“The opening is higher up than I thought,” said Guerchard. “I must get a pair of steps.”
He went to the door of the drawing-room and bade the young policeman fetch him a pair of steps. They were brought quickly. He took them from the policeman, shut the door, and locked it again. He set the steps in the fireplace and mounted them.
“Be careful,” he said to the Duke, who had followed him into the fireplace, and stood at the foot of the steps. “Some of these bricks may drop inside, and they’ll sting you up if they fall on your toes.”
The Duke stepped back out of reach of any bricks that might fall.
Guerchard set his left hand against the wall of the chimney-piece between him and the drawing-room, and pressed hard with his right against the top of the dappled patch of bricks. At the first push, half a dozen of them fell with a bang on to the floor of the next house. The light came flooding in through the hole, and shone on Guerchard’s face and its smile of satisfaction. Quickly he pushed row after row of bricks into the next house until he had cleared an opening four feet square.
“Come along,” he said to the Duke, and disappeared feet foremost through the opening.
The Duke mounted the steps, and found himself looking into a large empty room of the exact size and shape of the drawing-room of M. Gournay-Martin, save that it had an ordinary modern fireplace instead of one of the antique pattern of that in which he stood. Its chimney-piece was a few inches below the opening. He stepped out on to the chimney-piece and dropped lightly to the floor.
“Well,” he said, looking back at the opening through which he had come. “That’s an ingenious dodge.”
“Oh, it’s common enough,” said Guerchard. “Robberies at the big jewellers’ are sometimes worked by these means. But what is uncommon about it, and what at first sight put me off the track, is that these burglars had the cheek to pierce the wall with an opening large enough to enable them to remove the furniture of a house.”
“It’s true,” said the Duke. “The opening’s as large as a good-sized window. Those burglars seem capable of everything—even of a first-class piece of mason’s work.”