dim with the one French window closed and curtained. But Mr. Drinkwater
shut the door as well, and added indescribably to the lighting and
atmospheric effects by switching on all the electric lamps; they burned
sullenly in the partial daylight, exposed as thin angry bunches of
red-hot wire in dusty bulbs.
The electric light had been put in by the Cravens; all the other
fixtures in the room were as Cazalet remembered them. The bookshelves
contained different books, and now there were no busts on top. Certain
cupboards, grained and varnished in Victorian days, were undeniably
improved by being enameled white.
But the former son of the house gave himself no time to waste in
sentimental comparisons. He tapped a pair of mahogany doors, like those
of a wardrobe let into the wall.
"Have you looked in here?" demanded Cazalet in yet another key. His air
was almost authoritative now. Blanche could not understand it, but the
experienced Mr. Drinkwater smiled his allowances for a young fellow on
his native heath, after more years in the wilderness than were good for
young fellows.
"What's the use of looking in a cigar cupboard?" that dangerous man of
the world made mild inquiry.
"Cigar cupboard!" echoed Cazalet in disgust. "Did he really only use it
for his cigars?"
"A cigar cupboard," repeated Drinkwater, "and locked up at the time it
happened. What was it, if I may ask, in Mr. Cazalet's time?"
"I remember!" came suddenly from Blanche; but Cazalet only said, "Oh,
well, if you know it was locked there's an end of it."
Drinkwater went to the door and summoned his subordinate. "Just fetch
that chap from the pantry, Tom," said he; but the sullen sufferer from
police rule took his time, in spite of them, and was sharply rated when
he appeared.
"I thought you told me this was a cigar cupboard?" continued Drinkwater,
in the browbeating tone of his first words to Cazalet outside.
"So it is," said the man.
"Then where's the key?"
"How should I know? _I_ never kept it!" cried the butler, crowing over
his oppressor for a change. "He would keep it on his own bunch; find his
watch, and all the other things that were missing from his pockets when
your men went through 'em, and you may find his keys, too!"
Drinkwater gave his man a double signal; the door slammed on a petty
triumph for the servants' hall; but now both invaders remained within.
"Try your hand on it, Tom," said the superior officer. "I'm a free-lance
here," he explained somewhat superfluously to the others, as Tom applied
himself to the lock in one mahogany door. "Man's been drinking, I
should say. He'd better be careful, because I don't take to him, drunk
or sober. I'm not surprised at his master not trusting him. It's just
possible that the place _was_ open--he might have been getting out his
cigars before dinner--but I can't say I think there's much in it, Mr.
Cazalet."
It was open again--broken open--before many minutes; and certainly there
was not much in it, to be seen, except cigars. Boxes of these were
stacked on what might have been meant for a shallow desk (the whole
place was shallow as the wardrobe that the doors suggested, but lighted
high up at one end by a little barred window of its own) and according
to Cazalet a desk it had really been. His poor father ought never to
have been a business man; he ought to have been a poet. Cazalet said
this now as simply as he had said it to Hilton Toye on board the
_Kaiser Fritz_. Only he went rather farther for the benefit of the
gentlemen from Scotland Yard, who took not the faintest interest in the
late Mr. Cazalet, beyond poking their noses into his diminutive sanctum
and duly turning them up at what they saw.
"He used to complain that he was never left in peace on Saturdays and
Sundays, which of course were his only quiet times for writing," said
the son, elaborating his tale with filial piety. "So once when I'd been
trying to die of scarlet fever, and my mother brought me back from
Hastings after she'd had me there some time, the old governor told us
he'd got a place where he could disappear from the district at a
moment's notice and yet be back in another moment if we rang the gong. I
fancy he'd got to tell her where it was, pretty quick; but I only found
out for myself by accident. Years afterward, he told me he'd got the
idea from Jean Ingelow's place in Italy somewhere."
"It's in Florence," said Blanche, laughing. "I've been there and seen
it, and it's the exact same thing. But you mean Michelangelo, Sweep!"
"Oh, do I?" he said serenely. "Well, I shall never forget how I found
out its existence."
"No more shall I. You told me all about it at the time, as a terrific
secret, and I may tell you that I've kept it from that day to this!"
"You would," he said simply. "But think of having the nerve to pull up
the governor's floor! It only shows what a boy will do. I wonder if the
hole's there still!"
Now all the time the planetary detective had been watching his
satellite engaged in an attempt to render the damage done to the
mahogany doors a little less conspicuous. Neither appeared to be taking
any further interest in the cigar cupboard, or paying the slightest
attention to Cazalet's reminiscences. But Mr. Drinkwater happened to
have heard every word, and in the last sentence there was one that
caused him to prick up his expert ears instinctively.
"What's that about a hole?" said he, turning round.
"I was reminding Miss Macnair how the place first came to be--"
"Yes, yes. But what about some hole in the floor?"
"I made one myself with one of those knives that contain all sorts of
things, including a saw. It was one Saturday afternoon in the summer
holidays. I came in here from the garden as my father went out by that
door into the hall, leaving one of these mahogany doors open by mistake.
It was the chance of my life; in I slipped to have a look. He came back
for something, saw the very door you've broken standing ajar, and shut
it without looking in. So there I was in a nice old trap! I simply
daren't call out and give myself away. There was a bit of loose oilcloth
on the floor--"
"There is still," said the satellite, pausing in his task.
"I moved the oilcloth, in the end; howked up one end of the board
(luckily they weren't groove and tongue), sawed through the next one to
it, had it up, too, and got through into the foundations, leaving
everything much as I had found it. The place is so small that the
oilcloth was obliged to fall in place if it fell anywhere. But I had
plenty of time, because my people had gone in to dinner."
"You ought to have been a burglar, sir," said Mr. Drinkwater ironically.
"So you covered up a sin with a crime, like half the gentlemen who go
through my hands for the first and last time! But how did you get out of
the foundations?"
"Oh, that was as easy as pie; I'd often explored them. Do you remember
the row I got into, Blanche, for taking you with me once and simply
ruining your frock?"
"I remember the frock!" said Blanche.
It was her last contribution to the conversation; immediate developments
not only put an end to the further exchange of ancient memories, but
rendered it presently impossible by removing Cazalet from the scene with
the two detectives. Almost without warning, as in the harlequinade of
which they might have been the rascal heroes, all three disappeared down
the makeshift trap-door cut by one of them as a schoolboy in his
father's floor; and Blanche found herself in sole possession of the
stage, a very envious Columbine, indeed!
She hardly even knew how it happened. The satellite must have popped
back into the Michelangelo cigar cupboard. He might have called to Mr.
Drinkwater, but the only summons that Blanche could remember hearing was
almost a sharp one from Drinkwater to Cazalet. A lot of whispering
followed in the little place; it was so small that she never saw the
hole until it had engulfed two of the trio; the third explorer, Mr.
Drinkwater himself, had very courteously turned her out of the library
before following the others. And he had said so very little beforehand
for her to hear, and so quickly prevented Cazalet from saying anything
at all, that she simply could not think what any of them were doing
under the floor.
Under her very feet she heard them moving as she waited a bit in the
hall; then she left the house by way of the servants' quarters, of
course without holding any communication with those mutineers, and only
indignant that Mr. Drinkwater should have requested her not to do so.
It was a long half-hour that followed for Blanche Macnair, but she
passed it characteristically, and not in morbid probings of the many
changes that had come over one young man in less than the course of a
summer's day. He was excited at getting back, he had stumbled into a
still more exciting situation, so no wonder he was one thing one moment
and another the next. That was all that Blanche allowed herself to think
of Sweep Cazalet--just then.
She turned her wholesome mind to dogs, which in some ways she knew
better and trusted further than men. She had, of course, a dog of her
own, but it happened to be on a visit to the doctor or no doubt it would
have been in the way all the afternoon. But there was a dog at Uplands,
and as yet she had seen nothing of him; he lived in a large kennel in
the yard, for he was a large dog and rather friendless. But Blanche knew
him by sight, and had felt always sorry for him.
The large kennel was just outside the back door, which was at the top of
the cellar steps and at the bottom of two or three leading into the
scullery; but Blanche, of course, went round by the garden. She found
the poor old dog quite disconsolate in a more canine kennel in a corner
of the one that was really worthy of the more formidable carnivora.
There was every sign of his being treated as the dangerous dog that
Blanche, indeed, had heard he was; the outer bars were further protected
by wire netting, which stretched like a canopy over the whole cage; but
Blanche let herself in with as little hesitation as she proceeded to
beard the poor brute in his inner lair. And he never even barked at her;
he just lay whimpering with his tearful nose between his two front paws,
as though his dead master had not left him to the servants all his life.
Blanche coaxed and petted him until she almost wept herself; then
suddenly and without warning the dog showed his worst side. Out he
leaped from wooden sanctuary, almost knocking her down, and barking
horribly, but not at Blanche. She followed his infuriated eyes; and the
back doorway framed a dusty and grimy figure, just climbing into full
length on the cellar stairs, which Blanche had some difficulty in
identifying with that of Cazalet.
"Well, you really _are_ a Sweep!" she cried when she had slipped out
just in time, and the now savage dog was still butting and clawing at
his bars. "How did you come out, and where are the enemy?"
"The old way," he answered. "I left them down there."
"And what did you find?"
"I'll tell you later. I can't hear my voice for that infernal dog."
The dreadful barking followed them out of the yard, and round to the
right, past the tradesmen's door, to the verge of the drive. Here they
met an elderly man in a tremendous hurry--an unstable dotard who
instantly abandoned whatever purpose he had formed, and came to anchor
in front of them with rheumy eyes and twitching wrinkles.
"Why, if that isn't Miss Blanche!" he quavered. "Do you hear our Roy,
miss? I ha'n't heard that go on like that since the night that
happened!"
Then Cazalet introduced himself to the old gardener whom he had known
all his life; and by rights the man should have wept outright, or else
emitted a rustic epigram laden with wise humor. But old Savage hailed
from silly Suffolk, and all his life he had belied his surname, but
never the alliterative libel on his native country. He took the
wanderer's return very much as a matter of course, very much as though
he had never been away at all, and was demonstrative only in his
further use of the East Anglian pronoun.
"That's a long time since we fared to see you, Mus' Walter," said he;
"that's a right long time! And now here's a nice kettle of fish for you
to find! But I seen the man, Mus' Walter, and we'll bring that home to
him, never you fear!"
"Are you sure that you saw him?" asked Blanche, already under Cazalet's
influence on this point.
Savage looked cautiously toward the house before replying; then he
lowered his voice dramatically. "Sure, Miss Blanche. Why, I see him that
night as plain as I fare to see Mus' Walter now!"
"I should have thought it was too dark to see anybody properly," said
Blanche, and Cazalet nodded vigorously to himself.
"Dark, Miss Blanche? Why, that was broad daylight, and if that wasn't
there were the lodge lights on to see him by!" His stage voice fell a
sepulchral semitone. "But I see him again at the station this very
afternoon, I did! I promised not to talk about that--you'll keep that a
secret if I tell 'e somethin'?--but I picked him out of half a dozen at
the first time of askin'!"
Savage said this with a pleased and vacuous grin, looking Cazalet full
in the face; his rheumy eyes were red as the sunset they faced; and
Cazalet drew a deep breath as Blanche and he turned back toward the
river.
"First time of prompting, I expect!" he whispered. "But there's hope if
Savage is their strongest witness."
"Only listen to that dog," said Blanche, as they passed the yard.
VIII
FINGER-PRINTS
Hilton Toye was the kind of American who knew London as well as most
Londoners, and some other capitals a good deal better than their
respective citizens of corresponding intelligence. His travels were
mysteriously but enviably interwoven with business; he had an air of
enjoying himself, and at the same time making money to pay for his
enjoyment, wherever he went. His hotel days were much the same all over
Europe: many appointments, but abundant leisure. As, however, he never
spoke about his own affairs unless they were also those of the
listener--and not always then--half his acquaintances had no idea how
he made his money, and the other half wondered how he spent his time. Of
his mere interests, which were many, Toye made no such secret; but it
was quite impossible to deduce a main industry from the by-products of
his level-headed versatility.
Criminology, for example, was an obvious by-product; it was no morbid
taste in Hilton Toye, but a scientific hobby that appealed to his mental
subtlety. And subtle he was, yet with strange simplicities; grave and
dignified, yet addicted to the expressive phraseology of his less
enlightened countrymen; naturally sincere, and yet always capable of
some ingenuous duplicity.
The appeal of a Blanche Macnair to such a soul needs no analysis. She
had struck through all complexities to the core, such as it was or as
she might make it. As yet she could only admire the character the man
had shown, though it had upset her none the less. At Engelberg he had
proposed to her "inside of two weeks," as he had admitted without
compunction at the time. It had taken him, he said, about two minutes to
make up his mind; but the following summer he had laid more deliberate
siege, in accordance with some old idea that she had let fall to soften
her first refusal. The result had been the same, only more explicit on
both sides. She had denied him the least particle of hope, and he had
warned her that she had not heard the last of him by any means, and
never would till she married another man. This had incensed her at the
time, but a great deal less on subsequent reflection; and such was the
position between that pair when Toye and Cazalet landed in England from
the same steamer.
On this second day ashore, as Cazalet sat over a late breakfast in
Jermyn Street, Toye sent in his card and was permitted to follow it,
rather to his surprise. He found his man frankly divided between
kidneys-and-bacon and the morning paper, but in a hearty mood,
indicative of amends for his great heat in yesterday's argument. A
plainer indication was the downright yet sunny manner in which Cazalet
at once returned to the contentious topic.
"Well, my dear Toye, what do you think of it now?"
[Illustration: "What do you think of it now?"]
"I was going to ask you what you thought, but I guess I can see from
your face."
"I think the police are rotters for not setting him free last night!"
"Scruton?"
"Yes. Of course, the case'll break down when it comes on next week, but
they oughtn't to wait for that. They've no right to detain a man in
custody when the bottom's out of their case already."
"But--but the papers claim they've found the very things they were
searching for." Toye looked nonplused, as well he might, by an
apparently perverse jubilation over such intelligence.
"They haven't found the missing cap!" crowed Cazalet. "What they have
found is Craven's watch and keys, and the silver-mounted truncheon that
killed him. But they found them in a place where they couldn't possibly
have been put by the man identified as Scruton!"
"Say, where was that?" asked Toye with great interest. "My paper only
says the things were found, not where."
"No more does mine, but I can tell you, because I helped to find 'em."
"You don't say!"
"You'll never grasp where," continued Cazalet. "In the foundations under
the house!"
Details followed in all fulness; the listener might have had a part in
the Uplands act of yesterday's drama, might have played in the library
scene with his adored Miss Blanche, so vividly was every minute of that
crowded hour brought home to him. He also had seen the original
writing-cupboard in Michelangelo's old Florentine house; he remembered
it perfectly, and said that he could see the replica, with its shelf of
a desk stacked with cigars, and the hole in its floor. He was not so
sure that he had any very definite conception of the foundations of an
English house.
"Ours were like ever so many little tiny rooms," said Cazalet, "where I
couldn't stand nearly upright even as a small boy without giving my head
a crack against the ground floors. They led into one another by a lot of
little manholes--tight fits even for a boy, but nearly fatal to the boss
policeman yesterday! I used to get in through one with a door, at the
back of a slab in the cellars where they used to keep empty bottles;
they keep 'em there still, because that's how I led my party out last
night."
Cazalet's little gift of description was not ordered by an equal sense
of selection. Hilton Toye, edging in his word in a pause for a gulp of
coffee, said he guessed he visualized--but just where had those missing
things been found?
"Three or four compartments from the first one under the library," said
Cazalet.
"Did you find them?"
"Well, I kicked against the truncheon, but Drinkwater dug it up. The
watch and keys were with it."
"Say, were they buried?"
"Only in the loose rubble and brick-dusty stuff that you get in
foundations."
"Say, that's bad! That murderer must have known something, or else it's
a bully fluke in his favor."
"I don't follow you, Toye."
"I'm thinking of finger-prints. If he'd just've laid those things right
down, he'd have left the print of his hand as large as life for Scotland
Yard."
"The devil he would!" exclaimed Cazalet. "I wish you'd explain," he
added; "remember I'm a wild man from the woods, and only know of these
things by the vaguest kind of hearsay and stray paragraphs in the
papers. I never knew you could leave your mark so easily as all that."
Toye took the breakfast menu and placed it face downward on the
tablecloth. "Lay your hand on that, palm down," he said, "and don't move
it for a minute."
Cazalet looked at him a moment before complying; then his fine, shapely,
sunburnt hand lay still as plaster under their eyes until Toye told him
he might take it up. Of course there was no mark whatever, and Cazalet
laughed.
"You should have caught me when I came up from those foundations, not
fresh from my tub!" said he.
"You wait," replied Hilton Toye, taking the menu gingerly by the edge,
and putting it out of harm's way in the empty toast-rack. "You can't see
anything now, but if you come round to the Savoy I'll show you
something."
"What?"
"Your prints, sir! I don't say I'm Scotland Yard at the game, but I can
do it well enough to show you how it's done. You haven't left your mark
upon the paper, but I guess you've left the sweat of your hand; if I
snow a little French chalk over it, the chalk'll stick where your hand
did, and blow off easily everywhere else. The rest's as simple as all
big things. It's hanged a few folks already, but I judge it doesn't have
much chance with things that have lain buried in brick-dust. Say, come
round to lunch and I'll have your prints ready for you. I'd like awfully
to show you how it's done. It would really be a great pleasure."
Cazalet excused himself with decision. He had a full morning in front of
him. He was going to see Miss Macnair's brother, son of the late head of
his father's old firm of solicitors, and now one of the partners, to
get them either to take up Scruton's case themselves, or else to
recommend a firm perhaps more accustomed to criminal practise. Cazalet
was always apt to be elaborate in the first person singular, either in
the past or in the future tense; but he was more so than usual in
explaining his considered intentions in this matter that lay so very
near his heart.
"Going to see Scruton, too?" said Toye.
"Not necessarily," was the short reply. But it also was elaborated by
Cazalet on a moment's consideration. The fact was that he wanted first
to know if it were not possible, by the intervention of a really
influential lawyer, to obtain the prisoner's immediate release, at any
rate on bail. If impossible, he might hesitate to force himself on
Scruton in the prison, but he would see.
"It's a perfect scandal that he should be there at all," said Cazalet,
as he rose first and ushered Toye out into the lounge. "Only think: our
old gardener saw him run out of the drive at half past seven, when the
gong went, when the real murderer must have been shivering in the
Michelangelo cupboard, wondering how the devil he was ever going to get
out again."
"Then you think old man Craven--begging his poor pardon--was getting out
some cigars when the man, whoever he was, came in and knocked him on the
head?"
Cazalet nodded vigorously. "That's the likeliest thing of all!" he
cried. "Then the gong went--there may even have come a knock at the
door--and there was that cupboard standing open at his elbow."
"With a hole in the floor that might have been made for him?"
"As it happens, yes; he'd search every inch like a rat in a trap, you
see; and there it was as I'd left it twenty years before."
"Well, it's a wonderful yarn!" exclaimed Hilton Toye, and he lighted the
cigar that Cazalet had given him.
"I think it may be thought one if the police ever own how they made
their find," agreed Cazalet, laughing and looking at his watch. Toye had
never heard him laugh so often. "By the way, Drinkwater doesn't want any
of all this to come out until he's dragged his man before the beak
again."
"Which you mean to prevent?"
"If only I can! I more or less promised not to talk, however, and I'm
sure you won't. You knew so much already, you may just as well know the
rest this week as well as next, if you don't mind keeping it to
yourself."
Nobody could have minded this particular embargo less than Hilton Toye;
and in nothing was he less like Cazalet, who even now had the
half-regretful and self-excusing air of the impulsive person who has
talked too freely and discovered it too late. But he had been perfectly
delightful to Hilton Toye, almost too appreciative, if anything, and now
very anxious to give him a lift in his taxi. Toye, however, had shopping
to do in the very street that they were in, and he saw Cazalet off with
a smile that was as yet merely puzzled, and not unfriendly until he had
time to recall Miss Blanche's part in the strange affair of the previous
afternoon.