“He moved the body, eh? I wonder why. If the job was done by a certain person I have in mind, I don’t see what object he could have in carrying the corpse from Gage’s bedroom to the storeroom. The natural thing would have been to leave the body on the spot. You’re not kidding me?”
“Absolutely not.” The Phantom grinned at Culligore’s perplexity. Evidently the lieutenant’s theories and calculations had been completely upset by what he had just heard. “Who is the certain person you had in mind, Culligore?”
“Never mind that. Let me get this straight. You were in Gage’s bedroom when Mrs. Trippe was murdered?”
“Not in the bedroom, but——” The Phantom checked himself on the point of explaining that he had witnessed the murder from his place of concealment in the narrow opening back of the window frame. In a flash it dawned upon him that he had another advantage over the detective. He had found the loophole in the situation for which his mind had been searching for the past ten minutes. Culligore, of course, was not aware of the existence of the tunnel. The stairs leading to the cellar were at the Phantom’s back. If he could elude the detective long enough to slip down the steps and crawl into the mouth of the tunnel, he would be temporarily safe. It was a slender chance, but he had no other.
“Where were you, then?” demanded Culligore.
“My secret.” The Phantom assumed a mysterious expression, meanwhile edging ever so slightly toward the stairs at his back. “I saw Mrs. Trippe and she saw me. She was in a terribly frightened condition, and she called out that someone was killing her. Then, of a sudden, a hand appeared, holding a knife. Before I could utter a word or move a muscle, the knife had done its work.”
Culligore muttered something under his breath. He scanned the Phantom’s face keenly, but what he saw evidently convinced him of the narrator’s truthfulness. A noise, scarcely louder than the falling of a pin, sounded at the head of the stairs. The Phantom’s sensitive ears detected it, but the lieutenant appeared to have heard nothing.
“Well, what happened after that?”
The Phantom waited for a moment before he answered. A draft faint as a breath told him that the door at the top of the stairs had been opened. He had a vague impression that somebody was looking down on them, and he wondered whether Doctor Bimble or Jerome had returned. Not the slightest flicker in his face showed that he had noticed anything.
“I didn’t see any more. The—the curtain fell a moment or two after the blow was struck.”