“A home thrust, Weymouth!” snapped Nayland Smith, with one of those rare, boyish laughs of his. “We’re children to that Chinese doctor, Inspector, to that weird product of a weird people who are as old in evil as the pyramids are old in mystery. But about the Gables?”
“Well, it’s an uncanny place. You mentioned Glamys Castle a moment ago, and it’s possible to understand an old stronghold like that being haunted, but the Gables was only built about 1870; it’s quite a modern house. It was built for a wealthy Quaker family, and they occupied it, uninterruptedly and apparently without anything unusual occurring, for over forty years. Then it was sold to a Mr. Maddison—and Mr. Maddison died there six months ago.”
“Maddison?” said Smith sharply, staring across at Weymouth. “What was he? Where did he come from?”
“He was a retired tea-planter from Colombo,” replied the inspector.
“Colombo?”
“There was a link with the East, certainly, if that’s what you are thinking; and it was this fact which interested me at the time, and which led me to waste precious days and nights on the case. But there was no mortal connection between this liverish individual and the schemes of Dr. Fu-Manchu. I’m certain of that.”
“And how did he die?” I asked, interestedly.
“He just died in his chair one evening, in the room which he used as a library. It was his custom to sit there every night, when there were no visitors, reading, until twelve o’clock—or later. He was a bachelor, and his household consisted of a cook, a housemaid, and a man who had been with him for thirty years, I believe. At the time of Mr. Maddison’s death, his household had recently been deprived of two of its members. The cook and housemaid both resigned one morning, giving as their reason the fact that the place was haunted.”
“In what way?”
“I interviewed the precious pair at the time, and they told me absurd and various tales about dark figures wandering along the corridors and bending over them in bed at night, whispering; but their chief trouble was a continuous ringing of bells about the house.”