“Damn it!” he said, irritably, “if I go on like this, I’ll end up by being as bad as Freddie. That’s not the way to go about the business at all. What’s wanted is new facts, not a lot of futile ideas. One must begin somewhere. I’ll go and have a look at the Corinthian’s Room and see if anything suggests itself when I’m on the actual spot.”
Westenhanger had learnt that no change had been made in the Corinthian’s Room since the theft. The cabinet had been untouched, just as the thief had left it. They had all been asked not to tamper with anything.
“The Talisman will come back by the way in which it went,” Old Dangerfield had said, with a faint mockery in his voice. “Let us leave the door open for it to get into its case again.”
Without any very strong hope in his mind, Westenhanger made his way to the Corinthian’s Room which, to his relief, was untenanted. He felt a certain shamefacedness in actually embarking on this attempt at detection, and he was glad that he could examine the place without betraying his purpose. As he entered the door, his eye was caught by the gigantic chess-board set in the floor pattern, and he examined it curiously.
“These little holes at the corners of the squares are rum,” he thought, as his eye was caught by one of them. “I begin to wonder whether Wraxall wasn’t near the mark when he talked about some kind of man-trap for protecting the Talisman. But no, that’s obviously rubbish, because the Talisman’s gone and yet none of us shows much in the way of visible damage. Besides, old Rollo declared there was no man-trap—you could lift the Talisman and come to no harm. He volunteered that. And if there’s one thing certain in this business it’s that Rollo isn’t an aimless liar. That notion has nothing in it.”
He stepped across the chess-board and halted before the empty cabinet which had held the Dangerfield Talisman. It stood on its stone pillar so that the glass front was breast high, and he examined it minutely in the hope of detecting something significant. The central plate-glass slab, through which he had inspected the armlet three nights before, was intact. On the velvet floor of the cabinet he could see the clearly marked ring made by the long-continued pressure of the bell-cover of tinted glass which now stood in a fresh position a little to the right, almost behind the closed door of the cabinet. The other door stood half-open, and he noticed that it had no lock but only an ordinary spring-catch. Idly he tried the strength of the spring, using his nail to avoid leaving any finger-marks, and he found that the catch was in good order. The handles of the doors were simple in pattern, like miniature corkscrew handles. Conway Westenhanger studied the glass surfaces with care, but after a time he abandoned his self-imposed task.
“Not much use bothering about finger-marks there,” he commented. “There’s no saying how many of us had our paws on it, that night he showed us the Talisman. Some of them are bound to be there, even if the case has been dusted by the servants. Most likely there’s a set of my own amongst them. Nobody could be incriminated by that, certainly. There’s nothing in it.”
He stepped back a pace to look at the cabinet as a whole, and suddenly a keen expression crossed his features. He had seen the thing he wanted.
“Well, that limits it down considerably!” he said with relief. “What a bit of pure luck! And I believe I’m right, too.”
He thought for a moment or two before deciding on his next step.