner's life and the actual murder which has taken
place at 13 Scholefield Avenue? For my part I don't see any reason to
think the two affairs have anything to do with each other. I admit it
looked as if Miss Turner and Mrs. Vanderstein had been in the house, but
surely that theory is disposed of now and it is clear that your friend
the actress was mistaken in thinking it was them she saw. Remember, she
didn't even know them by sight, but merely guessed at their identity
from the description in the advertisement: two ladies in white, one
wearing a red cloak and the other a mauve one. Why, there may have been
dozens of couples dressed in these colours going about London on Monday,
or any other night!"
"But the jewels," said Gimblet, "she saw them too, you know."
"Mrs. Vanderstein hasn't a monopoly of diamonds. And besides, at that
distance, and at the pace Miss Finner was going, she could only have
received the vaguest impression, in any case."
"I suppose I have got my head full of Scholefield Avenue," said Gimblet.
"I admit that I find it very hard to remember that Mrs. Vanderstein, at
all events, is a very long way from that spot. And I daresay you are
right, and Miss Turner never was much nearer to it. Still...." Gimblet
fell into an introspective silence from which he soon roused himself
with a start. "Tell me what you think, Jennins," he said. "Have you any
theory?"
"I haven't any theory about the Scholefield Avenue business," replied
Jennins reluctantly, "but there doesn't seem much mystery about the
other affair, to my way of thinking. Surely it is clear that when Mrs.
Vanderstein went off so secretly to Boulogne, for some reason she wished
it to appear that Miss Turner went with her, while as a matter of fact
the young lady remained in London. Ten to one we shall find that Mrs.
Vanderstein had a more compromising companion with her in France than
she left in England. Miss Turner, no doubt, retired to some secluded
spot till her presence should be again required, probably to lodgings
near Regent's Park. Very likely she stayed indoors all day for fear of
meeting acquaintances who might call for troublesome explanations as to
her presence there, and being in want of exercise and fresh air went
for a walk at night in order to procure them. Is it surprising that
this ruffian of whom Matterson caught a glimpse, meeting her at such an
hour and in so lonely a place, should not have spared her his unwelcome
advances? Matterson saw him trying to put an arm round her neck, and it
was very natural for her to scream in such circumstances. On our man
running up, the black-bearded loafer, thinking himself caught, struck
out at the girl in a fit of temper, and then took to his heels just in
time to save himself."
"All very fine, Jennins," said Gimblet, "but I can pick holes in that
theory till you'll take it for a sieve. To put aside the question
whether such a young lady as Miss Turner is said to be would lend
herself to the deception you suggest, is it conceivable that, if she
did go out to seek fresh air after dark, she should defer doing so till
two in the morning and then choose a particularly violent thunderstorm
to walk about in? Would her desire for exercise have led her to stand
half way up the embankment of the canal when the rain was falling in
torrents, and had been doing so since midnight? There is another thing
as inexplicable, and that is the attire in which she took this midnight
ramble. The clothes we saw at the hospital were mere rags. It seems
incredible that this young lady, whom we know to have been clad on
Monday night in purple and fine linen, should have been going about
on Wednesday morning in garments which were not only threadbare and
indescribably ancient but actually dirty. The battered state of the hat
may be due to the blow from the spade, and all the garments were of
course drenched by the rain, but there is something beyond that in their
repulsiveness. I can't imagine how she can have brought herself to wear
such things.
"Apart from this behaviour of hers, which is in itself a mystery, what
was the black-bearded one doing in the same place and hour and in the
same unpropitious conditions? They could hardly both have been wandering
there for the innocuous purpose you attribute to Miss Turner. And, mark
you, the man was no destitute waif devoid of the means of procuring
himself shelter from the rain. He carried a good serviceable spade which
would have got him the price of a night's lodging whenever he liked to
pawn it. Now the kind of rough you are thinking of does not carry a
spade or anything so suggestive of hard and honest labour. On the other
hand, who does use that implement in a town like this? A gardener might
have one, or a scavenger; or one or two other people. I think one of the
most likely, especially at night, would be a gravedigger."
"There you go!" exclaimed Jennins; "your mind is running on bodies
buried in the flower pots! I suppose you think this fellow was going to
bury the girl in one of the beds in the park!"
"It's all very strange," mused Gimblet, unheeding the inspector's
jeering tones. "The rope now. That is a puzzle. What could he be going
to do with a rope? And why was it tied to a spade? Had he got the thing
in his hands when he was trying to put his arms round Miss Turner's
neck? It must have hampered him a good deal and perhaps helped her to
avoid his clutches." Gimblet, with unseeing eyes, stared fixedly at his
companion, his mind busy with the problem. Suddenly a light seemed to
fall upon it. "By Jove!" he cried, "I believe I see the whole thing. If
only Matterson were certain about the gloves."
"What is it?" asked Jennins eagerly.
"No, no," said Gimblet. "It is too wild an idea at present, though
indeed I do not think I can be mistaken. But you have all the facts
before you, Jennins, and are as able to come to the right conclusion as
myself. I will leave you to think over the puzzle, while I go back to my
flat and see if the answer to the wire I sent to Mrs. Vanderstein has
yet arrived. It ought to be there by now."
But he found no telegram awaiting him. He was annoyed and surprised
at this, but the time taken by foreign telegrams is always uncertain,
and Mrs. Vanderstein might have been out when his reached Boulogne.
Lunch was being kept warm for him, and he made a hearty meal of Scotch
woodcock and asparagus; with which he drank iced coffee and ate sponge
cake instead of bread. There were strawberries to finish up with, and he
left the dining-room with a peaceful smile on his face.
It was three o'clock, and the telegram was still undelivered.
Gimblet decided to wait in for it, and, having now leisure to think of
others, rang up Sidney on the telephone and told him of the discovery of
Barbara Turner's whereabouts.
Incoherent questions came to him over the wire, but after a minute or
two Sidney said "good-bye" and rang off hastily. The detective smiled
as he hung up the receiver. In his mind's eye he saw the young man dash
out and drive swiftly in the direction of the hospital, and indeed the
picture his imagination drew for him could not have been more accurate.
The afternoon passed and the evening wore away, and yet no wire came
from Mrs. Vanderstein. It was tiresome, and Gimblet felt irritated with
the lady for her lack of courtesy. Surely she might have replied by now.
He felt that she held the clue to many things which perplexed him, and
he could not understand her failure to give it to him. His own telegram
had been very urgent. Well, the police were sending a man to see her; he
was to go over by the 2.20 from Charing Cross, and by now he would be
arriving at Boulogne. There could not be much more delay, telegram or no
telegram.
Gimblet gave up waiting and went out again. He felt he must go to
Scholefield Avenue once more. The tragedy that had taken place there
filled his thoughts; and, being convinced in spite of Jennins'
contemptuous incredulity that the two mysteries were in some remote
way connected, he was inclined to go and see if there were not some
trifling point about things at No. 13 which he had overlooked, instead
of waiting longer for the minute glimmer of light which Mrs. Vanderstein
might be able to throw upon the darkness with which the whole affair was
enveloped.
Scholefield Avenue looked very quiet and peaceful in the evening light;
the few boys who still hovered about the gate, survivals of the crowd
which the report of the murder had gathered there earlier in the day,
wore the tranquil air of those to whom time is no object, and Gimblet,
looking up and down the road, where the shadows lay long and the air
was cool in the green twilight of the overhanging trees, thought again
what a good place the murderer had chosen for his deed. Who would ever
suspect evil in so calm and bright an oasis among the mazes of dusty,
traffic-worn streets which surrounded it on every hand?
The house was in charge of a couple of policemen, who let Gimblet in
without demur when he showed them his card, and followed him with their
eyes with looks in which curiosity and admiration were blended. He
went over the garden again, examining half-obliterated footmarks, and
poking about between flowering plants lest something should be thrust
away there and had escaped his notice. Then into the house, where he
renewed his search, but without result. He looked into the drawing-room
again, where all was as he had left it except that the body had been
removed to a bedroom, then went into the library and gazed again at the
dirty finger marks on the white paint of the door. Whose fingers were
they, he wondered, which had left so many imprints? Was it the murdered
woman who had been shut up in that room? Had Mrs. Vanderstein and her
companion been there too, or was Jennins right, and their presence in
that vicinity on Monday night been a figment of Miss Finner's excited
imagination?
His thoughts reverted to the powder puff and the forged note, and he
took the folded paper from his pocket book and sniffed at it again. The
odour of scent, now faint indeed, but still clinging sweetly to the
impassioned words, was unmistakably that which hovered about the house
in Grosvenor Street. Arome de la Corse, it was called, he remembered,
and Amélie had said that Mrs. Vanderstein had it sent to her direct
from Paris. Such extraordinary things happen every day that anything
short of a miracle hardly attracts attention, but surely it would be a
strain on the long arm of coincidence to suppose that, having strayed
on to the scene of a murder owing to the mistaken idea that he was on
the track of Mrs. Vanderstein, he should then find that not only did the
dead woman resemble that lady and wear similar clothes but that she even
used the same uncommon perfume! Gimblet's whole soul revolted at such an
impossibility. In the name of common sense, he said to himself, it must
be Mrs. Vanderstein who had been seen on the doorstep on Monday night,
and none other, in spite of all probability to the contrary; though what
she was doing in that _galère_ certainly seemed incomprehensible from
nearly every point of view.
No contingency was ever dismissed by Gimblet as too wild for
consideration, and the only reasonable explanation of her presence,
he felt, was that she was in some way mixed up with the murder, an
accomplice at least, if not the actual author of the deed; but this
view involved so complete a shifting of ideas, that he put it aside for
further consideration in the light of the information which the man
sent by Scotland Yard to Boulogne might be able to furnish. If only the
walls could speak! he thought, as he finally realised that nothing more
was to be gathered, and, before leaving the room, strolled over to the
mantelpiece in order to have a nearer look at the picture which hung
there, and which he had noticed the day before.
It was a small oil painting, dark with dirt and age, and much of the
detail lost in a general blackness. Still the figures, those of a man
in blue and another in greenish brown in the act of lighting a long
pipe, could be clearly enough distinguished, together with enough of the
background to make it plain that this represented an interior. Gimblet
studied it with the keenest appreciation; it was just the class of
picture he most delighted in. A longing took him to remove it from its
nail and carry it to the light, and with rather a guilty glance back at
the door, which he had, however, shut as he entered, he put up his hand
and lifted it off.
As he delicately lowered his prize he caught sight of something which
made him very nearly drop it.
On the square of wall paper which had been hidden by the picture was
some pencilled writing, scrawled irregularly in a large round hand:
"I am locked in this room. I write this hoping it may be the means
of delivering these people to justice, for I am sure they intend no
good. I can see that by the fact that the man with the black beard has
promised to help me to escape. Why should there be need to escape? But
I do not believe he will keep his word. I have been here so long, I do
not know how long, but many hours, perhaps days, and God knows what
dreadful thing they are doing in the drawing-room to Mr"
The writing broke off abruptly about half way down the square of darker
colour, where the paper had been prevented from fading by the protecting
picture. Gimblet gazed at it with all the emotions of the scientist
whose theory has stood the decisive test. His hands fumbled in his
excitement, as he hastily snatched out his notebook, and sought in it
for the telegraph form Higgs had obtained from the Piccadilly office.
He flattened it against the wall below the pencilled words, more in
order to gloat over this proof of the soundness of his deductions than
for the sake of comparing the two handwritings, for it had only needed
the first glance to make it plain to him that they were one and the
same. The writing on the wall was larger; the letters followed each
other unevenly, and while some of the lines drooped lower and lower as
they advanced, others rose crookedly to meet them, so that one or two
actually overlapped and were rather hard to decipher, but the essential
character of the hand was clearly identical with that of the telegram.
There was no mistaking the slant of the short line of the h's or the
oval converging lines of the w's and the low crossing of the t's,
besides a hundred other small points which left the trained eye in no
doubt as to the authorship of the message.
"I wonder what Jennins will say to this," thought Gimblet, as he copied
down the words on a page of his notebook. "That Scholefield Avenue has
got on my brain, I suppose."
Excited as he was, he did not forget his original purpose in taking down
the painting, but carried it to the window and examined it closely by
the now diminishing light. On nearer inspection it proved to be of less
interest than he had expected, and he hung it up again with the less
regret.
"But even Jennins will have to admit that a leaning towards Art comes
in very useful sometimes," he thought, as he once more hid the scrawled
message from view.
It was long past eight when the detective returned to his flat, only to
find that there was still no answer to his telegram to Boulogne.
"Nothing has come and no one has been to see us since you went out,
sir," Higgs told him.
Higgs always spoke of himself as "us" when he was engaged on Gimblet's
affairs, just as he alluded, with a fine impartiality, to matters in
which his master alone was concerned as "ours."
"They've been ringing us up from the Yard," he went on, "been ringing
every few minutes for the last half-hour, and said I was to ask you to
speak to them on the telephone the minute you come in. There they go
again," he concluded, as the bell tinkled violently in the library at
the same moment as there came a ring at the front door.
Gimblet hurried to the instrument and Higgs went to answer the door.
"Are you there?"
"Yes, is that Mr. Gimblet? Hold the line, please, sir."
In a moment Jennins' voice sounded in his ear.
"Mr. Gimblet, that you? Oh, Mr. Gimblet, our man has wired from Boulogne
and it appears that things have taken a very unexpected turn. I daresay
you've seen an evening paper?"
Gimblet had heard so much when the library door burst open, and Sir
Gregory rushed into the room.
"Look at this," he almost screamed, evidently beside himself with some
painful emotion. "Look at this!"
He waved an evening paper.
"Oh, do go away, Sir Gregory," said Gimblet; "can't you see I'm busy?
Hullo, Jennins! Jennins, are you there?"
But Sir Gregory would not be denied. Seizing Gimblet's arm he tore him
away from the telephone, and holding the newspaper under his eyes
pointed to it with a shaking hand. He would have spoken, but sobs choked
his utterance, and, glancing at him for the first time and in no very
friendly humour, Gimblet was surprised to see that tears were rolling
down the kindly pink face.
"Why, what's the matter?" he said, but Sir Gregory only pointed to the
unfolded sheet. The detective's eyes at last followed the outstretched
finger, and he read:
"Murder of Mrs. Vanderstein.
"Missing Lady Found Dead in Her Hotel at Boulogne."