“Nothing visible in the way of a handle, you see?” he pointed out. “The panelling’s quite smooth.”
He dropped the tapestry into place again and came back to the table.
“Now this leather disc,” he picked it up as he spoke. “You suggested to us that it might be a child’s toy. That was what eventually put me on the track. It is a child’s toy. I’ve played with one like it when I was a child myself, though I haven’t seen one for years now. Possibly the modern child doesn’t use things of that sort. But in my young days they used to call them ‘suckers.’ Here’s one in its normal state.”
He drew from his pocket a disc of leather with a loop of twine attached, exactly like the Corinthian relic, except that Westenhanger’s leather was soft and moist.
“I’ll show you how it works.”
He dipped it for a moment into the glass of water, then placed it flat on the table with the twine loop on the upper side.
“Now I squeeze it into contact with the table, so as to exclude all air between it and the wooden surface. The water acts as a seal. That’s right. Now I pull vertically upwards on the twine. You see the centre of the disc is pulled up by the twine. That makes a vacuum between the leather and the table; and the pressure of the atmosphere pins the ‘sucker’ to the wood. The harder you pull, the faster it sticks. It’s exactly the way a limpet sticks to a rock; and you know how tight that clings. With a thing of this size, I could lift an ordinary paving stone out of its bed. We used to pull up quite big stones with them when I was a kiddie.”
By levering the ‘sucker’ adroitly he loosened it from the table, just as a limpet is slid off its bed by a side-thrust.
“I think the rest’s obvious. The Corinthian wanted some means of pulling out that particular panel without leaving any mark or attaching a handle. He used this sucker for the purpose. I’ll show you.”
He went over to the arras, lifted it, and attached his leather disc at the point where the needle had been. A slow, steady pull on the twine completed the work, and a large piece of the panel came forward, evidently the end of a drawer fitting back into the wall of the room.