Chapter XXXV
Cleek found young Trent an extremely handsome man of aboutthree-and-thirty; of a highly strung, nervous temperament, andwith an irritating habit of running his fingers through his hairwhen excited. Also, it seemed impossible for him to sit still forhalf a minute at a stretch; he must be constantly hopping uponly to sit down again, and moving restlessly about as if he weredoing his best to retain his composure and found it difficultwith Cleek's calm eyes fixed constantly upon him.
"I want to tell you something about that bloodstained spongebusiness, Mr. Cleek," he said in his abrupt, jerky, uneasy manner."I never heard a word about it until last night, when Miss Larueconfessed her former suspicions of my dear old dad, and gave me allthe details of the matter. That sponge had nothing to do with theaffair at all. It was I that tucked it under the staircase whereit was found, and I did so on the day before James Colliver'sdisappearance. The blood that had been on it was mine, not his."
"I see," said Cleek, serenely. "The explanation, of course, is thegood, old tried-and-true refuge of the story-writers--namely, a caseof nose-bleeding, is it not?"
"Yes," admitted Trent. "But with this difference: mine wasn't anaccidental affair at all--it was the result of getting a jolly goodhiding; and I made an excuse to get away and hop out of town, so thatthe dad wouldn't know about it nor see how I'd been battered. Thefact is, I met one of our carmen in the upper hall. He was as drunkas a lord, and when I took him to task about it and threatened himwith discharge, he said something to me that I thought needed ajolly sight more than words by way of chastisement, so I nipped offmy coat and sailed into him. It turned out that he was the betterman, and gave me all that I'd asked for in less than a minute'stime; so I shook hands with him, told him to bundle off home andsleep himself sober, and that if he wouldn't say anything aboutthe matter I wouldn't either, and he could turn up for work in themorning as usual. Then I washed up, shoved the sponge under thestaircase, and nipped off out of town; because, you know, it wouldmake a deuced bad impression if any of the other workmen should findout that a member of the firm had been thrashed by one of theemployees--and Draycott had done me up so beautifully that I was asight for the gods."
The thing had been so frankly confessed that, in spite of the factof having in the beginning been rather repelled by him, Cleek couldnot but experience a feeling of liking for the man. "So that'show it happened, is it?" he said, with a laugh. "It is a braveman, Mr. Trent, that will resist the opportunity to make himself ahero in the presence of the lady he loves; and I hope I may bepermitted to congratulate Miss Larue on the wisdom of her choice. Butnow, if you please, let us get down at once to the details of themelancholy business we have in hand. Mr. Narkom has been telling methe amazing story of the boy's visit to the building and of hisstrange disappearance therein, but I should like to have a fewfurther facts, if you will be so kind. What took the boy to thebuilding, in the first place? I am told he went there upon yourinvitation, but I confess that that seems rather odd to me. Whyshould a man of business want a boy to visit him during businesshours?"
"Good Lord, man! I couldn't have let him see what he wanted tosee if he didn't come during business hours, could I? But that'srather ambiguous, so I'll make haste to put it plainer. YoungStan--his Christian name is Stanley, as I suppose you know--youngStan is mad to learn the business of theatrical property making,and particularly that of the manufacture of those wax effigies, etcetera, which we supply for the use of drapers in their show windows;and as he is now sixteen and of an age to begin thinking of _some_trade or profession for the future, I thought it would save MissLarue putting up a jolly big premium to have him taught outside if wetook him into our business free, so I invited him to come and lookround and see if he thought he'd like it when he came to look intothe messy details.
"Well, he came rather late yesterday afternoon, and I'd taken himround for just about ten or a dozen minutes when word was suddenlybrought to me that the representative of one of the biggest managersin the country had just called with reference to an important order,so, of course, I put back to the office as quickly as I could footit, young Stan quite naturally following me, as he didn't know hisway about the place alone, and, being a modest, retiring sort of boy,didn't like facing the possibility of blundering into what mightprove to be private quarters, and things of that sort. He said asmuch to me at the time.
"Well, when I got back to the office, I soon found that the businesswith my visitor was a matter that would take some time to settle--youcan't give a man an estimate all on a jump, and without doing abit of figuring, you know--so I told young Stan that he might cutoff and go over the place on his own, if he liked, as it had beenarranged that, when knocking-off time came, I was to go back withhim to Miss Larue's flat, where we all were to have supper together.When I told him that, he asked eagerly if he might go up to thewax-figure department, as he was particularly anxious to see Lotiat work, and so----"
"Loti!" Cleek flung in the word so sharply that Trent gave a nervousstart. "Just a moment, please, before you go any further, Mr. Trent.Sorry to interrupt, but, tell me, please: is the man who modelsyour show-window effigies named Loti, then? Is, eh? Hum-m! Anyconnection by chance with that once famous Italian worker in wax,Giuseppe Loti--chap that used to make those splendid wax tableauxfor the Eden Musee in Paris some eighteen or twenty years ago?"
"Same chap. Went all to pieces all of a sudden--clear off his headfor a time, I've heard--in the very height of his career, becausehis wife left him. Handsome French woman--years younger than he--ranoff with another chap and took every blessed thing of value shecould lay her hands upon when--but maybe you've heard the story?"
"I have," said Cleek. "It is one that is all too common on theContinent. Also, it happened that I was in Paris at the time of theoccurrence. And so you have that great Giuseppe Loti at the head ofyour waxwork department, eh? What a come-down in the world forhim! Poor devil! I thought he was dead ages ago. He dropped outsuddenly and disappeared from France entirely after that affair withhis unfaithful wife. The rumour was that he had committed suicide;although that seemed as improbable as it now turns out to be, inthe face of the fact that on the night after his wife left him heturned up at the Cafe Royal and publicly----No matter! Go on withthe case, please. What about the boy?"
"Let's see, now, where was I?" said Trent, knotting up his brow."Oh, ah! I recollect--just where he asked me if he could go up andsee Loti at work. Of course, I said that he could; there wasn't anyreason why I shouldn't, as the place is open to inspection always,so I opened the door and showed him the way to the staircase leadingup to the glass-room, and then went to the speaking-tube and calledup to Loti to expect him, and to treat him nicely, as he was thenephew of the great Miss Larue and would, in time, be mine also."
"Was there any necessity for taking that precaution, Mr. Trent?"
"Yes. Loti has developed a dashed bad temper since last autumn and isvery eccentric, very irritable--not a bit like the solemn, sedate oldjohnnie he used to be. Even his work has deteriorated, I think, butone daren't criticise it or he flies into a temper and threatens toleave."
"And you don't wish him to, of course--his name must stand forsomething."
"It stands for a great deal. It's one of our biggest cards. We cancommand twice as much for a Loti figure as for one made by any otherwaxworker. So we humour him in his little eccentricities and deferto him a great deal. Also, as he prefers to live on the premises,he saves us money in other ways. Serves for a watchman as well, youunderstand."
"Oh, he lives on the premises, does he? Where? In the glass-room?"
"Oh, no; that would not be possible. The character as well as theposition of that renders it impossible as a place of habitation. Heuses it after hours as a sort of sitting-room, to be sure, and haspartly fitted it up as one, but he sleeps, eats, and dresses in aroom on the floor below."
"Not an adjoining one?"
"Oh, no; an adjoining room would be an impossibility. Our buildingis an end one, st
anding on the corner of a short passage whichleads to nothing but a narrow alley running along parallel withthe back of our premises, and the glass-room covers nearly the entireroof of it. As a matter of fact, Mr. Cleek, although we call itthat at the works, the term Glass Room is a misnomer. In reality,it's nothing more nor less than a good sized 'lean-to' greenhousethat the dad bought and had taken up there in sections, and itsrear elevation rests against the side wall of a still higherbuilding than ours, next door--the premises of Storminger thecarriage builder, to be exact. But look here: perhaps I can makethe situation clearer by a rough sketch. Got a lead pencil and a bitof paper, anybody? Oh, thanks very much, dear. One can always relyupon _you_. Now, look here, Mr. Cleek--this is the way of it. Youmustn't mind if it's a crude thing, because, you know, I'm a rottenbad draughtsman and can't draw for nuts. But all the same, this willdo at a pinch."
Here he leaned over the table in the centre of the room and, takingthe pencil and the blank back of the letter which Miss Larue hadsupplied, made a crude outline sketch thus:
[Illustration of a group of houses]
"There you are," he said suddenly, laying the crude drawing onthe table before Cleek, and with him bending over it. "You aresupposed to be looking at the houses from the main thoroughfare,don't you know, and, therefore, at the front of them. This tallbuilding on the left marked 1 is Storminger's; the low one, number2, adjoining, is ours; and that cagelike-looking thing, 3, onthe top of it, is the glass-room. Now, along the front of it here,where I have put the long line with an X on the end, there runs awooden partition with a door leading into the room itself, so thatit's impossible for anybody on the opposite side of the mainthoroughfare to see into the place at all. But that is not thecase with regard to people living on the opposite side of the shortpassage (this is here, that I've marked 4), because there's nothingto obstruct the view but some rubbishy old lace curtains which Loti,in his endeavour to make the place what he calls homelike, wouldinsist upon hanging, and _they_ are so blessed thin that anybody canlook right through them and see all over the place. Of course,though, there are blinds, which he can pull down on the inside ifthe sun gets too strong; and when they are down, nobody can see intothe glass-room at all. Pardon? Oh, we had it constructed of glass,Mr. Narkom, because of the necessity for having all the lightobtainable in doing the minute work on some of the fine tableauxwe produce for execution purposes. We are doing one now--The Reliefof Lucknow--for the big exhibition that's to be given next monthat Olympia and----The place marked 6 at the back of our building?Oh, that's the narrow alley of which I spoke. We've a back dooropening into it, but it's practically useless, because the alleyis so narrow one can't drive a vehicle through it. It's simply aright of way that can't legally be closed and runs from CroomStreet on the right just along as far as Sturgiss Lane on theleft. Not fifty people pass through it in a day's time.
"But to come back to the short passage, Mr. Cleek. Observe, thereare no windows at all on the side of our building, here: Number2. There were, once upon a time, but we had them bricked up, aswe use that side for a 'paint frame' with a movable bridge sothat it can be used for the purpose of painting scenery anddrop-curtains. But there _are_ windows in the side of the housemarked 5; and directly opposite the point where I've put the arrowthere is one which belongs to a room occupied by a Mrs. Sherman andher daughter--people who do 'bushel work' for wholesale costumehouses. Now, it happens that at the exact time when the portersays he showed young Stan into the glass-room those two women weresitting at work by that window, and, the blinds not being drawn,could see smack into the place, and are willing to take their oaththat there was no living soul in it."
"How do they fix it as being, as you say,'the exact time,' Mr. Trent? If they couldn't see the porter come up to the glass-room with theboy, how can they be sure of that?"
"Oh, that's easily explained: There's a church not a great waydistant. It has a clock in the steeple which strikes the hours,halves, and quarters. Mrs. Sherman says that when it chimed half-pastfour she was not only looking into the glass-room, but was callingher daughter's attention to the fact that, whereas some few minutespreviously she had seen Loti go out of the place, leaving a greatpile of reference plates and scraps of material all over thefloor, and he had never, to her positive knowledge, come back intoit, there was the room looking as tidy as possible, and, in themiddle of it, a table with a vase of pink roses upon it, whichshe certainly had not seen there when he left."
"Hallo! Hallo!" interjected Cleek rather sharply. "Let's have thatagain, please!" and he sat listening intently while Trent repeatedthe statement; then, of a sudden, he gave his head an upward twitch,slapped his thigh, and, leaning back in his seat, added with a brieflittle laugh, "Well, of all the blithering idiots! And a simplelittle thing like that!"
"Like what, Mr. Cleek?" queried Trent, in amazement. "You don'tsurely mean to say that you can make anything important out of atable and a vase of flowers? Because, I may tell you that Loti is madon flowers, and always has a vase of them in the room somewhere."
"Does he, indeed? Natural inclination of the artistic temperament, Idare say. But never mind, get on with the story. Mrs. Sherman fixesthe hour when she noticed this as half-past four, you say? How, then,does the porter who showed the boy into the glass-room fix it, mayI ask?"
"By the same means precisely--the striking of the church clock. Heremembers hearing it just as he reached the partition door, andwas, indeed, at particular pains to take out his watch to see if ittallied with it. Also, three of our scene painters were passingalong the hall at the foot of the short flight of steps leading up tothe glass-room at the time. They were going out to tea; and one ofthem sang out to him laughingly, 'Hallo, Ginger, how does thattwo-shilling turnip of yours make it? Time for tea at BuckinghamPalace?' for he had won the watch at a singing contest only thenight before, and his mates had been chaffing him about it allday. In that manner the exact time of his going to the door withthe boy is fixed, and with three persons to corroborate it. A secondlater the porter saw the boy push open the swing-door and walk intothe place, and as he turned and went back downstairs he distinctlyheard him say, 'Good afternoon, sir. Mr. Trent said I might comeup and watch, if you don't mind.'"
"Did he hear anybody reply?"
"No, he did not. He heard no one speak but the boy."
"I see. So, then, there is no actual proof that Loti _was_ in thereat the time, which, of course, makes the testimony of Mrs. Shermanand her daughter appear reliable when they say that the room wasempty."
"Still the boy was there if Loti wasn't, Mr. Cleek. There's proofenough that he did go into the place even though those two womendeclare that the room was empty."
"Quite so, quite so. And when two and two don't make four, 'there'ssomething rotten in the state of Denmark.' What does Loti himself saywith regard to the circumstance? Or hasn't he been spoken to aboutit?"
"My hat, yes! I went to him about it the very first thing. He saysthe boy never put in an appearance, to _his_ knowledge; that henever saw him. In fact, that just before half-past four he wastaken with a violent attack of sick headache, the result of thefumes rising from the wax he was melting to model figures for thetableau, together with the smell of the chemicals used in preparingthe background, and that he went down to his room to lie down for atime and dropped off to sleep. As a matter of fact, he was therein his room sleeping when, at half-past six, I went for the boy,and, finding the glass-room vacated, naturally set out to hunt upLoti and question him about the matter."
"When you called up to the glass-room through the speaking-tube, tosay that the boy was about to go up, who answered you--Loti?"
"Yes."
"At what time was that? Or can't you say positively?"
"Not to the fraction of a moment. But I should say that it wasabout four or five minutes before the boy got there--say aboutfive-and-twenty minutes past four. It wouldn't take him longer toget up to the top of the house, I fancy, and he certainly did notstop at any of the other departments
on the way."
"Queer, isn't it, that the man should not have stopped to so much aswelcome the boy after you had been at such pains to tell him to benice to him? Does he offer any explanation on that score?"
"Yes. He says that, as his head was so bad, he knew that he wouldprobably be cross and crotchety; so as I had asked him to be kind,he thought the best thing he could do was to leave a note on thetable for the boy, telling him to make himself at home and to examineanything he pleased, but to be sure not to touch the cauldron inwhich the wax was simmering, as it tilted readily and he might getscalded. He was sorry to have to go, but his head ached so badly thathe really had to lie down for a while.
"That note, I may tell you, was lying on the table when I went up tothe glass-room and failed to find the boy. It was that which toldme where to go in order to find Loti and question him. I'll do himthe credit of stating that when he heard of the boy's mysteriousdisappearance he flung his headache and his creature comforts tothe winds and joined in the eager hunt for him as excitedly and asstrenuously as anybody. He went through the building from top tobottom; he lifted every trapdoor, crept into every nook and cornerand hole and box into which it might be possible for the poor littlechap to have fallen. But it was all useless, Mr. Cleek--everybit of it! The boy had vanished, utterly and completely; from theminute the porter saw him pass the swing-door and go into theglass-room we never discovered even the slightest trace of him, norhave we been able to do so since. He has gone, he has vanished, ascompletely as if he had melted into thin air, and if there is anyghost of a clue to his whereabouts existing----"
"Let us go and see if we can unearth it," interrupted Cleek, rising."Mr. Narkom, is the limousine within easy reach?"
"Yes, waiting in Tavistock Street, dear chap. I told Lennard to beon the lookout for us."
"Good! Then if Miss Larue will allow Mr. Trent to escort her asfar as the pavement, and he will then go on alone to his place ofbusiness and await us there, you and I will leave the hotel bythe back way and join him as soon as possible. Leave by the frontentrance if you be so kind; and--pardon, one last word, Mr. Trent,before you go. At the time when this boy's father vanished in muchthe same way, eleven months ago, you had, I believe, a door porterat your establishment name Felix Murchison. Is that man still inyour employ?"
"No, Mr. Cleek. He left about a week or so after James Colliver'sdisappearance."
"Know where he is?"
"Not the slightest idea. As a matter of fact, he suddenly inheritedsome money, and said he was going to emigrate to America. But I don'tknow if he did or not. Why?"
"Oh, nothing in particular--only that I shouldn't be surprised ifthe person who supplied that money was the pawnbroker who received inpledge the jewels which your father handed over to James Colliver,and that the sum which Felix Murchison 'inherited' so suddenly wasthe L150 advanced upon those gems."
"How utterly absurd! My dear Mr. Cleek, you must surely rememberthat the pawnbroker said the chap who pawned the jewels was agentlemanly appearing person, of good manners and speech, andMurchison is the last man in the world to answer to that description.A great hulking, bull-necked, illiterate _animal_ of that sort,without an H in his vocabulary and with no more manners than a pig!"
"Precisely why I feel so certain _now_ that the pawnbroker's'advance' was paid over to _him_," said Cleek, with a twitch of theshoulder. "Live and learn, my friend, live and learn. Elevenmonths ago I couldn't for the life of me understand why thosejewels had been pawned at all; to-day I realize that it was the onlypossible course. Miss Larue, my compliments. Au revoir." And hebowed her out of the room with the grace of a courtier, standingwell out of sight from the hallway until the door had closedbehind her and her companion and he was again alone with thesuperintendent.
"Now for it! as they used to say in the old melodramas," helaughed, stepping sharply to a wardrobe and producing, first, abroad-brimmed cavalry hat, which he immediately put on, and then apair of bright steel handcuffs. "We may have use for this veryeffective type of wristlets, Mr. Narkom; so it's well to goprepared for emergencies. Now then, off with you while I lock thedoor. That's the way to the staircase. Nip down it to the Americanbar. There's a passage from that leading out to the EmbankmentGardens. A taxi from there will whisk us along Savoy Street,across the Strand and up Wellington Street to Tavistock in lessthan no time; so we may look to be with Lennard inside of anotherten minutes."
"Righto!" gave back the superintendent. "And I can get rid of thisdashed rig as soon as we're in the limousine. But, I say; any ideas,old chap--eh?"
"Yes, two or three. One of them is that this is going to be oneof the simplest cases I ever tackled. Lay you a sovereign to asixpence, Mr. Narkom, that I solve the riddle of that glass-roombefore they ring up the curtain of any theatre in London to-night.What's that? Lying? No, certainly not. There's been no lying in thematter at all; it isn't a case of that sort. The pawnbroker didnot lie; the porter who says he showed the boy into the room didnot lie; and the two women who looked into it and saw nothing butan empty room did not lie either. The only thing that _did_ lie was avase of pink roses--a bunch of natural Ananiases that tried tomake people believe that they had been blooming and keeping freshever since last August!"
"Good Lord! you don't surely think that that Loti chap----"
"Gently, gently, my friend; don't let yourself get excited. Besides,I _may_ be all at sea, for all my cocksureness. I don't think I am,but--one never knows. I'll tell you one thing, however: The manwith whom Madame Loti eloped had, for the purpose of carrying on theintrigue, enlisted as a student under her husband, and gulled thepoor fool by pretending that he wished to learn waxwork making, whenhis one desire was to make love to the man's worthless wife. Whenthey eloped, and Loti knew for the first time what a dupe he hadbeen, he publicly swore, in the open room of the Cafe Royal, that hewould never rest until he had run that man down and had exterminatedhim and every living creature in whose veins his blood flowed. Theman was an English actor, Mr. Narkom. He posed under the _nom detheatre_ of Jason Monteith--his real name was James Colliver! Steplivelier, please--we're dawdling!"
Cleek of Scotland Yard: Detective Stories Page 36
