“No capture yet,” said the superintendent, grimly; “but it seems to me, Dick, that you’ll get your promotion over this bit of mystery, for a nice game of some kind has been carried on, and we haven’t got to the bottom of it yet I want that other door open now.”
They descended to the crypt again, and paused before the locked iron door, which, thanks to the experience gained in opening the others of the same make, the workmen forced in the course of an hour, and at the first flash in of a bull’s-eye lantern a suppressed hiss of excitement escaped from the officer’s lips.
“At last!” he muttered. “It’s murder, then, after all, but where’s the girl?”
For there, just as they had been carried in, ready for future disposal, lay side by side, in the bottom of the roomy iron closet, the bodies of the two servants, each with a bullet wound in the head, such an one as would produce almost instant death.
They were carried out and laid upon a broad table of massive make, and as soon as this was done the superintendent examined the iron closet, whose back was covered with a perfect nest of drawers, one of which on being opened proved to be full of carefully-done-up rouleaux, the greater part of the rest being similarly filled.
One of the rouleaux was torn open, and a portion of its contents poured into the officer’s hand.
“Sovereigns,” he said. “Why, they must have had to do with some bank. Eh, what?”
“Duffers,” said the constable addressed as Dick. “A gang of smashers.”
“It isn’t a time for making jokes,” said another of the men, who was handling a couple of sovereigns, “or I’d say you was a duffer. Look at that; hark at this.”
He handed one coin to the man, and rang another on the heavy table, for it to give out the true sound of sterling gold.