When, ten minutes later, she rejoined Kennedy in the lounge, she told him of her discovery.
“Yes,” was his reply. “They are the same in all the rooms—one of the fads of the proprietor. But,” he added, “you must not be seen here. We don’t know who is coming from London by the next train.”
For that reason Ella retired to her room and did not leave it for some hours, not indeed till her lover came to tell her that all was clear.
By that time Mr Merton Mansfield had arrived, eaten a frugal dinner, and had gone to the meeting.
“That young man Schrieber has arrived also,” Kennedy told her. “He’s never seen me, so he suspects nothing. He has also gone to the meeting, therefore we can go down and have something to eat.”
That night at eleven o’clock Mr Merton Mansfield returned, was cheered loudly by a huge crowd gathered outside the hotel, and waited below chatting for nearly half-an-hour before he retired to his room.
The room was numbered 146—the best room of a suite on the first floor—and to this room the young German, the catspaw of Ortmann, had gone about a quarter past eleven, gaining admission through the private sitting-room next door.
On entering he, quick as lightning, took down one of the vases from the mantelshelf and replaced it by another exactly similar which he drew from beneath the light coat thrown over his arm. Then, carrying the vase with him concealed by his coat, he slipped quickly out again unobserved, not, however, before he had poured into the other vase some bird-sand so as to make them both of equal weight when the maid came to dust them on the morrow. The conspirators left nothing to chance.
In that innocent-looking vase he had brought was one of the most diabolical contrivances ever invented by man’s brain. To the explosive needle the tiny clock had been attached and set to strike at half-past two, an hour when the whole hotel would be wrapped in slumber. The effect of striking would be to explode the needle and thus break a thin glass tube of a certain liquid and set over a piece of sponge saturated by a second liquid. The mixing of the two liquids would produce that terribly deadly poison-gas which, escaping through the perforation, must cause almost instant death to any person sleeping in the room.
Truly, it was a most diabolical death-trap.