"He's the first footman. He runs mother's junk closet. He… I say!" Morley snapped his fingers. "Got it! Ten to one he put 'em in the junk closet. That's mother's idea. It's for the heathen. Whatever there is in the house that we can't possibly want, it's chucked into the junk closet, and once or twice a year mother sorts everything out with the idea of sending it to the heathen. After six months' cool reflection, however, she generally decides she can find a use for most of the things that have been thrown away, so the heathen don't profit much after all."
"And this junk closet is accessible to everybody?"
"Oh, yes. It's a room, really." Morley glanced at the bishop, and one of his eyelids drooped. "It's next door to the room, by the way, where that poltergeist of ours made such a murderous attack on the Vicar of Pucklechurch."
The bishop looked at Dr. Fell, and Dr. Fell looked at the bishop. Hugh Donovan had an uneasy feeling that nonsense was beginning to assume the colors of ugly purpose.
"Let's go inside" said Dr. Fell abruptly, and turned.
They went round to the front of the house. The marshy smell had grown strong with the declining sun, and gnats flickered in the shadow of the porch. All the dull-red blinds were drawn on the lower floor. Poking at the bell push with his stick, Dr. Fell glanced along the line of windows.
"There's more in this business," he said, "than shoes or poltergeists, or even murder. The queerest riddle of all is old Depping himself. Mmf. Look at this atrocity!" He rapped the stone wall of the house. "Here's a man noted for his fastidiousness of taste in dress, in letters, and in bearing. He is a gourmet who employs a special cook to prepare him dishes that must be exactly right. And yet he lives in a house like this! He's an austere fellow with the nicest sort of taste in wines, and yet he goes on periodical whooping sprees of secret drinking with a servant posted outside the door so that nobody may disturb him. In addition to this, he interrupts periods of hard study to go slobbering after girls young enough to be his granddaughters. This is bad. There's something mad and unholy about it, and this ascetic old satyr is the worst of all. Archons of Athens! — behold Hadley's idea of a nice, featureless, commonplace case. The eight of swords is only an item… Ah!"
The door, whose upper panel was made of red-and-black chequered glass, glowed out eerily as somebody switched on a light inside. It was opened by a thin man with a melancholy nose and an air of having looked on all the follies of earth without any particular surprise.
"Yes, sir?" said the nose; he talked through it.
"We're from the police," said Dr. Fell. "Take us upstairs. — Your name is Storer, isn't it?"