“How?”
“Through the maid, Dobson. Mrs. Hillmer has given her notice to leave, and the girl is furious about it, as she appears to have had a very easy place there. I think it came to Mrs. Hillmer’s ears that she talked to me.”
“I see. Proceed.”
“Here I hit upon a slight clue. It was a gentleman who ordered the new furniture, and directed the transfer of the articles replaced from No. 61 to No. 12 Raleigh Mansions. He did this early in the morning of November 7, and the foreman in charge of the job remembered that there was some bother about it, as neither Mrs. Hillmer nor Mr. Corbett, as Mensmore used to be called, knew anything about it. But the gentleman came the same morning and explained matters. It struck the foreman as funny that there should be such a fearful hurry about refurnishing a drawing-room, for the gentleman did not care what the cost was so long as the job was carried out at express speed. Another odd thing was that Mrs. Hillmer paid for the articles, though she had not ordered them nor did she appear to want them. The man was quite sure that Mensmore’s first knowledge of the affair came with the arrival of the first batch of articles from Mrs. Hillmer’s flat, but he could only describe the mysterious agent as being a regular swell. He afterwards identified a portrait of Sir Charles Dyke as being exactly like the man he had seen, if not the man himself.”
“How did you come to have a portrait of Sir Charles in your possession?”
“That appears later,” said the detective, full of professional pride at the undoubtedly smart manner in which he had manipulated his facts once they were placed in order before him.
“Of course,” he went on, “I jumped at the conclusion that the stranger was this Colonel Montgomery. Then, while closely questioning the maid about the events of November 7, she suddenly remembered that she lost an old skirt and coat about that time. They had vanished from her room, and she had never laid eyes on them since. This set me thinking. I confronted her with the clothes worn by Lady Dyke when she was found in the river, and I’m jiggered if Dobson didn’t recognize them at once as being her missing property. Now, wasn’t that a rum go?”
“It certainly was,” said Bruce, who was piecing together the story of the murder in his mind as each additional detail came to light.
“Naturally I thought harder than ever after that. It then occurred to me that Jane Harding must have had some powerful reasons for so suddenly shutting up about the identification of her mistress’s underclothing. She was right enough, as we know, in regard to the skirt and coat, but she admitted to me that the linen on the dead body was just the same as Lady Dyke’s. Curiously enough, it was not marked by initials, crest, or laundry-mark, and I ascertained months ago that owing to some fad of her ladyship’s, all the family washing was done on the estate in Yorkshire. This explained the absence of the otherwise inevitable laundry-mark.”