"What?" asked the chief constable, rather irritably.
The doctor pointed with his cane. "Suppose a burglar wanted to key into that thing. Why, with only a keyhole in plain sight, he might get an impression of the lock and have a skeleton key made; though it would be an infernally big key…. But with this arrangement, he couldn't have got in short of blowing the whole wall out with dynamite."
"With what arrangement?"
"A letter combination. I'd heard there was one. It isn't a new idea, you know. Metternich had one; and Talleyrand speaks of, `Ma porte qu'on peut ouvrir avec un mot, comme les quarante voleurs de Scheherazade.' You see that knob, with the sliding metal thing above it? The metal piece covers a dial, like a modern safe, except that there are the twenty-six letters of the alphabet instead of numbers. You must turn that knob and spell a word — the word arranged on — before the door can be opened; without that word, a mere key is useless."
"Provided anybody wanted to open the dashed thing," said Sir Benjamin.
They were silent again, all uncomfortable. The rector was mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, a sure sign, and regarding a large canopied bed against the right-hand wall. It was still laid with moth-eaten, decaying clothes and bolster; and fragments of the curtains hung on black brass rings about the tester. There was a night table beside it, with a candlestick. Rampole found himself thinking of lines out of Anthony's manuscript: "I had trimmed my bedside candle, put on my nightcap, and prepared to read in bed, when I saw a movement among the bedclothes…."
The American removed his eyes quickly. Well, one more person had lived and died in this room since Anthony. Over beyond the safe there was a desk-secretary with glass doors; on top of it he could see a bust of Minerva and a huge Bible. None of them, with the exception of Dr. Fell, could quite shake off a sense that they were in a dangerous place where they must walk lightly and not touch. The chief constable shook himself.
"Well," Sir Benjamin began, grimly, "we're here. I'm hanged if 'I see what we do now. There's where the poor chap sat. There's where he put his lamp. No sign of a struggle — nothing broken — "
"By the way," interposed Dr. Fell, thoughtfully, "I wonder if the safe is still open."
Rampole felt a constriction in his throat.