"Is it — is it open?" asked the rector, his voice startlingly loud.
The door rasped and squealed as Dr. Fell pushed it back, the chief constable lending him a hand; it was warped, and difficult to jar backwards along the stone floor. A sifting of dust shook round them.
Then they stood on the threshold of the Governor's Room, looking round.
"I dare say we shouldn't be going in here," Sir Benjamin muttered, after a silence. "All the same! — Any of you ever seen the room before?… No? I didn't expect so. H'm. They can't have changed the furniture much, can they?"
"Most of the furniture was old Anthony's," said Dr. Fell. "The rest of it belonged to his son Martin, who was governor here until he — well, died — in 1837. They both gave instructions that the room wasn't to be altered."
It was a comparatively large room, though with rather a low ceiling. Directly opposite the door in which they stood was the window. That side of the prison was in shadow, and, the ivy twined round the window's heavy grating did not admit much light; puddles of rain water still lay under it on the uneven stone floor. Some six feet to the left of the window was the door giving on the balcony. It was open, standing out almost at right-angles to the wall; and trailing strands of vine, ripped apart when the door had been opened, drooped across the entrance; so that it allowed but little more light than the window.
There had evidently been an effort, once upon a time, to lend a semblance of comfort to this gloomy place. Black-walnut panelling, now rotting away, had been superimposed on the stone walls. In the wall towards the left of the watchers, just between a tall wardrobe and a. bookcase full of big discoloured volumes in calfskin, was a stone chimney-piece with a couple of empty candlesticks on its ledge. A mildewed wing-chair had been drawn up before the fireplace. There (Rampole remembered) would be where old Anthony sat in his nightcap before the blaze, when he heard a knocking at the balcony door and a whispered invitation to come out and join dead men….
In the centre of the room was an old flat desk, thick with dust and debris, and a straight wooden chair drawn up beside it. Rampole stared. Yes, in the dust he could see a narrow rectangular space where the bicycle-lamp had stood last night; there, in that wooden chair facing the right-hand wall, was where Martin Starberth had sat with the ray of. his lamp directed towards…
So — In the middle of the right-hand wall, set flush with it, was the door to the vault or the safe or whatever it was called. A plain iron door, six feet high and half as wide, now dull with rust. Just under its iron handle was a curious arrangement like a flattened box, with a large keyhole in one end, and in the other what resembled a metal flap above a small knob.
"The reports were correct, then," Dr. Fell said, abruptly. "I thought so. Otherwise it would have been too easy."