Fatty walked round the room. It had evidently been roughly cleaned and thoroughly dusted not long before. A little pile of tins of meat and fruit stood on a shelf. The kettle on the stove had water in it. A tin of tea was on the table. Books stood on the window-sill, and Fatty turned over the pages of some. They were in a foreign language and he couldn’t understand a word.
The sofa had been prepared as a kind of bed, for the cushions were piled at one end, and cosy rugs had been folded there. It was all very strange.
“I suppose I’d better get back to the summer-house,” thought Fatty. “I wish I could find some letters or documents of some sort that would tell me a bit about this queer room. But there don’t seem to be any.”
He sat down on the sofa and yawned. Then his eye caught sight of a small cupboard in the wall He wondered what was in it. He got up - but the cupboard was locked. Fatty put his hand into his pocket and brought out a perfectly extraordinary collection of keys. He had secretly been making a board of these, as he had leant that most detectives can lock or unlock doors of cupboards. They had queer keys called skeleton keys which could apparently unlock with ease almost anything that needed a key.
But a skeleton key had proved impossible to buy, and, indeed, had led to many awkward questions being put by the shopkeepers whom he had asked for one. So Fatty had been forced to collect any old key which he could find, and he now had a very varied collection which weighed down the pocket of his coat considerably. He took them all out.
Most patiently and methodically Fatty tried first one key and then another in the lock of the little cupboard, and to his delight, and also his surprise, one key did manage to unlock the door!
Inside was a small book, a kind of notebook, and entered in it were numbers and names, nothing else at all. It seemed very dull to Fatty.
“Perhaps Inspector Jenks may like to have a look at it,” he thought, and he pocketed the little book and locked the cupboard door again. “We shall soon be reporting this mystery to him, and he may like to have all the bits of evidence we can find.”
He sat down on the sofa again. He no longer felt excited, but very sleepy. He looked at his watch. It was quarter past one! Gracious! he had been a long time in Milton House.
“I’ll just have a bit of a rest on this comfy sofa,” said Fatty, and curled himself up. In half a minute he was sound asleep. What a mistake that was!