“You will observe,” he said, “that there is no signature. How was I to know who it came from? As a matter of fact, I guessed, or at least thought it possible she had sent it, as no one else cares whether I go to blazes or not. But I’ve no idea whatever why she chose to think I should get some money or good news on Wednesday. I need hardly say that I didn’t. And I saw no reason to speak to you of what only concerns a young lady and myself. It can have no possible bearing on her disappearance, or that of my aunt.”
“You think not?” Gimblet looked at him oddly.
“How could it? I can’t imagine what connection there could be. But of course you’re the sort of fellow who can read the secret of dark mysteries in anything, from the Tower Bridge to a baked potato, aren’t you? So perhaps there’s some occult inference that I fail to draw. By the way, you’ve not told me much yet. How did you discover the murder, and where?”
“I found the poor lady’s body buried in a house in the north of London,” said Gimblet, “No. 13 Scholefield Avenue. As to how I discovered it, it was by the help of two or three facts from which I was able to draw certain inferences.”
“I wish you would tell me all about it.”
“Well,” said Gimblet, “as Sir Gregory told you over the telephone this morning, I heard, as a result of the advertisement I gave you yesterday to have inserted in the papers, that the two ladies were seen by an actress on Monday night, standing under a board ‘To Let,’ before a detached house in some street on the way to Carolina Road. I was unable to find that street yesterday, and it was not until I could get hold of the cabman who had driven the actress that I ascertained that Scholefield Avenue was the only street he had passed through on Monday night which contains detached houses. I went there at once and found out that No. 13 had recently been let, the board having been removed on Tuesday morning. I rang the bell, but no one came to the door, so after getting the name of the house agent from a neighbour I went to the office and interviewed the agent. From him I learnt that the house had only been let since Monday, and that the tenant was a man named West who had been ready to pay a high rent for immediate possession, and who gave out that he was a recluse, desiring nothing so much as solitude and privacy. The agent happened to have a spare key of No. 13 Scholefield Avenue and he sent his clerk down with me to open the door.
“As soon as I got in I ran over the house with my servant, who as well as Sir Gregory had accompanied me, but there was no one to be seen in it, and so I proceeded to make a careful and searching examination. Not to weary you with details, I soon found a considerable number of small paste spangles, or imitation diamonds, such as are sewn on to the more elaborate and gorgeous kinds of ladies’ evening dresses. As I found several of these on the staircase between the hall and the drawing-room and a good many more in the drawing-room itself, but none in any other part of the house, I thought it was likely that, if they came off Mrs. Vanderstein’s gown, this was the only room she had visited. There was, of course, the possibility that they had fallen from the dress of some one who had been in the room before the place was let, but I set against this the improbability of the mistress of the house or her friends being rich people who would wear such expensively ornamented materials, and also the fact that your aunt’s maid in describing her toilette to me had spoken of it as ‘diamantée.’
“The next discovery was a most alarming one. On moving the sofa I saw beneath it a large stain in the carpet, which various indications assured me was the result of some acid that had been upset. From the nature of the damage I was pretty certain that it had been caused by sulphuric acid or vitriol. Now this is a strange thing to find traces of in a lady’s drawing-room, and when you find it in an empty house which a young and beautiful lady has been seen to enter, but which she has never been seen to leave, and when you further reflect that the disappearance of this lady appears to be complete, and on the fact that when last seen she was wearing a fortune in jewellery, one of two conclusions appears inevitable, unless you assume that all these facts are entirely unconnected and the result of pure coincidence. Assume them on the contrary to be related to each other, and you are led, as I say, to consider two possibilities. So I asked myself at once whether Mrs. Vanderstein had been decoyed to the house by some demented creature bent on assuaging a mad jealousy by throwing vitriol at her, or whether she had been induced to visit it to satisfy the still more fatal greed of a robber. And the more I looked at it, the more likely it seemed that the poor lady had been murdered for her jewels and that the vitriol was used to make the recognition of her body, if it should be discovered, a negligible danger. A few minutes later I came across a powder puff perfumed with the peculiar scent your aunt was in the habit of using—I daresay you know it—and this dispelled any doubts I still had as to her having been in the room.
“I still hoped against hope, however, that she might have left it alive, and I found some evidence downstairs which led me to think she had been locked in one of the lower rooms for a time; but if so it must have been before she was taken up to the drawing-room. In the library a pane of the window was broken, no doubt by some one trying to escape or attract attention, and obviously it had been done by a woman, as a man could have opened the window, which was so stiff as to require more than a woman’s strength. The broken glass had been carefully removed from the frame, so that, but for the draught, it might well have passed unnoticed.
“That it had been broken since the letting of the house was clear, since I found a dustpan full of broken glass, which would not have been left so by the landlord’s servants, or by the charwoman who cleaned up after their departure. The sight of that dustpan filled me with hopes that were doomed to disappointment. Nothing offers a better ground for the impression and retention of finger marks than a piece of shining metal, and I expected to find a whole collection on the tin surface of the pan. But to my astonishment and disgust I could not find a single one; and this strengthened my opinion that I had to deal with deliberate crime, and that of no ordinary stamp, for it was plain that not only had some one cleaned and polished the dustpan after using it, but that the person who had done so had worn gloves. And it was the same all over the house. Not a finger-print to be seen, except in the room with the broken pane, on the white painted door of which I found several distinct marks of fingers. What more likely than that the poor lady, finding herself locked into a strange room, should have broken the window and beaten on the door with her hands in a sudden panic? In the same cupboard as the dustpan was an old newspaper crumpled into a ball, which I found to contain a handful or so of what appeared to be garden mould, and I could not at first imagine why it should be there, though I can account for it now. I had by this time been all over the house and made the most thorough and exhaustive search, but the only other clue I could discover was a negative one.