The Third R. Austin Freeman Megapack

by R. Austin Freeman

  “I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that,” replied Wampole, with somewhat belated caution. “Any of us could have gone into the strong-room; but not without being seen by some of the others. Still, one must admit that a robbery might have been possible; the point is that it didn’t happen. I checked those boxes when I helped to put them in, and I checked them when we took them out. They were all there in their original wrappings with Mr. Hollis’s handwriting on them and all the seals intact. It is nonsense to talk of a robbery in the face of those facts.”

  “And you attach no significance to Mr. Osmond’s disappearance?”

  “No, sir. He was a bachelor and could go when and where he pleased. It was odd of him, I admit, but he sometimes did odd things; a hasty, impulsive gentleman, quick to jump at conclusions and make decisions and quick to act. Not a discreet gentleman at all; rather an unreasonable gentleman, perhaps, but I should say highly scrupulous. I can’t imagine him committing a theft.”

  “Should you describe him as a nervous or timid man?”

  Mr. Wampole emitted a sound as if he had clock work in his inside and was about to strike. “I never met a less nervous man,” he replied with emphasis. “No, sir. Bold to rashness would be my description of Mr. John Osmond. A buccaneering type of man. A yachtsman, a boxer, a wrestler, a footballer, and a cricketer. A regular hard nut, sir. He should never have been in an office. He ought to have been a sailor, an explorer, or a big-game hunter.”

  “What was he like to look at?”

  “Just what you would expect—a big, lean, square-built man, hatchet-faced, Roman-nosed, with blue eyes, light-brown hair, and a close-cropped beard and moustache. Looked like a naval officer.”

  “Do you happen to know if his residence has been examined?”

  “Mr. Woodstock and the Chief Constable searched his rooms, but of course they didn’t find anything. He had only two small rooms, as he took his meals and spent a good deal of his time with Mr. Hepburn, his brother-in-law. He seemed very fond of his sister and her two little boys.”

  “Would it be possible for me to see those rooms?”

  “I don’t see why not, sir. They are locked up now, but the keys are here and the rooms are only a few doors down the street.”

  Here occurred a slight interruption, for Mr. Wampole, having completed his operations on the bell, now connected it with the battery—which had also been under repair—when it emitted a loud and cheerful peal. At the same moment, as if summoned by the sound, Polton entered holding a small drawing-board on which was a neatly executed plan of the premises.

  “Dear me, sir!” exclaimed Mr. Wampole, casting an astonished glance at the plan. “You are very thorough in your methods. I see you have even put in the furniture.”

  “Yes,” Thorndyke agreed, with a faint smile; “we must needs be thorough even if we reach no result.”

  Mr. Wampole regarded him with a sly smile. “Very true, sir,” he chuckled—“very true, indeed. A bill of costs needs something to explain the total. But, God bless us! what is this?”

  “This” was, in effect, a diminutive vacuum cleaner, fitted with a little revolving brush and driven by means of a large dry battery, which Polton was at the moment disinterring from his suitcase. Thorndyke briefly explained the nature of the apparatus while Mr. Wampole stared at it with an expression of stupe faction.

  “But why have you brought it here, sir?” he exclaimed. “The premises would certainly be the better for a thorough cleaning, but surely—”

  “Oh, we are not going to ‘vacuum clean’ you,” Thorndyke reassured him. “We are going to take samples of dust from the different parts of the premises.”

  “Are you, indeed, sir? And, if I may take the liberty of asking, what do you propose to do with them?”

  “I shall examine them carefully when I get home,” Thorndyke replied, “and I may then possibly be able to judge whether the robbery took place here or elsewhere.”

  As Thorndyke furnished this explanation, Mr. Wampole stood gazing at him as if petrified. Once he opened his mouth, but shut it again tightly as if not trusting himself to speak. At length he rejoined: “Wonderful! wonderful!” and then, after an interval, he continued meditatively: “I seem to have read somewhere of a wise woman of the East who was able, by merely examining a hair from the beard of a man who had fallen downstairs, to tell exactly how many stairs he had fallen down. But I never imagined that it was actually possible.”

  “It does sound incredible,” Thorndyke admitted, gravely. “She must have had remarkable powers of deduction. And now, if Mr. Polton is ready, we will begin our perambulation. Which was Mr. Osmond’s office?”

  “I will show you,” replied Mr. Wampole, recovering from his trance of astonishment. He led the way out into the hall and thence into a smallish room in which were a writing-table and a large, old-fashioned, flap-top desk.

  “This table,” he explained, “is Mr. Hepburn’s. The desk was used by Mr. Osmond and his belongings are still in it. That second door opens into Mr. Woodstock’s office.”

  “Is it usually kept open or closed?” Thorndyke asked.

  “It is nearly always open; and as it is, as you see”—here he threw it open—“exactly opposite the door of the strong-room, no one could go in there unobserved unless Mr. Woodstock, Mr. Hepburn, and Mr. Osmond had all been out at the same time.”

  Thorndyke made a note of this statement and then asked: “Would it be permissible to look inside Mr. Osmond’s desk? Or is it locked?”

  “I don’t think it is locked. No, it is not,” he added, demonstrating the fact by raising the lid; “and, as you see, there is nothing very secret inside.”

  The contents, in fact, consisted of a tobacco-tin, a couple of briar pipes, a ball of string, a pair of gloves, a clothes-brush, a pair of much-worn hair-brushes, and a number of loose letters and bills. These last Thorndyke gathered together and laid aside without examination, and then proceeded methodically to inspect each of the other objects in turn, while Mr. Wampole watched him with the faintest shadow of a smile.

  “He seems to have had a pretty good set of teeth and a fairly strong jaw,” Thorndyke remarked, balancing a massive pipe in his fingers and glancing at the deep tooth-marks on the mouth-piece, “which supports your statement as to his physique.”

  He peered into the tobacco-tin, smelt the tobacco, inspected the gloves closely, especially at their palmar surfaces, and tried them on; examined the clothes brush, first with the naked eye and then with the aid of his pocket-lens, and, holding it inside the desk, stroked its hair backwards and forwards, looking closely to see if any dust fell from it. Finally, he took up the hair-brushes one at a time and, having examined them in the same minute fashion, produced from his pocket a pair of fine forceps and a seed-envelope. With the forceps he daintily picked out from the brushes a number of hairs which he laid on a sheet of paper, eventually transferring the collection to the little envelope, on which he wrote: “Hairs from John Osmond’s hair-brushes.”

  “You don’t take anything for granted, sir,” remarked Mr. Wampole, who had been watching this proceeding with concentrated interest (perhaps he was again reminded of the wise woman of the East).

  “No,” Thorndyke agreed. “Your description was hearsay testimony, whereas these hairs could be produced in Court and sworn to by me.”

  “So they could, sir; though, as it is not disputed that Mr. Osmond has been in this office, I don’t quite see what they could prove.”

  “Neither do I,” rejoined Thorndyke. “I was merely laying down the principle.”

  Meanwhile, Polton had been silently carrying out his part of the programme, not unobserved by Mr. Wampole; and a pale patch about a foot square, between Mr. Hepburn’s chair and the front of the table, where the pattern of the grimy carpet had miraculously reappeared, marked the site of his operations. Tenderly removing the little silken bag, now bulging with its load of dust, he slipped it into a numbered envelope and wrote the number on the spot on the plan t
o which it corresponded.

  Presently a similar patch appeared on the carpet in front of Osmond’s desk, and when the sample had been disposed of and the spot on the plan marked, Polton cast a wistful glance at the open desk.

  “Wouldn’t it be as well, sir, to take a specimen from the inside?” he asked.

  “Perhaps it would,” Thorndyke replied. “It should give us what we may call a ‘pure culture.’” He rapidly emptied the desk of its contents, when Polton introduced the nozzle of his apparatus and drew it slowly over every part of the interior. When this operation was completed, including the disposal of the specimen and the marking of the plan, the party moved into Mr. Woodstock’s office, and from thence back into the clerks’ office.

  “I find this investigation intensely interesting,” said Mr. Wampole, rubbing his hands gleefully. “It seems to combine the attractions of a religious ceremony and a parlour game. I am enjoying it exceedingly. You will like to have the names of the clerks who sit at those desks, I presume.”

  “If you please,” replied Thorndyke.

  “And, of course, you will wish to take samples from the insides of the desks. You certainly ought to. The informal lunches which the occupants consume during the forenoon will have left traces which should be most illuminating. And the desks are not locked, as there are no keys.”

  Mr. Wampole’s advice produced on Polton’s countenance a smile of most extraordinary crinkliness, but Thorndyke accepted it with unmoved gravity and it was duly acted upon. Each of the desks was opened and emptied of its contents—instructive enough as to the character and personal habits of the tenant—and cleared of its accumulation of crumbs, tobacco-ash, and miscellaneous dirt, the ‘catch’ forming a specimen supplementary to those obtained from the floor. At length, when they had made the round of the office, leaving in their wake a succession of clean squares on the matting which covered the floor, Mr. Wampole halted before an old-fashioned high desk which stood in a corner in company with a high office-stool.

  “This is my desk,” said he. “I presume that you are going to take a little souvenir from it?”

  “Well,” replied Thorndyke, “we may as well complete the series. We operated on Mr. Hollis’s premises this morning.”

  “Did you indeed, sir! You went there first; and very proper too. I am sure Mr. Hollis was very gratified.”

  “If he was,” Thorndyke replied with a smile, “he didn’t make it obtrusively apparent. May I compliment you on your desk? You keep it in apple-pie order.”

  “I try to show the juniors an example,” replied Mr. Wampole, throwing back the lid of the desk and looking complacently at the neatly stowed contents. “It is a miscellaneous collection,” he added as he proceeded to transfer his treasures from the desk to a cleared space on the table.

  It certainly was. There were a few tools—pliers, hack-saw, hammer, screw-driver, and a couple of gimlets—a loosely folded linen apron, one or two battery terminals and a coil of insulated wire, a stamp-album, a cardboard tray full of military buttons, cap-badges, and old civilian coat buttons, and a smaller tray containing one or two old copper and silver coins.

  “I see you are a stamp collector,” remarked Thorndyke, opening the album and casting a glance of lukewarm interest over its variegated pages.

  “Yes,” was the reply, “in a small way. It is a poor man’s hobby, unless one seeks to acquire costly rarities, which I do not. As a matter of fact, I seldom buy specimens at all. This album has been filled principally from our foreign correspondence. And the same is true of the coins. I don’t regularly collect them; I just keep any odd specimens that come my way.”

  “And the buttons? You have a better opportunity there, for you have practically no competitors. And yet it seems to me that they are of more interest than the things that the conventional collectors seek so eagerly.”

  “I entirely agree with you, sir,” Mr. Wampole replied, warmly. “It is the common things that are best worth collecting—the things that are common now and will be rare in a few years’ time. But the collector who has no imagination neglects things until they have become rare and precious. Then he buys at a high price what he could have got a few years previously for nothing. Look at these old gilt coat-buttons. I got them from an old-established tailor who was clearing out his obsolete stock. Unfortunately, he had thrown away most of them and nearly all the steel button-dies. I just managed to rescue these few and one or two dies, which I have at home. They are of no value now, but when the collectors discover the interest of old buttons, they will be worth their weight in gold. I am collecting all the buttons I can get hold of.”

  “I think you are wise, from a collector’s point of view. By the way, did you ever meet with any of those leather-bound sample wallets that the old button-makers used to supply to tailors?”

  “Never,” replied Mr. Wampole. “I have never even heard of them.”

  “I have seen one or two,” said Thorndyke, “and each was a collection in itself, for it contained some two or three hundred buttons, fixed in sheets of mill-board, forming a sort of album; and, of course, every button was different from every other.”

  Mr. Wampole’s eyes sparkled. “What an opportunity you had, sir!” he exclaimed. “But probably you are not a collector. It was a pity, though, for, as you say, one of those wallets was a museum in itself. If you should ever chance to meet with another, would it be too great a liberty for me to beg you to secure an option for me, at a price within my slender means?”

  “It is no liberty at all,” Thorndyke replied. “It is not likely that I shall ever come across one again, but if I should, I will certainly secure it for you.”

  “That is most kind of you, sir,” exclaimed Mr. Wampole. “And now, as Mr. Polton seems to have completed the cleansing of my desk—the first that it has had, I am afraid, for a year or two—we may continue our exploration. Did you wish to examine the waiting-room?”

  “I think not. I have just looked into it, but its associations are too ambiguous for the dust to be of any interest. But I should like to glance at the rooms upstairs.”

  To the upstairs rooms they accordingly proceeded, but the inspection was little more than a formality. They walked slowly through each room, awakening the echoes as they trod the bare floors, and as they went, Thorndyke’s eye travelled searchingly over the shelves and rough tables, stacked with documents and obsolete account-books, and the few rickety Windsor chairs. There was certainly an abundance of dust, as Mr. Wampole pointed out, but it did not appear to be of the brand in which Thorndyke was interested.

  “Well,” said Mr. Wampole, as they descended to the ground-floor, “you have now seen the whole of our premises. I think you said that you would like to inspect Mr. Osmond’s rooms. If you will wait a few moments, I will get the keys.”

  He disappeared into the principal’s office, and meanwhile Polton rapidly packed his apparatus in the suit case, so that by the time Mr. Wampole reappeared, he was ready to start.

  “Mr. Osmond’s rooms,” said Mr. Wampole, as they set forth, “are over a bookseller’s shop. This is the place. If you will wait for a moment at the private door, I will notify the landlord of our visit.” He entered the shop and after a short interval emerged briskly and stepped round to the side-door, into which he inserted a latch-key. He led the way along the narrow hall, past a partially open door, in the opening of which a portion of a human face was visible, to the staircase, up which the little procession advanced until the second-floor landing was reached. Here Mr. Wampole halted and, selecting a key from the small bunch, unlocked and opened a door, and preceded his visitors into the room.

  “It is just as well that you came today,” he remarked, “for I understand that Mrs. Hepburn is going to take charge of these rooms. A day or two later and she would have been beforehand with you in the matter of dust. As it is, you ought to get quite a good haul.”

  “Quite,” Thorndyke agreed. “There is plenty of dust; but in spite of that, the place has a very ne
at, orderly appearance. Do you happen to know whether the rooms have been tidied up since Mr. Osmond left?”

  “They are just as he left them,” was the reply, “excepting that the Chief Constable and Mr. Woodstock came and looked over them. But I don’t think they disturbed them to any extent. There isn’t much to disturb, as you see.”

  Mr. Wampole was right. The furnishing of the room did not go beyond the barest necessities, and when Thorndyke opened the door of communication and looked into the bedroom, it was seen to be characterized by a like austere simplicity. Whatever might be the moral short-comings of the vanished tenant, softness or effeminate luxuriousness did not appear to be among them.

  As his assistant refixed the ‘extractor,’ Thorndyke stood thoughtfully surveying the room, trying to assess the personality of its late occupant by the light of his belongings. And those belongings and the room which held them were highly characteristic. The late tenant was clearly an active man, a man whose interests lay out-of-doors; an orderly man, too, with something of a sailor’s tidiness. He had the sailor’s knack of keeping the floor clear by slinging things aloft out of the way. Not only small articles such as rules, dividers, marlinspike, and sheath-knife, but a gun-case, fishing-rods, cricket-bats, and a bulky roll of charts were disposed of on the walls by means of picture-hooks and properly-made slings—the height of which gave a clue to the occupant’s stature and length of arm. And the nautical flavour was accentuated by the contents of a set of rough shelves in a recess, which included a boat compass, a nautical almanack, a volume of sailing directions, and a manual of naval architecture. The only touch of ornament was given by a set of four photographs in silver frames, which occupied the mantelpiece in company with a pipe-rack, a tobacco-jar, an ash-bowl, and a box of matches.

  Thorndyke stepped across to the fireplace to look at them more closely. They were portraits of five persons: a grave-looking, elderly clergyman; a woman of about the same age with a strong, alert, resolute face and markedly aquiline features; and a younger woman, recognizably like the clergyman; and two boys of about seven and eight, photographed together.