Chapter Twenty Two
A Secret is Disclosed
The night was still – clear and starlit.
Between two and three in the morning is the one hour when, in London, the very houses seem to slumber, save in a few districts, such as Fleet Street, Covent Garden and its purlieus, where night and day are alike – equally active, equally feverish – those streets which never sleep.
I wore an old suit, a golf cap, shoes with rubber soles, and in my jacket-pocket carried an electric torch. I had decided not to take a pistol. After all, I was not bent on mischief. Also I was going, as I supposed, among friends. Even if Sir Charles were to turn upon me I could not believe he would do me an injury, in spite of my beloved’s warning. He and I had known each other such a long time.
Vera, finding that nothing would dissuade me, had ended by giving me the bunch of keys which I had forgotten she still possessed – the keys I had taken from old Taylor’s pocket. “If you are determined to do this mad thing, Dick,” she had said to me, kissing me fondly, “you may as well get in with the key, instead of house-breaking.” On the bunch were the key which would unlock the iron gate, and the one of the little door. This greatly simplified matters, for there were no bolts on the little door, as there were upon the front door and on the tradesmen’s door.
The light appeared in the same window on the first floor at exactly twenty minutes past two. Standing in Belgrave Street with my constable friend, who was now on duty, I saw it flicker suddenly. Without further delay we both went round Crane’s Alley. Nobody was about. Not a sound anywhere. Noiselessly I unlocked the iron gate, then the little door…
“Good luck, sir,” the policeman whispered, as I crept into the dark, low-roofed passage. “And if you want any help, remember you’ve got the whistle.”
There were two little stone-walled cellar-passages, and I took the one to the right. Before I had gone a yard I uttered an exclamation. I was up against a great veil of grey cobwebs which hung from everywhere and was stretched right across the stone passage. So thick were they that I had to push into them to make my way along. How I regretted I had not brought a stick! Suddenly something damp creepy, large, horrible, ran across my face, then another, and another.
Ugh! My blood ran cold at their touch, for I hate spiders.
I pulled out my electric torch. Its sudden glare sent scores of spiders scurrying in all directions. I could actually hear them – nay, I could smell them, and, wherever I looked, I could see them. The sight made me shudder, for they were not, apparently, house-spiders of the usual variety – but large, fat, oval-bodied things, with curved legs, and with protruding heads that seemed to look at me. Indeed, I don’t think that in the whole of my life I have ever spent moments that I less like to dwell upon than the two minutes it took me to push my way through that loathsome tangle of evil-smelling cobwebs alive with spiders. I would not go through such an experience again for any sum.
At last I got through them, and I recollect thinking, as I emerged, how foolish I had been to take the wrong turning.
Of course, when Vera had led me out we must have come by the other passage, as there had been no cobwebs then. And that led me further to wonder whether at that time the passage had not been in regular use by some person or persons. I did not for a moment believe that old Taylor had been so conscientious as to keep either passage free of cobwebs, seeing how utterly neglected had been the rest of the house.
In the servants’ quarters, where I presently found myself, I recognised at once that same acrid smell of dry rot I had noticed when last in the house, only now it was more “pronounced.” Noiselessly I crept along, in my rubber shoes, to the hall. Everywhere the deathly stillness was so intense that one seemed almost to feel it. Cautiously I crept up the front stairs, keeping close to the wall in order to prevent their creaking. My electric torch proved most useful.
I was outside the door of the drawing-room that overlooked Belgrave Street – the first room I had entered on that previous occasion – the room into which I had peered the night before, as I stood upon the ladder. A tiny ray of faint light percolated through the keyhole. I listened, hardly breathing, but could hear no sound at all, except my own heart-beats.
Should I turn the handle gently, slowly push the door ajar, and peep in? It might squeak. Should I fling open the door and rush in? Faced with a problem, I was undecided. I admit that at that moment I felt inclined to run away. Instead, I stood motionless, hesitating, frightened at my own temerity. Had I, after all, been wise in disregarding Vera’s good advice?
I thought of that curious brown stain I remembered so distinctly upon the ceiling in this very room. It had been in the right hand corner – the corner farthest from me. What was above that corner? Ah, I knew just where that spot would be in the room above.
Suddenly an idea struck me. I would creep up to the next floor and enter the room above. I had taken from the bunch about eight keys I thought might prove of use. Vera had told me which they were. All were loose in different pockets, each with a tag tied to it, bearing the name of the room it belonged to.
The room upstairs was in darkness, but the door of it was not locked. Cautiously I entered, pushed to the door behind me, and then pressed the button of my electric torch.
Everything was in disorder. Most of the dusty furniture had been pushed into a corner. Some of it was still covered with sheets, but much of it was not. Clearly people had been in here a good deal of late. I picked my way between various pieces of furniture across to the corner I sought. On arriving there I started, and at once switched off my light.
In the floor at that corner, was a big hole, a very big hole indeed, several feet across.
The carpet had been rolled back. The boards had all been ripped up. Two of the beams below them had been sawed across, and about three feet of each of these beams removed. The ceiling of the room below had been smashed away – this I judged to be the exact spot where the brown stain had been – and, as I cautiously bent forward, and craned my neck, I could see right down into the drawing-room.
Voices were murmuring – men’s voices. The sight upon which my gaze rested made me recoil.
Stretched out on the floor, right below me, was a human body – shrivelled, dry, quite brown, but undoubtedly a body. It looked exactly like a mummy, a mummy five feet or more in length. Beside it knelt two figures. As I looked, I saw them slowly lift the body from the floor, one man holding either end of it. In a moment or two they had carried it out of sight. And the men who had taken it away were Sir Charles Thorold and the man I had known as Davies, but whose name I now knew to be Whichelo.
This was more, a great deal more than I had expected or even dreamt I should see when I entered the house of mystery.
What could it all mean? Had there been foul play? And if so, had Thorold had a hand in it? I could not think this possible. And yet what other construction could I possibly place upon what I had just witnessed?
I did not know what to think, much less had I any idea of what I ought now to do. And then, all at once, an inspiration came to me.
I took several long breaths. Then, setting my voice at a low, unnatural pitch, I gave vent to a deep, long-drawn-out wail, gradually raising my voice until it ended in a weird shriek.
The stillness below became intense. I paused for perhaps half-a-minute. Then I slowly repeated the wail, ending this time in a kind of unearthly yell.
I knew I had achieved my purpose – knew that the men below were terrified, panic-stricken. I could picture them kneeling beside the shrivelled corpse, literally petrified by horror, their eyes starting from their sockets, their faces bloodless.
Then I walked with measured tread about the floor, the dull “plunk plunk” of my rubber soles sounding, in the depth of the night, and in the stillness of that unoccupied house – ghostly even to me. Next I began to push the furniture about, and a moment later I slammed the door.
There was a wild, a frantic stampede. Both men had sprung to their feet and were dashing headlong down the stairs. I pursued them in the darkness! They heard the quick patter of my rubber shoes upon the stairs behind them, and it seemed to give them wings. Furniture was knocked spinning in the darkness. A terrific crash echoed through the house as, in their blind rush, they hurled on to the stone floor of the hall a big china vase the height of a man which had stood upon a pedestal. A door slammed. Then another, more faintly, a long way down some corridor.
Then once more all was still.
Chuckling at the grim humour of the situation, I went slowly up the stairs again. There was still a light in the first-floor room. I pushed the door open and walked boldly in.
I halted, surprise had petrified me.
The sight that my eyes rested upon I shall not forget as long as ever I live!
Chapter Twenty Three
Contains Another Revelation
I stood still in horror, my eyes riveted upon the shrivelled human body. It was stretched out upon several chairs placed side by side. The sight was most gruesome.
Near it, upon the floor, was an ordinary packing-case, in the bottom of which a quantity of wood shavings had been pressed down, to form a sort of bed. At once I realised that this box had been prepared for the reception of the body.
It was about to be smuggled out of the house!
But how did it come to be there? Whose body was it? How long had it been dead? And how had the man – for I saw it was the body of a man, apparently a man of middle-age – come by his death?
It was not the sight of the Thing that had startled me, however, for I had expected to see it there.
What had taken my breath away had been the sight of great heaps of coin upon the floor, gold coin which had evidently just been emptied out of the little sacks close by. Near by were some glass bottles containing powdered metal, some bottles of coloured fluid, and various implements – a couple of metal moulds, a ladle, a miniature hand-lathe, several files, and some curiously-fashioned tools which I judged must be finishing tools used in the manufacture of coin.
The truth was plain – a ghastly unexpected truth.
Thorold and Whichelo were, or had been, in some way concerned in issuing base coin, though to me it seemed hardly possible that Sir Charles could actually be implicated. I picked up a handful of the shining coins, and let them fall between my fingers in a golden stream. If they were not golden French louis they were certainly fine imitations. All the coins were French twenty and ten-franc pieces, I noticed. There were no British coins among them, nor were there coins of any other nation. In all, there must have been several thousands of them.
When I had recovered from my surprise, I began to examine the body more closely. With my electric torch I ran a flash all along it and to and fro. It was the body of a man about thirty, I definitely decided, and it was swathed in brown rags. I had seen bodies in the catacombs in Rome and in Paris that looked like this, and also in South America I had seen some.
South America! My thought of that continent set up a fresh train of thought in my mind. It made me think of Mexico, and the thought of Mexico, though not in South America, brought the tall, dark man, Whichelo, back to me vividly. He had been in Mexico a great deal at one time, Vera had told me. And this mummified body lying in front of me – yes, it singularly resembled the mummified bodies I had seen in Mexico when on my travels about the world.
What had caused death? Critical inspection with my electric torch showed distinctly a fracture at the base of the skull, as though it had been struck with some blunt implement, such as a hammer.
Yes, there could be no doubt that the skull had been severely fractured. I should have held the theory that the poor fellow had been attacked from behind, felled to the ground with some iron weapon. I wondered greatly how long the man had been dead. No expert knowledge was needed to decide that he must have been dead a number of years. And where had the body been hidden all this time?
Instinctively I glanced at the ceiling – at the gaping hole in it – and instantly I knew. This mummified body had been hidden away, buried between the ceiling and floor! It had been in that corner, where the hole now was. And the brown stain I had noticed in the corner of the ceiling…
But the money? Why, of course, the money must have been there, too. A thought struck me. I picked up some of the coins again, and glanced at the dates. Twenty-five or thirty years ago they were dated, yet they looked quite new. Clearly, then, they had not been in circulation. Paulton’s significant remark returned to me – the remark he had made that night in the room in Château d’Uzerche, when I had said something about not revealing Sir Charles Thorold’s secret.
Could there be some hidden connexion between this discovery I had made, Thorold’s secret, and the charge upon which Paulton was “wanted?”
I spent some time in examining the room and its contents. Then I explored other parts of the house.
Was I now gradually approaching the solution of Sir Charles Thorold’s secret?
I believed it more than likely that I might now at last be well on my way to solving the mystery of Houghton Park and the Thorolds’ sudden flight. That Sir Charles and his big friend would not return that night I fully believed. They might, or might not, be superstitious, but there could be no doubt I had terrified them thoroughly. If they returned at all it would be in the daytime, I conjectured.
What was to be done? How should I act?
I decided that the only thing to do would be to go out into the street and inform the constable of all that had happened. I had told him I would not stay long in the house in any case, and my prolonged absence might be making him feel uneasy.
I left by the front door – which I found securely bolted and chained on the inside – and there found the constable flashing his bull’s-eye lantern upon the door, and with his truncheon ready drawn.
“Hush!” I whispered, and he smiled upon seeing me, and at once replaced his truncheon.
“I was beginning to feel very anxious on your account, sir,” he said. “I ’arf wondered who might be a-comin’ out. Well, sir, did you see anything?”
“I should say so,” I answered, and then, as briefly as I could, I told him nearly everything.
I persuaded him to come in then and there.
“Well, look at that, now!” he said, as I showed him first the mummified body, then the sacks of gold, and pointed out to him the great hole cut in the ceiling. “Well, look at that, now!” he repeated.
“The awkward part of the affair is this,” I said at last. “Who is going to lodge information? I don’t care to, for, if I do, inquiries will be made as to how I came to be on the premises at all, and how I managed to get in, and it won’t look well if I am proved, on my own showing, to have entered the place secretly in the middle of the night. Again, I don’t want to lodge information against Sir Charles Thorold. Why should I? He has always been my friend. Nor, for that matter, do I want to prefer any sort of charge against Whichelo. So far as the body is concerned, we may be quite wrong in conjecturing that there has been foul play. Indeed, there is no actual proof that the mummy was hidden in the ceiling of the room, though personally I think it must have been. Everything points to it. And you, Bennett, can’t very well give information either without compromising yourself as well as me. Your inspector would want to know how you managed to get into the house, and what right you had to enter it.”
I paused, considering, while he removed his helmet and scratched his head.
“I’ll tell you what I think we had better do,” I said at last.
“Well, sir, what?” he inquired eagerly.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Go back to your beat. I’ll bolt and chain the front door when you’re gone. Then I’ll put out the light in this room, and make my way out of the house by the way I entered it.”
“But the two men,” the policeman said quickly. “Where can they have got to? They can’t have left the premises.”
“You may depend upon it they have,” I answered. “I feel pretty sure there must be some secret entrance to this house, that they alone know. The back door, too, is bolted and chained on the inside, and they can hardly have entered the way I did – ugh!” and I shuddered again at the thought of those horrible, hairy-legged spiders scampering over my bare flesh.
“Meet me 2.”
Again that odd little advertisement arose in my thoughts. I would watch the front page of the Morning Post for a day or two. Perhaps another advertisement might appear that would help me.
Early next day I went and told Vera everything. I found her seated in the lounge on the right of the hall.
She listened eagerly, and I saw at once that the news excited her a good deal, yet to my surprise she made no comment, but changed the subject of conversation by remarking —
“Violet brought Frank Faulkner here yesterday evening. He is engaged to be married to her. He has broken off his engagement to Gladys Deroxe, and I am very glad he has,” she declared.
“Really,” I exclaimed. “Well, frankly I’m not surprised, for I believe he has been in love with Violet from the moment he first met her. But how did Miss Deroxe take it? Was there a dreadful scene?”
“Scene? There was no scene at all, it appears. What happened was simply this. Gladys discovered that Frank had brought Violet over from the Riviera, that she was staying here at his expense, and that he seemed to be extremely attentive to her. Now, a sensible girl would have asked her future husband, in a case of that sort, to come to see her and explain everything. That, certainly, is what I should have done.”
“And what did Miss Deroxe do?”
“Do? Good Heavens, she sat down then and there and wrote him a letter – oh! such a letter! He showed it to me. I have never in my life read anything so insulting. She ended by telling him in writing that she had never really cared for him, and that she hoped she would never see him again. In one place she wrote: ‘I might have guessed the kind of man you are by the kind of company you keep. I know all about your friend, Richard Ashton. He associates with dreadful people. I am only glad I have found you out before it was too late!’ Those were her words. So you see the kind of reputation you have acquired, my dear Dick.”
I laughed – laughed uproariously. I, “the associate of dreadful people,” I, a member of that hot-bed of conventions and of respectability, Brooks’s Club. The whole thing was delicious.
“When will Frank and Violet be here again?”
I asked presently, after we had ascended together to the private sitting-room.
“I’ve invited Frank to lunch. I told them you were coming. Frank has something important to tell you, he said.”
“Did he tell you what?”
“No. At least it had reference, he said, to the Château d’Uzerche, or to something that has been found there. To tell the truth, I was thinking of something else when he told me.”
“Dearest,” I said, some minutes later, my arm about her waist, “you remember my telling you I had taken a few of the coins I found in your father’s house. Well, yesterday I had them tested. They are not counterfeits. They are genuine.”
She looked at me curiously. Then, after a pause, she said —
“What made you think they might be counterfeit?”
“What made me think so? Seeing that I discovered with them a number of implements, etc, used apparently in the manufacture of base coin, my inference naturally was that the coins must have been false.”
Still she looked at me. Gradually her expression hardened.
“Dick,” she said at last, “you are deceiving me. You have deceived me all along. You told me you knew my father’s secret. Now you don’t know it – do you?”
“Indeed you are mistaken, quite mistaken, dearest,” I exclaimed quickly. “I know it well enough, but I don’t, I admit, know that part of it which bears upon these coins. I never pretended to know that part.”
It was a wild shot, but I felt I must say something in my defence.
I hated deceiving Vera in this way, as, indeed, I should have hated to deceive her in any way, but, playing a part still, I was driven to subterfuge. After all, I had never said I knew her father’s secret. She had jumped to the conclusion that I knew it, that day I had found her locked in the upper room in the house in Belgrave Street, and I had not disillusioned her. That was all.
The door of the sitting-room opened at that moment, we sprang apart as Faulkner and Violet entered. The pretty girl, in a blue serge coat and skirt, looked radiantly happy, and the happiness she felt seemed to increase her great beauty. I confess I had not before fully realised what a lovely girl she was.
“Ah, Dick, my dear fellow,” Faulkner exclaimed, grasping me by the hand, “I want you to congratulate me, old chap.”
“Oh, I do, of course,” I said at once. “I congratulate you doubly – on becoming engaged, and on breaking off your engagement.”
He made a quick little gesture of impatience.
“Oh, I don’t mean congratulations of that kind,” he said quickly. “I shouldn’t ask you to waste your time in congratulating me upon anything so commonplace as an engagement of marriage. I want you to congratulate me upon something you don’t yet know.”
“Well, what is it?” I said impatiently. “Have you come into a fortune?”
“Right the very first time!” he exclaimed. “Yes, I have. I’ve inherited, quite unexpectedly, a very large fortune. But the odd thing is this. My benefactor is, or rather was, unknown to me. Until yesterday I had never even heard his name.”
“How wonderful! But how splendid!” I cried out. “Do tell me more about it. Tell me everything.”
“I will. And now prepare to receive a shock. The will leaving me this fortune was found in the safe discovered among the débris of Château d’Uzerche, after the fire?”