by Graeme Davis
At the head of the first flight of a dingy staircase leading up from an ever-open portal in a street by the Strand stood a door, the dusty ground-glass upper panel of which carried in its center the single word “Hewitt,” while at its right-hand lower corner, in smaller letters, “Clerk’s Office” appeared. On a morning when the clerks in the ground-floor offices had barely hung up their hats, a short, well-dressed young man, wearing spectacles, hastening to open the dusty door, ran into the arms of another man who suddenly issued from it.
“I beg pardon,” the first said. “Is this Hewitt’s Detective Agency Office?”
“Yes, I believe you will find it so,” the other replied. He was a stoutish, clean-shaven man, of middle height, and of a cheerful, round countenance. “You’d better speak to the clerk.”
In the little outer office the visitor was met by a sharp lad with inky fingers, who presented him with a pen and a printed slip. The printed slip having been filled with the visitor’s name and present business, and conveyed through an inner door, the lad reappeared with an invitation to the private office. There, behind a writing-table, sat the stoutish man himself, who had only just advised an appeal to the clerk.
“Good-morning, Mr. Lloyd—Mr. Vernon Lloyd,” he said, affably, looking again at the slip. “You’ll excuse my care to start even with my visitors—I must, you know. You come from Sir James Norris, I see.”
“Yes; I am his secretary. I have only to ask you to go straight to Lenton Croft at once, if you can, on very important business. Sir James would have wired, but had not your precise address. Can you go by the next train? Eleven-thirty is the first available from Paddington.”
“Quite possibly. Do you know any thing of the business?”
“It is a case of a robbery in the house, or, rather, I fancy, of several robberies. Jewelry has been stolen from rooms occupied by visitors to the Croft. The first case occurred some months ago—nearly a year ago, in fact. Last night there was another. But I think you had better get the details on the spot. Sir James has told me to telegraph if you are coming, so that he may meet you himself at the station; and I must hurry, as his drive to the station will be rather a long one. Then I take it you will go, Mr. Hewitt? Twyford is the station.”
“Yes, I shall come, and by the 11.30. Are you going by that train yourself?”
“No, I have several things to attend to now I am in town. Good-morning; I shall wire at once.”
Mr. Martin Hewitt locked the drawer of his table and sent his clerk for a cab.
At Twyford Station Sir James Norris was waiting with a dog-cart. Sir James was a tall, florid man of fifty or thereabout, known away from home as something of a county historian, and nearer his own parts as a great supporter of the hunt, and a gentleman much troubled with poachers. As soon as he and Hewitt had found one another the baronet hurried the detective into his dog-cart. “We’ve something over seven miles to drive,” he said, “and I can tell you all about this wretched business as we go. That is why I came for you myself, and alone.”
Hewitt nodded.
“I have sent for you, as Lloyd probably told you, because of a robbery at my place last evening. It appears, as far as I can guess, to be one of three by the same hand, or by the same gang. Late yesterday afternoon—”
“Pardon me, Sir James,” Hewitt interrupted, “but I think I must ask you to begin at the first robbery and tell me the whole tale in proper order. It makes things clearer, and sets them in their proper shape.”
“Very well! Eleven months ago, or thereabout, I had rather a large party of visitors, and among them Colonel Heath and Mrs. Heath—the lady being a relative of my own late wife. Colonel Heath has not been long retired, you know—used to be political resident in an Indian native state. Mrs. Heath had rather a good stock of jewelry of one sort and another, about the most valuable piece being a bracelet set with a particularly fine pearl—quite an exceptional pearl, in fact—that had been one of a heap of presents from the maharajah of his state when Heath left India.
“It was a very noticeable bracelet, the gold setting being a mere feather-weight piece of native filigree work—almost too fragile to trust on the wrist—and the pearl being, as I have said, of a size and quality not often seen. Well, Heath and his wife arrived late one evening, and after lunch the following day, most of the men being off by themselves—shooting, I think—my daughter, my sister (who is very often down here), and Mrs. Heath took it into their heads to go walking—fern-hunting, and so on. My sister was rather long dressing, and, while they waited, my daughter went into Mrs. Heath’s room, where Mrs. Heath turned over all her treasures to show her, as women do, you know. When my sister was at last ready, they came straight away, leaving the things littering about the room rather than stay longer to pack them up. The bracelet, with other things, was on the dressing-table then.”
“One moment. As to the door?”
“They locked it. As they came away my daughter suggested turning the key, as we had one or two new servants about.”
“And the window?”
“That they left open, as I was going to tell you. Well, they went on their walk and came back, with Lloyd (whom they had met somewhere) carrying their ferns for them. It was dusk and almost dinner-time. Mrs. Heath went straight to her room, and—the bracelet was gone.”
“Was the room disturbed?”
“Not a bit. Everything was precisely where it had been left, except the bracelet. The door hadn’t been tampered with, but of course the window was open, as I have told you.”
“You called the police, of course?”
“Yes, and had a man from Scotland Yard down in the morning. He seemed a pretty smart fellow, and the first thing he noticed on the dressing-table, within an inch or two of where the bracelet had been, was a match, which had been lit and thrown down. Now nobody about the house had had occasion to use a match in that room that day, and, if they had, certainly wouldn’t have thrown it on the cover of the dressing-table. So that, presuming the thief to have used that match, the robbery must have been committed when the room was getting dark—immediately before Mrs. Heath returned, in fact. The thief had evidently struck the match, passed it hurriedly over the various trinkets lying about, and taken the most valuable.”
“Nothing else was even moved?”
“Nothing at all. Then the thief must have escaped by the window, although it was not quite clear how. The walking party approached the house with a full view of the window, but saw nothing, although the robbery must have been actually taking place a moment or two before they turned up.
“There was no water-pipe within any practicable distance of the window, but a ladder usually kept in the stable-yard was found lying along the edge of the lawn. The gardener explained, however, that he had put the ladder there after using it himself early in the afternoon.”
“Of course it might easily have been used again after that and put back.”
“Just what the Scotland Yard man said. He was pretty sharp, too, on the gardener, but very soon decided that he knew nothing of it. No stranger had been seen in the neighborhood, nor had passed the lodge gates. Besides, as the detective said, it scarcely seemed the work of a stranger. A stranger could scarcely have known enough to go straight to the room where a lady—only arrived the day before—had left a valuable jewel, and away again without being seen. So all the people about the house were suspected in turn. The servants offered, in a body, to have their boxes searched, and this was done; everything was turned over, from the butler’s to the new kitchen-maid’s. I don’t know that I should have had this carried quite so far if I had been the loser myself, but it was my guest, and I was in such a horrible position. Well, there’s little more to be said about that, unfortunately. Nothing came of it all, and the thing’s as great a mystery now as ever. I believe the Scotland Yard man got as far as suspecting me before he gave it up altogether, but give it up he did in the end. I think that’s all I know about the first robbery. Is it clear?”
&
nbsp; “Oh, yes; I shall probably want to ask a few questions when I have seen the place, but they can wait. What next?”
“Well,” Sir James pursued, “the next was a very trumpery* affair, that I should have forgotten all about, probably, if it hadn’t been for one circumstance. Even now I hardly think it could have been the work of the same hand. Four months or thereabout after Mrs. Heath’s disaster—in February of this year, in fact—Mrs. Armitage, a young widow, who had been a school-fellow of my daughter’s, stayed with us for a week or so. The girls don’t trouble about the London season, you know, and I have no town house, so they were glad to have their old friend here for a little in the dull time. Mrs. Armitage is a very active young lady, and was scarcely in the house half an hour before she arranged a drive in a pony-cart with Eva—my daughter—to look up old people in the village that she used to know before she was married. So they set off in the afternoon, and made such a round of it that they were late for dinner. Mrs. Armitage had a small plain gold brooch—not at all valuable, you know; two or three pounds, I suppose—which she used to pin up a cloak or anything of that sort. Before she went out she stuck this in the pin-cushion on her dressing-table, and left a ring—rather a good one, I believe—lying close by.”
“This,” asked Hewitt, “was not in the room that Mrs. Heath had occupied, I take it?”
“No; this was in another part of the building. Well, the brooch went—taken, evidently, by some one in a deuce of a hurry, for, when Mrs. Armitage got back to her room, there was the pin-cushion with a little tear in it, where the brooch had been simply snatched off. But the curious thing was that the ring—worth a dozen of the brooch—was left where it had been put. Mrs. Armitage didn’t remember whether or not she had locked the door herself, although she found it locked when she returned; but my niece, who was indoors all the time, went and tried it once—because she remembered that a gas-fitter was at work on the landing near by—and found it safely locked. The gas-fitter, whom we didn’t know at the time, but who since seems to be quite an honest fellow, was ready to swear that nobody but my niece had been to the door while he was in sight of it—which was almost all the time. As to the window, the sash-line had broken that very morning, and Mrs. Armitage had propped open the bottom half about eight or ten inches with a brush; and, when she returned, that brush, sash, and all were exactly as she had left them. Now I scarcely need tell you what an awkward job it must have been for anybody to get noiselessly in at that unsupported window; and how unlikely he would have been to replace it, with the brush, exactly as he found it.”
“Just so. I suppose the brooch, was really gone? I mean, there was no chance of Mrs. Armitage having mislaid it?”
“Oh, none at all! There was a most careful search.”
“Then, as to getting in at the window, would it have been easy?”
“Well, yes,” Sir James replied; “yes, perhaps it would. It was a first-floor window, and it looks over the roof and skylight of the billiard-room. I built the billiard-room myself—built it out from a smoking-room just at this corner. It would be easy enough to get at the window from the billiard-room roof. But, then,” he added, “that couldn’t have been the way. Somebody or other was in the billiard-room the whole time, and nobody could have got over the roof (which is nearly all skylight) without being seen and heard. I was there myself for an hour or two, taking a little practice.”
“Well, was anything done?”
“Strict inquiry was made among the servants, of course, but nothing came of it. It was such a small matter that Mrs. Armitage wouldn’t hear of my calling in the police or anything of that sort, although I felt pretty certain that there must be a dishonest servant about somewhere. A servant might take a plain brooch, you know, who would feel afraid of a valuable ring, the loss of which would be made a greater matter of.”
“Well, yes, perhaps so, in the case of an inexperienced thief, who also would be likely to snatch up whatever she took in a hurry. But I’m doubtful. What made you connect these two robberies together?”
“Nothing whatever—for some months. They seemed quite of a different sort. But scarcely more than a month ago I met Mrs. Armitage at Brighton, and we talked, among other things, of the previous robbery—that of Mrs. Heath’s bracelet. I described the circumstances pretty minutely, and, when I mentioned the match found on the table, she said: ‘How strange! Why, my thief left a match on the dressing-table when he took my poor little brooch!’”
Hewitt nodded. “Yes,” he said. “A spent match, of course?”
“Yes, of course, a spent match. She noticed it lying close by the pin-cushion, but threw it away without mentioning the circumstance. Still, it seemed rather curious to me that a match should be lit and dropped, in each case, on the dressing-cover an inch from where the article was taken. I mentioned it to Lloyd when I got back, and he agreed that it seemed significant.”
“Scarcely,” said Hewitt, shaking his head. “Scarcely, so far, to be called significant, although worth following up. Everybody uses matches in the dark, you know.”
“Well, at any rate, the coincidence appealed to me so far that it struck me it might be worth while to describe the brooch to the police in order that they could trace it if it had been pawned. They had tried that, of course, over the bracelet without any result, but I fancied the shot might be worth making, and might possibly lead us on the track of the more serious robbery.”
“Quite so. It was the right thing to do. Well?”
“Well, they found it. A woman had pawned it in London—at a shop in Chelsea. But that was some time before, and the pawnbroker had clean forgotten all about the woman’s appearance. The name and address she gave were false. So that was the end of that business.”
“Had any of the servants left you between the time the brooch was lost and the date of the pawn ticket?”
“No.”
“Were all your servants at home on the day the brooch was pawned?”
“Oh, yes! I made that inquiry myself.”
“Very good! What next?”
“Yesterday—and this is what made me send for you. My late wife’s sister came here last Tuesday, and we gave her the room from which Mrs. Heath lost her bracelet. She had with her a very old-fashioned brooch, containing a miniature of her father, and set in front with three very fine brilliants and a few smaller stones. Here we are, though, at the Croft. I’ll tell you the rest indoors.”
Hewitt laid his hand on the baronet’s arm. “Don’t pull up, Sir James,” he said. “Drive a little farther. I should like to have a general idea of the whole case before we go in.”
“Very good!” Sir James Norris straightened the horse’s head again and went on. “Late yesterday afternoon, as my sister-in-law was changing her dress, she left her room for a moment to speak to my daughter in her room, almost adjoining. She was gone no more than three minutes, or five at most, but on her return the brooch, which had been left on the table, had gone. Now the window was shut fast, and had not been tampered with. Of course the door was open, but so was my daughter’s, and anybody walking near must have been heard. But the strangest circumstance, and one that almost makes me wonder whether I have been awake to-day or not, was that there lay a used match on the very spot, as nearly as possible, where the brooch had been—and it was broad daylight!”
Hewitt rubbed his nose and looked thoughtfully before him. “Um—curious, certainly,” he said, “Anything else?”
“Nothing more than you shall see for yourself. I have had the room locked and watched till you could examine it. My sister-in-law had heard of your name, and suggested that you should be called in; so, of course, I did exactly as she wanted. That she should have lost that brooch, of all things, in my house is most unfortunate; you see, there was some small difference about the thing between my late wife and her sister when their mother died and left it. It’s almost worse than the Heaths’ bracelet business, and altogether I’m not pleased with things, I can assure you. See what a position it
is for me! Here are three ladies, in the space of one year, robbed one after another in this mysterious fashion in my house, and I can’t find the thief! It’s horrible! People will be afraid to come near the place. And I can do nothing!”
“Ah, well, we’ll see. Perhaps we had better turn back now. By-the-by, were you thinking of having any alterations or additions made to your house?”
“No. What makes you ask?”
“I think you might at least consider the question of painting and decorating, Sir James—or, say, putting up another coach-house, or something. Because I should like to be (to the servants) the architect—or the builder, if you please—come to look around. You haven’t told any of them about this business?”
“Not a word. Nobody knows but my relatives and Lloyd. I took every precaution myself, at once. As to your little disguise, be the architect by all means, and do as you please. If you can only find this thief and put an end to this horrible state of affairs, you’ll do me the greatest service I’ve ever asked for—and as to your fee, I’ll gladly make it whatever is usual, and three hundred in addition.”
Martin Hewitt bowed. “You’re very generous, Sir James, and you may be sure I’ll do what I can. As a professional man, of course, a good fee always stimulates my interest, although this case of yours certainly seems interesting enough by itself.”
“Most extraordinary! Don’t you think so? Here are three persons, all ladies, all in my house, two even in the same room, each successively robbed of a piece of jewelry, each from a dressing-table, and a used match left behind in every case. All in the most difficult—one would say impossible—circumstances for a thief, and yet there is no clue!”
“Well, we won’t say that just yet, Sir James; we must see. And we must guard against any undue predisposition to consider the robberies in a lump. Here we are at the lodge gate again. Is that your gardener—the man who left the ladder by the lawn on the first occasion you spoke of?”
Mr. Hewitt nodded in the direction of a man who was clipping a box border.
