“Well, look at that, now!” he said, as I showed him first the mummified body, then the sacks of gold, and pointed out to him the great hole cut in the ceiling. “Well, look at that, now!” he repeated.
“The awkward part of the affair is this,” I said at last. “Who is going to lodge information? I don’t care to, for, if I do, inquiries will be made as to how I came to be on the premises at all, and how I managed to get in, and it won’t look well if I am proved, on my own showing, to have entered the place secretly in the middle of the night. Again, I don’t want to lodge information against Sir Charles Thorold. Why should I? He has always been my friend. Nor, for that matter, do I want to prefer any sort of charge against Whichelo. So far as the body is concerned, we may be quite wrong in conjecturing that there has been foul play. Indeed, there is no actual proof that the mummy was hidden in the ceiling of the room, though personally I think it must have been. Everything points to it. And you, Bennett, can’t very well give information either without compromising yourself as well as me. Your inspector would want to know how you managed to get into the house, and what right you had to enter it.”
I paused, considering, while he removed his helmet and scratched his head.
“I’ll tell you what I think we had better do,” I said at last.
“Well, sir, what?” he inquired eagerly.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Go back to your beat. I’ll bolt and chain the front door when you’re gone. Then I’ll put out the light in this room, and make my way out of the house by the way I entered it.”
“But the two men,” the policeman said quickly. “Where can they have got to? They can’t have left the premises.”
“You may depend upon it they have,” I answered. “I feel pretty sure there must be some secret entrance to this house, that they alone know. The back door, too, is bolted and chained on the inside, and they can hardly have entered the way I did—ugh!” and I shuddered again at the thought of those horrible, hairy-legged spiders scampering over my bare flesh.
“Meet me 2.”
Again that odd little advertisement arose in my thoughts. I would watch the front page of the Morning Post for a day or two. Perhaps another advertisement might appear that would help me.