His thoughts reverted to the powder puff and the forged note, and he took the folded paper from his pocket book and sniffed at it again. The odour of scent, now faint indeed, but still clinging sweetly to the impassioned words, was unmistakably that which hovered about the house in Grosvenor Street. Arome de la Corse, it was called, he remembered, and Amélie had said that Mrs. Vanderstein had it sent to her direct from Paris. Such extraordinary things happen every day that anything short of a miracle hardly attracts attention, but surely it would be a strain on the long arm of coincidence to suppose that, having strayed on to the scene of a murder owing to the mistaken idea that he was on the track of Mrs. Vanderstein, he should then find that not only did the dead woman resemble that lady and wear similar clothes but that she even used the same uncommon perfume! Gimblet’s whole soul revolted at such an impossibility. In the name of common sense, he said to himself, it must be Mrs. Vanderstein who had been seen on the doorstep on Monday night, and none other, in spite of all probability to the contrary; though what she was doing in that galère certainly seemed incomprehensible from nearly every point of view.
No contingency was ever dismissed by Gimblet as too wild for consideration, and the only reasonable explanation of her presence, he felt, was that she was in some way mixed up with the murder, an accomplice at least, if not the actual author of the deed; but this view involved so complete a shifting of ideas, that he put it aside for further consideration in the light of the information which the man sent by Scotland Yard to Boulogne might be able to furnish. If only the walls could speak! he thought, as he finally realised that nothing more was to be gathered, and, before leaving the room, strolled over to the mantelpiece in order to have a nearer look at the picture which hung there, and which he had noticed the day before.
It was a small oil painting, dark with dirt and age, and much of the detail lost in a general blackness. Still the figures, those of a man in blue and another in greenish brown in the act of lighting a long pipe, could be clearly enough distinguished, together with enough of the background to make it plain that this represented an interior. Gimblet studied it with the keenest appreciation; it was just the class of picture he most delighted in. A longing took him to remove it from its nail and carry it to the light, and with rather a guilty glance back at the door, which he had, however, shut as he entered, he put up his hand and lifted it off.
As he delicately lowered his prize he caught sight of something which made him very nearly drop it.
On the square of wall paper which had been hidden by the picture was some pencilled writing, scrawled irregularly in a large round hand:
“I am locked in this room. I write this hoping it may be the means of delivering these people to justice, for I am sure they intend no good. I can see that by the fact that the man with the black beard has promised to help me to escape. Why should there be need to escape? But I do not believe he will keep his word. I have been here so long, I do not know how long, but many hours, perhaps days, and God knows what dreadful thing they are doing in the drawing-room to Mr”
The writing broke off abruptly about half way down the square of darker colour, where the paper had been prevented from fading by the protecting picture. Gimblet gazed at it with all the emotions of the scientist whose theory has stood the decisive test. His hands fumbled in his excitement, as he hastily snatched out his notebook, and sought in it for the telegraph form Higgs had obtained from the Piccadilly office. He flattened it against the wall below the pencilled words, more in order to gloat over this proof of the soundness of his deductions than for the sake of comparing the two handwritings, for it had only needed the first glance to make it plain to him that they were one and the same. The writing on the wall was larger; the letters followed each other unevenly, and while some of the lines drooped lower and lower as they advanced, others rose crookedly to meet them, so that one or two actually overlapped and were rather hard to decipher, but the essential character of the hand was clearly identical with that of the telegram. There was no mistaking the slant of the short line of the h’s or the oval converging lines of the w’s and the low crossing of the t’s, besides a hundred other small points which left the trained eye in no doubt as to the authorship of the message.
“I wonder what Jennins will say to this,” thought Gimblet, as he copied down the words on a page of his notebook. “That Scholefield Avenue has got on my brain, I suppose.”
Excited as he was, he did not forget his original purpose in taking down the painting, but carried it to the window and examined it closely by the now diminishing light. On nearer inspection it proved to be of less interest than he had expected, and he hung it up again with the less regret.