He put the “corroborating item” back in the cabinet and as, at this moment a taxi was heard to draw up at our entry, he picked up a large attaché case and preceded me down the stairs.
During the comparatively short journey I made a few not very successful efforts to discover what was Thorndyke’s real purpose in making this visit of inspection to the dismantled house. But his reticence and mine were not quite similar. He answered all my questions freely. He gave me a wealth of instances illustrating the valuable evidence obtained by the inspection of empty houses. But none of them seemed to throw any light on his present proceedings. And when I pointed this out, he smilingly replied that I was in precisely the same position as himself.
“We are not looking for corroborative evidence,” said he. “That belongs to a later stage of the inquiry. We are looking for some suggestive fact which may give us a hint where to begin. Naturally we cannot form any guess as to what kind of fact that might be.”
It was not a very illuminating answer, but I had to accept it, although I had a strong suspicion that Thorndyke’s purpose was not quite so vague as he represented it to be, and determined unobtrusively to keep an eye on his proceedings.
“Can I give you any assistance?” I enquired, craftily, when I had let him into the hall and shut the outer door.
“Yes,” he replied, “there is one thing that you can do for me which will be very helpful. I have brought a packet of cards with me”—here he produced from his pocket a packet of stationer’s post-cards. “If you will write on each of them the description and particulars of one room with the name of the occupant in the case of bedrooms, and lay the card on the mantelpiece of the room which it describes, I shall be able to reconstitute the house as it was when it was inhabited. Then we can each go about our respective businesses without hindering one another.”
I took the cards—and the fairly broad hint—and together we made a preliminary tour of the house, which, now that the furniture, carpets and pictures were gone, looked very desolate and forlorn; and as it had not been cleaned since the removal, it had a depressingly dirty and squalid appearance. Moreover, in each room, a collection of rubbish and discarded odds and ends had been roughly swept up on the hearth, converting each fireplace into a sort of temporary dust-bin.
After a glance around the rooms on the ground floor, I made my way up to the room in which Harold Monkhouse had died, which was my principal concern as well as Thorndyke’s.
“Well, Mayfield,” the latter remarked, running a disparaging eye round the faded, discoloured walls and the blackened ceiling, “you will have to do something here. It is a shocking spectacle. Would you mind roughly sketching out the position of the furniture? I see that the bedstead stood by this wall with the head, I presume, towards the window, and the bedside table about here, I suppose, at his right hand. By the way, what was there on that table? Did he keep a supply of food of any kind for use at night?”
“I think they usually put a little tin of sandwiches on the table when the night preparations were made.”