I cursed myself for being such an idiot. Yet I had no idea that such a cunningly-devised trap could be prepared. I had never dreamed, when I went forth to pull Jack out of a hole, that I was deliberately placing my head in such a noose.
What did it all mean? Why had these men formed this plot against me? What had I done to merit such deadly vengeance as this?—a torture of the Middle Ages!
Vainly I tried to think. As far as I knew, I had never met either Forbes or Reckitt before in all my life. They were complete strangers to me. I remembered there had been something about the man-servant who admitted me that seemed familiar, but what it was, I could not decide. Perhaps I had seen him before somewhere in the course of my wanderings, but where, I knew not.
I recollected that soon after I had entered there I had heard the sound of a motor-car receding. My waiting taxi had evidently been paid, and dismissed.
How would they dispose of my body, I lay wondering? There were many ways of doing so, I reflected. They might burn it, or bury it, or pack it in a trunk and consign it to some distant address. When one remembers how many persons are every year reported to the London police as missing, one can only believe that the difficulties in getting rid of the corpse of a victim are not so great as is popularly imagined.
Speak with any detective officer of the Metropolitan Police, and, if he is frank, he will tell you that a good many people meet with foul play each year in every quarter of London—they disappear and are never again heard of. Sometimes their disappearance is reported in the newspapers—a brief paragraph—but in the case of people of the middle class only their immediate relatives know that they are missing.
Many a London house with deep basement and a flight of steps leading to its front door could, if its walls had lips, tell a tragic and terrible story.
For one assassination discovered, ten remain unknown or merely vaguely suspected.
How many thousands of pounds had these men, Forbes and Reckitt, secured, I wondered? And how many poor helpless victims had felt the serpent’s fang and breathed their last in that fatal chair I now occupied?