What was it he smelt? Something so faint, so indefinite, that after the first arresting instant he had lost it altogether; and with it the knowledge of what it was—which in that one second had seemed almost his—slipped away and was gone, nor could his most strenuous effort recall it. Oh, for one more whiff of that evasive, troubling odour! But sniff as he might he could no longer detect anything, and slowly his attitude relaxed, and he brought other senses to bear upon the scene.
The room was divided, by its shape, into a front and back drawing-room, as is commonly the case in London houses; but the two had been thrown into one and the door led into the narrower back part, so that the light from the window overlooking the garden, which was obscured by trees, while it still illumined all that lay on Gimblet’s right, hardly penetrated into the front and larger portion of the place. There the closed shutters of the three windows leading to the balcony prevented the light from finding an entrance, and it was very dark. The detective lit the gas and looked around him.
It was a cheerful, pleasant room; not overcrowded with furniture, and showing taste and judgment in its arrangement and decoration, though there was nothing very original about it. On the walls, which were covered with some light coloured paper, were hung three or four good modern pictures; the mantelpiece was an eighteenth century one, and on either side of it was placed a Chippendale cabinet, with shelves for china, of which some good pieces could be seen through the small panes of the glass doors. At the opposite end of the room was a long, low bookcase and, except for a large writing bureau, the rest of the furniture consisted of sofas and chairs, with one or two small tables. It was a room at once dainty and desolate, gay and forlorn. The empty flower vases which stood on the tables, the absence of stray books, work, papers, or other signs of human occupancy, gave it a look of discomfort and dreariness; but it was plain, from the bright chintzes and curtains and the soft luxury of the carpet, that it only needed the presence of its owners to assume a cheerful and lively aspect.
Gimblet began his examination in his usual methodical manner, working his way over the floor on hands and knees, gazing at the carpet through his lens at any place where there appeared a doubtful mark or change in the appearance of its surface from that of the surrounding parts. As he came to chairs or tables he moved them to one side, and continued his quest on the spot where they had stood. There were two small Chesterfield sofas, one of which jutted out at right angles to the fire-place before the right hand window of the front part of the room, the other facing the door with its back against the wall.
When the detective came to the sofa by the fireplace, he pushed it to one side as he had pushed each piece of furniture in its turn, and as his eyes fell on the floor beneath it a low whistle escaped him: there was a patch of reddish stain on the green Wilton carpet, about three inches in diameter, and a smaller spot or two near by of the same rusty colour.
With his head on one side, and his lips still pursed as if to emit a whistling sound, but with no audible noise issuing from them, Gimblet gazed at the stain on the carpet; and the longer he looked the sterner his face became; the whistling expression vanished, and he opened and shut his mouth with a grinding sound as the teeth met. He rubbed his finger over the marks, and the patch seemed to crumble away at his touch, till a hole appeared in the carpet and the white boards of the flooring were exposed to view. He applied his lens to the edges of the hole and plucked at the frayed wool with his fingers. A small piece that he pulled off he bestowed in one of the little specimen boxes with which he had provided himself.
Then he replaced the sofa in its original position, and continued his examination of the floor. Under the fender he discovered another of the little objects he had picked up on the stairs, but nothing else did he find of any interest till he began to turn his attention to the furniture. Almost the first thing he looked at was the sofa that concealed the hole in the carpet; he was drawn back to it with an irresistible attraction. A careful scrutiny, however, did not reveal much more than the fact that the chintz cover was rather tumbled. Gimblet dug his hand down at the back of the seat, and pulled out the part of it which was tucked down. As he did so he felt a little lump under his fingers, and holding it up saw that it was yet another tiny shining thing for his pill-box collection, and as he looked at the piece of chintz he had pulled out he perceived several more of the same kind.
They glittered in the gaslight like little diamonds, but had evidently come off the spangled tulle of a lady’s dress. Gimblet remembered that Mrs. Vanderstein’s dress had been described by her maid as “diamantée”; but then it was possible, indeed probable, that Mrs. Mill, or her friends, possessed gowns of similar material. Gimblet stooped again, and tugged up the rest of the sofa covering from the depths behind the cushions. This time he pulled it all up; the whole covering lay spread before him in an untidy, unwieldy mass, and from the end, as he plucked it out, there shot two small objects, which fell to the floor at his feet. In a moment he had lifted them from the ground and stood staring at them: they were a piece of crushed and folded paper and a minute powder puff.
The detective unfolded the paper, and held it to the light; it was a sheet of thick white notepaper, and on it was embossed a crown and device in heavy gold lettering. Below these was written in a fine, slanting foreign hand