“Yes, sir.”
“It's not locked now.”
“Oh, yes, it is, sir.” She laid a confident hand on it to turn in bewilderment as it opened easily.
“Why—why—someone must have undone it!”
“Just so,” agreed Pointer dryly. “And the key?”
She opened a door facing the street entrance, and switched on the light. “There it is, hanging where I put it at twelve o'clock.”
Pointer raised a weary eyebrow, but he said nothing, and made his way to the lounge, where, after asking both the manager and Mr. Beale to hold themselves in readiness for any possible further questions to-morrow morning, he joined Watts upstairs and spent a strenuous hour with him.
“No key to fit his trunk—no sign of the bag which the booking-clerk and porter saw him carry upstairs,—no sign of a ring,—no scrap of paper nor any mark of identity beyond his signatures,—humph!”
The Chief Inspector dusted his knees carefully and went to the mantelpiece. “Here's a box of wax vestas right enough, the same kind as the vesta I picked up in the wardrobe, but that one was still warm and soft. Burnt down to the last end and dropped burning into the wardrobe when it scorched someone's fingers—whose, Watts?”
Watts shook his head.