“Oh, he lives on the premises, does he? Where? In the glass-room?”
“Oh, no; that would not be possible. The character as well as the position of that renders it impossible as a place of habitation. He uses it after hours as a sort of sitting-room, to be sure, and has partly fitted it up as one, but he sleeps, eats, and dresses in a room on the floor below.”
“Not an adjoining one?”
“Oh, no; an adjoining room would be an impossibility. Our building is an end one, standing on the corner of a short passage which leads to nothing but a narrow alley running along parallel with the back of our premises, and the glass-room covers nearly the entire roof of it. As a matter of fact, Mr. Cleek, although we call it that at the works, the term Glass Room is a misnomer. In reality, it’s nothing more nor less than a good sized ‘lean-to’ greenhouse that the dad bought and had taken up there in sections, and its rear elevation rests against the side wall of a still higher building than ours, next door—the premises of Storminger the carriage builder, to be exact. But look here: perhaps I can make the situation clearer by a rough sketch. Got a lead pencil and a bit of paper, anybody? Oh, thanks very much, dear. One can always rely upon you. Now, look here, Mr. Cleek—this is the way of it. You mustn’t mind if it’s a crude thing, because, you know, I’m a rotten bad draughtsman and can’t draw for nuts. But all the same, this will do at a pinch.”
Here he leaned over the table in the centre of the room and, taking the pencil and the blank back of the letter which Miss Larue had supplied, made a crude outline sketch thus:
“There you are,” he said suddenly, laying the crude drawing on the table before Cleek, and with him bending over it. “You are supposed to be looking at the houses from the main thoroughfare, don’t you know, and, therefore, at the front of them. This tall building on the left marked 1 is Storminger’s; the low one, number 2, adjoining, is ours; and that cagelike-looking thing, 3, on the top of it, is the glass-room. Now, along the front of it here, where I have put the long line with an X on the end, there runs a wooden partition with a door leading into the room itself, so that it’s impossible for anybody on the opposite side of the main thoroughfare to see into the place at all. But that is not the case with regard to people living on the opposite side of the short passage (this is here, that I’ve marked 4), because there’s nothing to obstruct the view but some rubbishy old lace curtains which Loti, in his endeavour to make the place what he calls homelike, would insist upon hanging, and they are so blessed thin that anybody can look right through them and see all over the place. Of course, though, there are blinds, which he can pull down on the inside if the sun gets too strong; and when they are down, nobody can see into the glass-room at all. Pardon? Oh, we had it constructed of glass, Mr. Narkom, because of the necessity for having all the light obtainable in doing the minute work on some of the fine tableaux we produce for execution purposes. We are doing one now—The Relief of Lucknow—for the big exhibition that’s to be given next month at Olympia and——The place marked 6 at the back of our building? Oh, that’s the narrow alley of which I spoke. We’ve a back door opening into it, but it’s practically useless, because the alley is so narrow one can’t drive a vehicle through it. It’s simply a right of way that can’t legally be closed and runs from Croom Street on the right just along as far as Sturgiss Lane on the left. Not fifty people pass through it in a day’s time.
“But to come back to the short passage, Mr. Cleek. Observe, there are no windows at all on the side of our building, here: Number 2. There were, once upon a time, but we had them bricked up, as we use that side for a ‘paint frame’ with a movable bridge so that it can be used for the purpose of painting scenery and drop-curtains. But there are windows in the side of the house marked 5; and directly opposite the point where I’ve put the arrow there is one which belongs to a room occupied by a Mrs. Sherman and her daughter—people who do ‘bushel work’ for wholesale costume houses. Now, it happens that at the exact time when the porter says he showed young Stan into the glass-room those two women were sitting at work by that window, and, the blinds not being drawn, could see smack into the place, and are willing to take their oath that there was no living soul in it.”
“How do they fix it as being, as you say,‘the exact time,’ Mr. Trent? If they couldn’t see the porter come up to the glass-room with the boy, how can they be sure of that?”
“Oh, that’s easily explained: There’s a church not a great way distant. It has a clock in the steeple which strikes the hours, halves, and quarters. Mrs. Sherman says that when it chimed half-past four she was not only looking into the glass-room, but was calling her daughter’s attention to the fact that, whereas some few minutes previously she had seen Loti go out of the place, leaving a great pile of reference plates and scraps of material all over the floor, and he had never, to her positive knowledge, come back into it, there was the room looking as tidy as possible, and, in the middle of it, a table with a vase of pink roses upon it, which she certainly had not seen there when he left.”