‘I’m afraid whoever double-locked it has left the key in on the other side,’ he panted. ‘This’ll never go in till the other’s taken out.’
Mr Muirhead suddenly recovered his calm and stuck his hands in his pockets. ‘He’s done us,’ he announced. ‘He could reach Piccadilly in fifteen seconds from here, without hurrying. It’s a clean getaway. Probably he’s bowling off in a taxi by now. Hudson, why the devil didn’t you say there was a lady with the captain? I’d never have let him pass me if I’d known he was coming from these rooms.’
‘I never knew there was any one with him, indeed, inspector,’ quavered the old man, his mind wrestling feebly with the confusion of genders. ‘I expect it was this girl let her in.’
‘How was I to know there was anything wrong?’ cried the domestic, bursting into tears. ‘She spoke like a perfect lady and sent me up with her card and all. I never thought till this minute – ’
‘All right, all right, my girl,’ said the inspector brusquely. ‘You’ll get into no trouble if you’re straight. Hudson, I want your telephone. In the back room here? Right! And you’d better hail somebody next door and get your door opened.’
The detective disappeared into the room and Hudson shuffled down the passage to the back of the building, still in a dazed condition. ‘What I don’t see,’ he mumbled, ‘is where she, or he, or whoever it was, got the key from.’ And as he said it, Trent, who had been leaning against the wall with a face of great contentment, suddenly turned and fled lightly up the stairs.
Captain Ainger’s door opened easily. Captain Ainger himself, a small, crop-headed man, lay upon a sofa near the window of his tastefully furnished sitting-room. As Trent burst in a look of relief came into the captain’s bewildered eyes. The rest of his face below them was covered by an improvised gag made out of a tobacco pouch and a tightly knotted scarf. His ankles were tied together and his arms lashed to his sides with box cord.
He looked wretchedly uncomfortable.
Five minutes later, in answer to a call from Trent, Mr Muirhead closed his conversation with Scotland Yard and came upstairs. He found Captain Ainger sitting in an armchair, restoring his physical tone with a deep glass of whisky and soda. To Trent’s account of how he had found that ill-used officer the detective answered only with a grim nod. Then, ‘I suppose it was your latch-key, sir,’ he said to the victim.
‘Yes,’ replied the little captain, ‘she took my latch-key – he did, I mean. Tell you just how it was. She sent up her card – his, I should say – well, it was a woman’s card, anyhow. I put it up here.’ He rose and took a card from the mantelshelf.
Mr Muirhead glanced at it with curiosity. ‘Of course!’ he exclaimed.
‘Mrs Van Sommeren’s card, is it?’ asked Trent from his chair by the window.
‘It is.’
‘And Mrs Van Sommeren’s clothes and hat, and Mrs Van Sommeren’s little bag, and Mrs Van Sommeren’s own particular perfume – they all went by us just now,’ Trent remarked, ‘in company with (I expect) Mr Van Sommeren’s shoes and Mr James Rudmore’s wig. Probably he was a little excited at seeing you, inspector, awaiting him at the bottom of the stairs. It needed some nerve for him to stand there fixing his veil without a quiver, and to trip downstairs right into your yearning embrace, as one may say.’
Annoyance, self-reproach, menacing resolve, and appreciation of the comic side of the episode – all these things were in the inspector’s eloquent answering grunt.
‘If only he had remembered to walk along the lower passage like a lady, instead of like a champion lightweight,’ Trent resumed, ‘I don’t believe the meaning of the shoes would have burst upon me as it did. I daresay his hold on himself began to go when he saw the street door and safety six steps in front of him. Yet that latch-key business was pretty coolly done. Jim is certainly a gifted amateur. But you were telling us’ – he turned to the obviously mystified captain – ‘how she made her appearance.’
‘The message with the card,’ resumed Captain Ainger, who still preserved his pained expression, ‘was that she would be obliged if I would answer an inquiry on a family matter. It made me feel curious, so I said I would see her. She had on a very thick veil – he had, I mean.’
‘Why not stick to “she”, Captain,’ Trent suggested. ‘We should get on quicker, I think.’
‘Thank you,’ said the veteran gratefully, ‘I believe we should. The whole thing is so confusing, because she talked just like a woman from beginning to end. Where was I? Ah, yes! I couldn’t see her face very well, but her voice and style were those of a well-bred woman. She told me she was an American, and that a year ago she had lost a brother who was very dear to her, and that on his death-bed he had laid what she called a sacred charge upon her. It seemed he had been befriended at some critical time, when he was in India, by an English officer of my name, of whom he had lost sight for many years. He wished her, if possible, to find out that officer and place in his hands a memento, something which had belonged to himself, in token of his undying gratitude. She had made inquiries and had found me in the first place, but understood there were others of my name in the army list.’
‘How did Rudmore get hold of your name, I wonder?’ mused the inspector. ‘He only got away from Dartmoor yesterday.’
‘That wouldn’t have been difficult for his sort of man,’ Trent replied. ‘Very likely he got it out of the housemaid who opened the door, before sending up the message.’
The captain cursed the absent malefactor feebly and took another drink from his tumbler. ‘I confess I was rather touched. Of course, I’ve usually done a man a good turn when it lay in my power, but I couldn’t remember having played Providence to an American at any time. So I asked what his name was. She said their name was Smith. Well, you know, I must have run across about fifty Smiths, and I told her so. Then she said she had a photograph of him with her. She took it out of her bag. It was a picture of a good-looking, youngish chap, with the name of a Philadelphia firm on the mount.’
‘Van Sommeren’s photograph,’ murmured Trent. ‘She carried it about with her. You didn’t tell me they were on their honeymoon, inspector.’
‘I felt sure I’d never seen the man,’ continued Captain Ainger, ‘but I took it to the window to have a good look. And the moment my back was turned she leaped on me and garrotted me. There wasn’t a chance for me. She was as strong as a tiger, and I’m pretty shaky from a long illness. When I was about at my last gasp she gagged me with that infernal thing, then dragged me into the bedroom and tied me up with my own cord. When I was trussed properly she went through my pockets and took my latch-key; then she carried me back to that sofa. She said she was so sorry to be giving me all this trouble, and that she always wished women were not so dependent upon men for everything. She put her veil up a little way and helped herself to a whisky and soda and lighted one of my cigars. After that she took a screwdriver out of her bag and went to work at something behind me. I don’t know in the least what she was doing; I couldn’t move. It took about five minutes, I should say. Then she skipped to the window with something that looked like a wad of cotton-wool in her fingers and began gloating over something I couldn’t see. She stood there a long time, smoking and looking out, and then all at once she gave a start and stared down into the street. Just after that I heard the front-door bell ring. And then she – well, she went.’ The captain’s bronzed face went slowly scarlet to the roots of his hair.
‘She said goodbye, surely,’ murmured Trent, looking at him attentively.
‘If you must know,’ burst out the captain with his first show of fierceness, ‘she said she didn’t know how to thank me, and that I was a dear, and might she give me a kiss? So she – she did it.’ Here his narrative dissolved into unchivalrous expressions. ‘And then she went out and shut the door. That’s all I can tell you.’ He wearily resorted to his tumbler again.
Trent and the inspector, who had prudently avoided catching each other’s eyes during the last part of the
story, now conquered their feelings. ‘What I want to know now,’ the detective said, ‘is where the stuff was hidden here. Can you go straight to the place, Mr Trent, or should we have to search?’
Trent took the convict’s letter from his pocket. ‘Let me tell you how I got at it first,’ he said. ‘You ought to know about this, Captain. Read it.’ He handed the document to the soldier, and gave him a brief account of the circumstances regarding it.
The captain, now highly interested, read it through carefully twice, then handed it to Trent again. ‘I don’t believe I should make anything out of it in a thousand years,’ he said. ‘It seems straight enough to me. I should call it an interesting letter, that’s all.’
‘This letter,’ said Trent, regarding it with a look of unstinted appreciation, ‘is the most interesting, by a long way, that I have ever read. It tells us, not, I think, where the pendant was hidden, but where the diamonds of the pendant were hidden by Jim Rudmore before his arrest. What Jim did with the setting I don’t know, nor does it matter much. But the diamonds were concealed here; and they are now again, I am afraid, in the possession of Jim.’
Inspector Muirhead made an impatient movement. ‘Come to the point, Mr Trent,’ he urged. ‘What did you pick up from that letter? Where was the stuff hidden?’
‘I will tell you first the things I picked up, and how. The first time I read the letter – in your presence, inspector – I checked at the statement that “the country looks and smells like the Gelderland country around Apeldijk.” When one reads that, it naturally occurs to one’s mind that Dartmoor is practically a mountain district, whereas Gelderland is a part of Holland, most of which country is actually below the sea-level.’
‘It didn’t occur to my mind,’ observed Captain Ainger.
‘Therefore,’ pursued Trent, unconscious of him, ‘any similarity of look or smell would be rather curious, don’t you think? Possibly that was what struck the governor of the prison and aroused his suspicions of the letter. Well, the next thing that pulled me up was the Shakespearian reference. I knew I’d read it in Shakespeare, and yet I felt it was wrong somehow. There were some words missing, I thought. Besides, it didn’t look like a prose passage; yet it didn’t fit into the decasyllabic form, or any other metre… The only other notion that occurred to me at first glance was that it was an odd thing to quote a German phrase where an English one would have been just as good.
‘Then I took the letter to the British Museum library and sat down to the problem in earnest. I said to myself that if there was any cipher in it, it was probably impossible to get at it. But I thought it more likely that the message, if any, was conveyed in the words as they stood. So I asked myself what were the signals that it hung out to a man who would be trying to read some inner meaning into it. What things in it were, by ever so little, out of the common, so that the reader would say to himself, “This may be a pointer”? And I had to remember that both the Rudmores were said to be clever and cultivated men, who understood each other well.
‘Now, to begin with, I thought that “the idol, whose name I forget, on your mantelshelf”, was the sort of thing Rudmore père would have pondered over. Of course we’ve all seen those little images of the Hindu goddess with ten arms. Jim Rudmore, who had lived in India for years, said he had forgotten her name. That might possibly be meant to draw attention to the name.’
‘It’s Parvati – heard it thousands of times,’ the captain interjected.
‘Yes, I found that name when I looked up the Hindu mythology. But there’s another, by which she is known in Bengal, where the Rudmores had had their experience of India. There, my book told me, the people call her Doorga. So I noted down both names… Very well; now the next passage that seemed out of the ordinary was that about “the Gelderland country round Apeldijk”. The first thing I did was to look up Apeldijk in the gazetteer. It mentioned no such place; the nearest thing to it was a town called Apeldoorn, which was in Gelderland sure enough. Then I got a big map and went through Gelderland from end to end. As I expected, it was as flat as a board, and there was no sign of Apeldijk. But I found several towns in Holland ending in “dijk”, which shows you what a conscientious artist Jim is. Now if he had really been ill at Apeldoorn, as I expect he had been, his father would have got a hint at once. I wrote down Apeldoorn, and then I began to see light.’
Mr Muirhead rubbed his nose with a puzzled air. ‘I don’t see – ’ he began.
‘You will very soon. Next I turned to the odd-looking quotation from Shakespeare. On looking up “joints” in the Cowden Clarke, Concordance, I found the passage. It’s in Henry IV, where Northumberland says:
And as the wretch, whose fever-weaken’d joints,
Like strengthless hinges, buckle under life…
‘What do you think of that?’
The inspector shook his head.
‘Well, then, look at the German phrase. Sie würden das nicht so hingehen lassen means “They would not allow that”, or “They would not pass that over”, or something of that sort. Now suppose a man was looking for a suggestion or hint in each of those German words.’
Mr Muirhead took the letter and conned the words carefully. ‘I’m no German scholar,’ he began, and then his eyes brightened. ‘Those missing words – ’ he said.
‘Like strengthless hinges,’ Trent reminded him.
‘Well, and here’ – the inspector tapped excitedly upon the word hingehen – ‘you’ve got “hinge” and “hen” in English.’
‘You’re there! Never mind the hen; she’s not there on business. Lastly, I’ll tell you a thing you probably don’t know. Schraube is the German word for “screw”.’
Mr Muirhead gave his knee a violent blow with his fist.
‘Now then!’ Trent tore a leaf from his note-book. ‘I’ll put down the words we’ve got at that were hidden.’ He wrote quickly and handed the paper to the inspector. Both he and Captain Ainger read the following:
Doorga.
Doom.
Hinges.
Hinge.
Screw.
‘Also,’ Trent added, ‘the word “door” occurs twice openly in the body of the letter, and the word “hinge” once. That was to show old Rudmore he was on the right track, if he succeeded in digging out those words. “Good!” says he to himself. “The loot is hidden under a screw in a hinge on a door somewhere. Then where?” He turns to the letter again and finds the only address mentioned in it is “the old rooms in Jermyn Street”. And there you are!’
Trent took his screwdriver from his pocket and went to the open door leading into the captain’s bedroom. ‘Naturally it wouldn’t be the outer door, as to get at the hinges one would have to have it standing open.’ He glanced at the hinges of the bedroom door. ‘These screws’ – he pointed to those on the door-post half of the upper hinge – ‘have had their paint scratched a little.’
In a minute or two he had removed all three screws. The open door sank forward slightly on the lower hinge and the upper one came away from its place on the door-post. Beneath it was a little cavity roughly hollowed out in the wood. Silently the inspector probed it with a penknife.
‘The stones are gone, of course,’ he announced gloomily.
‘Certainly gone,’ Trent agreed. ‘The stones were in that little piece of cotton-wool the captain saw him handling.’
Mr Muirhead rose to his feet. ‘Well, I don’t think they’ll get far.’ As he took up his hat there was a knock at the door and Hudson entered panting, a sharp curiosity in his eyes.
‘A messenger boy just brought this for you, inspector,’ he wheezed, handing a small package to the detective. It was directed in a delicate, sloping handwriting to ‘Inspector C B Muirhead, CID, care of Captain R Ainger, 230 Jermyn Street.’
Hastily the inspector tore it open. It contained a small black suede glove, faintly perfumed. With this was a scrap of paper, bearing these words in the same writing:
‘Wear this for my sake. – J R’
; VI
The Fool-proof Lift
One of the commonest forms of fatal accident in the life of the town is falling down a lift shaft. Every coroner of large urban experience has dealt with cases by the score, whether due to short-sight, negligence, faulty construction, or defective safety mechanism. And there is another possibility.
One perfect day in June M. Armand Binet-Gailly, who held an important agency in the wine trade, left his office in Jermyn Street rather earlier than usual, and strolled homewards through the Parks to his bachelor flat at 42 Rigby Street. This was a tall old house, ‘converted’ from the errors of its pre-Victorian youth. There were five flats, and M. Binet-Gailly’s was the second above the ground level. About 5.30 – so went his statement to the police – he entered by the front door, which always stood open during the daytime, and went to the lift at the end of the hall. The lift was not at the ground floor, as he could see through the lattice gate, and he pressed the button which should bring it down. But nothing happened.
M. Binet-Gailly was very much annoyed. A portly man, he did not relish the prospect of climbing two flights of stairs on a warm day when he had paid for lift service. He aimlessly seized and shook the handle of the lattice gate. To his amazement, the gate slid aside as if the lift were in place. It should, of course, have been impossible to move it unless the lift were there. The whole system was out of order, he thought. He put his head into the shaft and looked upwards. There was the lift, so far as he could judge, at the top floor. Then, as he drew back his head, his eye was caught by something at the bottom of the shallow well in which the liftshaft ended. There was a strong electric ceiling lamp always alight at this dark end of the hall, and it showed M. Binet-Gailly quite enough.
Trent Intervenes and Other Stories Page 10
