“The miniatures—where are they?”
Scared at the abruptness of the query and at his mistress’s changed tone of voice, Chipps gazed quickly around him.
“You told me to put them on the table, ma’am,” he murmured, “and I did so. They certainly don’t seem to be in the room now——” he added, with a sudden feeling of terror.
“Run and ask one of the nurses at once if the case was taken up to Mr. Frewin’s room during the night?”
Chipps, needless to say, did not wait to be told twice. He was beginning to feel very anxious. He spoke to Kennet and also to the two nurses, and asked them if, by any chance, the miniatures were in the late master’s room. To this Kennet and the nurses replied in the negative. The last they had seen of the miniatures was when Chipps took them from the valet and followed his mistress downstairs with the case in his hands.
The poor old butler was in despair; the cook was in hysterics, and consternation reigned throughout the house. The disappearance of the miniatures caused almost a greater excitement than the death of the master, who had been a dying man so long that he was almost a stranger to the servants at Blatchley.
Mrs. Frewin was the first to recover her presence of mind.
“Send a motor at once to the police-station at Brighton,” she said very calmly, as soon as she completely realised that the miniatures were nowhere to be found. “It is my duty to see that this matter is thoroughly gone into at once.”
Within half an hour of the discovery of the theft, Detective Inspector Hankin and Police Constable McLeod had both arrived from Brighton, having availed themselves of Mrs. Frewin’s motor. They are shrewd men, both of them, and it did not take them many minutes before they had made up their minds how the robbery had taken place. By whom it was done was quite another matter, and would take some time and some ingenuity to find out.
What Detective Inspector Hankin had gathered was this: While John Chipps saw his mistress into the motor, the front door of the house had, of necessity, been left wide open. The motor then made a start, but after a few paces it stopped, and Mrs. Frewin put her head out of the window and shouted to Chipps some instructions with regard to the nurses’ evening collation, which, in view of Mr. Frewin’s state, she feared might be forgotten. Chipps, being an elderly man and a little deaf, did not hear her voice distinctly, so he ran up to the motor, and she repeated her instructions to him. In Inspector Hankin’s mind there was no doubt that the thief, who must have been hanging about the shrubbery that evening, took that opportunity to sneak into the house, then to hide himself in a convenient spot until he could find an opportunity for the robbery which he had in view.