THE CLUE
OF THE NEW PIN

By EDGAR WALLACE

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with Small, Maynard & Company
Printed in U. S. A.

Copyright 1923
By SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
(Incorporated)
Printed in the United States of America

THE CLUE OF THE NEW PIN

I

The establishment of Yeh Ling was just between the desert of Reed Street, and the sown of that great and glittering thoroughfare which is theatreland. The desert graduated down from the respectable, if gloomy, houses where innumerable milliners, modistes and dentists had their signs before the doors and their workrooms and clinics on divers landings, to the howling wilderness of Bennet Street, and in this particular case the description often applied so lightly is aptly and faithfully affixed, for Bennet Street howled by day and howled in a shriller key by night. Its roadway was a playground for the progeny of this prolific neighbourhood, and a “ring” in which all manner of local blood-feuds were settled by waist-bare men, whilst their slatternly women squealed their encouragement or vocalized their apprehensions.

Yeh Ling’s restaurant had begun at the respectable end of the street and he had specialized in strange Chinese dishes. Later it had crept nearer and nearer to The Lights, one house after another having been acquired by the unhappy looking oriental, its founder.

Then, with a rush, it arrived on the main street, acquired a rich but sedate facia, a French chef and a staff of Italian waiters under the popular Signor Maciduino, most urban of maitres d’hotel, and because of gilded and visible tiles, became “The Golden Roof.” Beneath those tiles it was a place of rosewood panelling and soft shaded lights. There was a gilded elevator to carry you to the first and second floors where the private dining-rooms were—these had doors of plate glass, curtained diaphanously. Yeh Ling thought that this was carrying respectability a little too far, but his patron was adamant on the matter.

Certain rooms had no plate glass doors, but these were very discreetly apportioned. One such was never under any circumstances hired to diners, however important or impeccable they might be. It was the end room No. 6, near to the service doorway which led through a labyrinth of crooked and cross passages to the old building in Reed Street. This remained almost unchanged as it had been in the days of Yeh Ling’s earlier struggles. Men and women came here for Chinese dishes and were supplied by soft-footed waiters from Han-Kow, which was Yeh Ling’s native province.

The patrons of the old establishment lamented the arrival of Yeh Ling’s prosperity and sneered at his well-dressed customers. The well-dressed customers being, for the most part, entirely ignorant that their humble neighbours had existence, ate their expensive meals unmoved and at certain hours danced sedately to the strains of The Old Original South Carolina Syncopated Orchestra, which Yeh Ling had hired regardless of expense.

He only visited the fashionable part of his property on one day of the year, the Chinese New Year, a queer little figure in a swallow-tailed coat, white-vested, white-gloved and tightly, as well as whitely collared.

At other times, he sat at ease midway between the desert and the sown in a pokey little parlour hung about with vivid pictures which he had cut from the covers of magazines. Here, in a black silk robe, he pulled at his long-stemmed pipe. At half-past seven every night, except Sundays, he went to a door which opened on to the street, and was the door of one of those houses which linked the two restaurants, and here he would wait, his hand upon the knob. Sometimes the girl came first, sometimes the old man. Whichever it was, they usually passed in without a word and went up to Room No. 6. With their arrival Yeh Ling went back to his parlour to smoke and write letters of great length and beauty to his son at Han-Kow, for Yeh Ling’s son was a man of great learning and position, being both a poet and a scholar. He had been admitted a member of the Forest of Pencils, which is at least the equivalent to being elected an Academician.

Sometimes, Yeh Ling would devote himself to the matter of his new building at Shanford and dream dreams of an Excellency who would be its honoured master—for all things are possible in a land which makes education a test of choice for Ambassadorial appointments.

He never saw the two guests depart. They found their way to the door alone, and soon after eight the room was empty. No waiter served them; their meals were placed in readiness on a small buffet and as No. 6 was veiled from the observations of the curious by a curtain which stretched across the passage, only Yeh Ling knew them.

On the first Monday of every month, Yeh Ling went up to the room and kow-towed to its solitary occupant. The old man was always alone on these occasions. On such a Monday, with a large lacquered cash-box in his hand and a fat book under his arm, Yeh Ling entered the presence of the man in No. 6, put down his impedimenta on the buffet and did his reverence.

“Sit down,” said Jesse Trasmere, and he spoke in the sibilant dialect of the lower provinces. Yeh Ling obeyed, hiding his own hands respectfully in the full sleeves of his gown. “Well?”

“The profits this week have fallen, excellency,” said Yeh Ling but without apology. “The weather has been very fine and many of our clients are out of town.”

He exposed his hands to open the cash-box and bring out four packages of paper money. These he divided into two, three of the packages to the right and one to the left. The old man took the three packages, which were nearest to him and grunted.

“The police came last night and asked to be shown over the houses,” Yeh Ling went on impressively. “They desired to see the cellars, because they think always that Chinamen have smoke-places in their cellars.”

“Humph,” said Mr. Trasmere. He was thumbing the money in his hand. “This is good, Yeh Ling.”

He slipped the money into a black bag which was on the floor at his feet. Yeh Ling shook his head, thereby indicating his agreement.

“Do you remember in Fi Sang a man who worked for me?”

“The drinker?”

The old man agreed to the appellation.

“He is coming to this country,” said Mr. Trasmere, chewing a tooth-pick. He was a hard-faced man between sixty and seventy. A rusty black frock-coat ill fitted his spare form, his old-fashioned collar was frayed at the edge and the black shoe-string tie that encircled his lean throat had been so long in use that it had lost whatever rigidity it had ever possessed, and hung limp in two tangled bunches on either side of the knot. His eyes were a hard granite blue, his face ridged and scaled with callosities until it was lizard-like in its coarseness.

“Yes, he is coming to this country. He will come here as soon as he finds his way about town and that will be mighty soon, for Wellington Brown is a traveller! Yeh Ling, this man is troublesome. I should be happy if he were sleeping on the Terraces of the Night.”

Again Yeh Ling shook his head.

“He cannot be killed—here,” he said. “The illustrious knows that my hands are clean—”

“Are you a man-of-wild-mind?” snarled the other. “Do I kill men or ask that they should be killed? Even on the Amur, where life is cheap, I have done no more than put a man to the torture because he stole my gold. No, this Drinker must be made quiet. He smokes the pipe of Pleasant Experience. You have no pipe-room. I would not tolerate such a thing. But you know places.”

“I know a hundred and a hundred,” said Yeh Ling, cheerfully for him.

He accompanied his master to the door, and when it had closed upon him, he returned swiftly to his parlour and summoned a stunted man of his race.

“Go after the old man and see that no harm comes to him,” he said.

It seemed from his tone almost as though this guardianship was novel, but in exactly the same words the shuffling Chinaman had received identical instructions every day for six years, when the thud of the closing street-door came to Yeh Ling’s keen ears. Every day except Sunday.

He himself never went out after Jesse Trasmere. He had other duties which commenced at eleven and usually kept him busy until the early hours of the morning.

II

Mr. Trasmere walked steadily and at one pace, keeping to the more populous streets. Then at exactly 8.25 he turned into Peak Avenue, that wide and pleasant thoroughfare where his house was situated. A man who had been idling away a wasted half-hour saw him and crossed the road.

“Excuse me, Mr. Trasmere.”

Jesse shot a scowling glance at the interrupter of his reveries. The stranger was young and a head taller than the old man, well dressed, remarkably confident.

“Eh?”

“You don’t remember me—Holland? I called upon you about a year ago over the trouble you had with the municipality.”

Jesse’s face cleared.

“The reporter? Yes, I remember you. You had an article in your rag that was all wrong, sir—all wrong! You made me say that I had a respect for municipal laws and that’s a lie! I have no respect for municipal laws or lawyers. They’re thieves and grafters!”

He thumped the ferrule of his umbrella on the ground to emphasize his disapproval.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said the young man with a cheerful smile, “and if I made you toss around a few bouquets that was faire bonne mine. I’d forgotten anyway, but it is the job of an interviewer to make his subject look good.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“Our correspondent in Pekin has sent us the original proclamation of the insurgent, General Wing Su—or Sing Wu, I’m not sure which. These Chinese names get me rattled.”

Tab Holland produced from his pocket a sheet of yellow paper covered with strange characters.

“We can’t get in touch with our interpreters and knowing that you are a whale—an authority on the language, the news editor wondered if you would be so kind.”

Jesse took the sheet reluctantly, gripped his bag between his knees and put on his glasses.

“‘Wing Su Shi, by the favour of heaven, humbly before his ancestors, speaks to all men of the Middle Kingdom,’” he began.

Tab, note-book in hand, wrote rapidly as the old man translated.

“Thank you, sir,” he said when the other had finished.

There was an odd smirk of satisfaction on the old man’s face, a strange, childlike pride in his accomplishment.

“You have a remarkable knowledge of the language,” said Tab, politely.

“Born there,” replied Jesse Trasmere, complacently, “born in a go-down on the Amur River and could speak the three dialects before I was six. Beat the whole lot of ’em at their own books when I was so high! That all, mister?”

“That is all, and thank you,” said Tab gravely, and lifted his hat.

He stood looking after the old man as he continued his walk. So that was Rex Lander’s miserly uncle? He did not look like a millionaire and yet, when he came to consider the matter, millionaires seldom looked their wealth.

He had settled the matter of the Wing Su proclamation and was immersed in a new prison report which had been published that day when he remembered an item of news which had come his way and duly reported.

“Sorry, Tab,” said the night editor, “the theatre man has ’flu. Won’t you go along and see the lady?”

Tab snorted, but went.

The dresser, hesitating, thought that Miss Ardfern was rather tired, and wouldn’t tomorrow do?

“I’m tired, too,” said Tab Holland wearily, “and tell Miss Ardfern that I haven’t come to this darned theatre at eleven p.m. because I’m an autograph hunter, or because I’m collecting pictures of actresses I’m crazy about; I’m here in the sacred cause of publicity.”

To the dresser, he was as a man who spoke a foreign language. Surveying him dubiously, she turned the handle of the stained yellow door, and standing in the opening, talked to somebody invisible.

Tab had a glimpse of cretonne hangings, yawned and scratched his head. He was not without elegance, except in moments of utter tiredness.

“You can come in,” said the dresser and Tab passed into a room that blazed with unshaded lights.

Ursula Ardfern had made her change and was ready to leave the theatre except that her jacket was still hung on the back of one chair, and her cloth cloak with the blue satin lining was draped over another. She had in her hand a brooch which she was about to put into an open jewel-case. Tab particularly noticed the brooch. A heart-shaped ruby was its centre-piece. He saw her pin it to the soft lining of the lid and close the case.

“I’m extremely sorry to worry you at this hour of the night, Miss Ardfern,” he said apologetically, “and if you’re annoyed with me, you have my passionate sympathy. And if you’re not mad at me, I’d be glad of a little sympathy myself, for I’ve been in court all day following the Lachmere fraud trial.”

She had been a little annoyed. The set of her pretty face told him that when he came in.

“And now you’ve come for another trial,” she half-smiled. “What can I do for you, Mr.——?”

“Holland—Somers Holland of ‘The Megaphone’. The theatre reporter is sick and we got a rumor tonight from two independent sources that you are to be married.”

“And you came to tell me! Now, isn’t that kind of you!” she mocked. “No, I am not going to be married. I don’t think I ever shall marry, but you need not put that in the newspaper, or people will think I am posing as an eccentric. Who is the lucky man, by-the-way?”

“That is the identical question that I have come to ask,” Tab smiled.

“I am disappointed,” her lips twitched. “But I am not marrying. Don’t say that I am wedded to my art, because I’m not, and please don’t say that there is an old boy and girl courtship that will one day materialize, because there isn’t. I just know nobody that I ever wanted to marry and if I did, I shouldn’t marry him. Is that all?”

“That’s about all, Miss Ardfern,” said Tab. “I’m really sorry to have troubled you. I always say that to people I trouble, but this time I mean it.”

“How did this information reach you?” she asked as she rose.

Tab’s frown was involuntary.

“From a—a friend of mine,” he said. “It is the first piece of news that he has ever given to me and it is wrong. Goodnight, Miss Ardfern.” His hand gripped hers and she winced.

“I’m sorry!” He was all apologies and confusion.

“You’re very strong!” she smiled, rubbing her hand, “and you aren’t very well acquainted with us fragile women—didn’t you say your name is Holland? Are you ‘Tab’ Holland?”

Tab coloured. It wasn’t like Tab to feel, much less display, embarrassment.

“Why ‘Tab’?” she asked, her blue eyes dancing.

“It is an office nick-name,” he explained awkwardly, “the boys say that I’ve a passion for making my exit on a good line. Really, I believe it is the line on which a curtain falls. You’ll understand that, Miss Ardfern, it is one of the conventions of the drama.”

“A tab-line?” she said. “I have heard about you. I remember now. It was a man who was in the company I played with—Milton Braid.”

“He was a reporter before he fell—before he went on to the stage,” said Tab.

He was not a theatre man and knew none of its disciples. This was the second actress he had met in his twenty-six years of life, and she was unexpectedly human. That she was also remarkably pretty he accepted without surprise. Actresses ought to be beautiful, even Ursula Ardfern, who was a great actress, if he accepted the general verdict of the press and the ecstatic and prejudiced opinion of Rex Lander. But she had a sense of humour; a curious possession in an emotional actress, if he could believe all that he had read on the subject. She had grace and youth and naturalness. He would willingly have stayed, but she was unmistakably ending the interview.

“Goodnight, Mr. Holland.”

He took her hand again, this time more gingerly and she laughed outright at his caution.

On the dressing-table was the small brown jewel-case and a glimpse of it reminded him:

“If there is anything you’d like to go in the ‘Megaphone’,” he floundered, “there was a paragraph in the paper about your having more wonderful jewels than any other woman on the stage.”

He was being unaccountably gauche; he knew this and hated himself. It did not need her quick smile to tell him that she did not wish for that kind of publicity. And then the smile vanished, leaving her young face strangely hard.

“No. I don’t think that my jewels and their value are very interesting. In the part I am playing now it is necessary to wear a great deal of jewelry—I wish it weren’t. Goodnight. I’m glad to upset the rumor.”

“I’m sorry for the bridegroom,” said Tab gallantly.

She watched him out of the room and her mind was still intent upon this broad-shouldered, towering young man when her dresser came in.

“I do wish, Miss, you hadn’t to carry those diamonds about with you,” said the sad-faced dresser. “Mr. Stark, the treasurer, said he would put them in the theatre safe for you, and there’s a night watchman.”

“Mr. Stark told me that, too,” said the girl quietly, “but I prefer to take them with me. Help me with my coat, Simmons.”

A few minutes later she passed through the stage-door. A small and handsome little car was drawn up opposite the door. It was closed and empty. She passed through the little crowd that had gathered to see her depart, stepped inside, placed the jewel-case on the floor at her feet and started the machine. The door-man saw it glide around the corner and went back to his tiny office.

Tab also saw the car depart. He grinned at himself for his whimsical and freakish act. If anybody had told him that he would wait at a stage-door for the pleasure of catching a glimpse of a popular actress, he would have been rude. Yet, here he was, a furtive and abashed man, so ashamed of his weakness that he must look upon her from the darkest corner of the street!

“Well, well,” said Tab, with a sigh. “We live and we learn.”

His flat was in Doughty Street, and stopping only to telephone the result of his interview, he made his way home.

As he came into the sitting-room a man some two years his junior looked up over the top of the arm-chair in which he was huddled.

“Well?” he asked eagerly.

Tab went to a large tobacco jar and filled his polished briar before he spoke.

“Is it true?” asked Rex Lander, impatiently. “What a mysterious brute you are!”

“Rex, you’re related to the Canards of Duckville,” said the other, puffing solemnly. “You’re a spreader of false tidings and a creator of alarm and despondency amongst the stage-door lizards—whose ancient fraternity I have this night joined, thanks to you.”

Rex relaxed his strained body into a more easy and even less graceful posture.

“Then she isn’t going to be married?” he said, with a sigh.

“You meant well,” said Tab, flopping into a chair, “and I know of no worse thing that you can say about a man than that he ‘meant well!’ But it isn’t true. She’s not going to be married. Where did you get hold of this story, Baby?”

“I heard it,” said the other vaguely.

He was a boyish looking young man with a pink and white complexion. His face was so round and cherubic that the appellation of ‘baby’ had good excuse, for he was plump of person and lazy of habit. They had been school fellows and when Rex had come to town at the command of his one relative, his uncle, the sour Mr. Jesse Trasmere, to take up a torturous training as an architect, these two had gravitated together and now shared Tab’s small flat.

“What do you think of her?”

Tab thought before replying.

“She’s certainly handicapped with good looks,” he said cautiously. At another time he would have added a word of disparagement or would have spoken jokingly of Rex Lander’s intense interest in the lady, but now, for some reason, he treated the other’s enquiry with more seriousness than was his wont.

Ursula Ardfern stood for the one consistently successful woman management in town. Despite her youth she had chosen and cast her own plays and in four seasons had not known the meaning of the word failure.

“She’s quite charming,” Tab said. “Of course, I felt a fool; interviewing actresses is off my beat anyway. Who is the letter from?” He glanced up at the envelope propped on the mantelpiece.

“From Uncle Jesse,” said the other without looking up from his book. “I wrote to him, asking him if he would lend me fifty.”

“And he said?— I saw him today, by-the-way.”

“Read it,” invited Rex Lander with a grin.

Tab took down the envelope and extracted a thick sheet of paper written in a crabbed, school-boy-hand.

“Dear Rex (he read), your quarterly allowance is not due until the twenty-first. I regret, therefore, that I cannot agree to your request. You must live more economically, remembering that when you inherit my money you will be thankful for the experience which economical living has given to you and which will enable you to employ the great wealth which will be yours, in a more judicious, far-seeing manner.”

“He’s a miserable old skinflint,” said Tab, tossing the letter back to the mantelshelf. “Somebody was telling me the other day that he’s worth a million—where did he make it?”

Rex shook his head.

“In China, I think. He was born there and started in quite a humble way as a trader on the Amur River Goldfields. Then he bought property on which gold was discovered. I don’t know,” he said, scratching his chin, “that I ought to complain. After all, there may be a lot in all he says, and he has been a good friend of mine.”

“How often have you seen him?”

“I spent a week with him last year,” said Rex, with a little grimace at the memory. “Still,” he hastened to add, “I owe him a lot. It may be if I wasn’t such a lazy slug and didn’t like expensive things, I could live within my income.”

Tab pulled at his pipe in silence. Presently he said:

“There are all sorts of rumors about old Jesse Trasmere. A fellow told me the other day that he is a known miser; keeps his money in the house, which, of course, is a romantic lie.”

“He hasn’t a banking account,” said the other surprisingly, “and I happen to know that he does keep a very large sum of money at Mayfield. The house is built like a prison and it has an underground strong-room which is the strongest room of its kind. I have never seen it, but I have seen him go down to it. Whether or not he sits down and gloats over his pieces of eight, I have never troubled to discover. But it is perfectly true, Tab,” he said earnestly, “he has no banking account. Everything is paid out in cash. I suppose he does have transactions through banks, but I have never heard of them. As to his being a miser,” he hesitated, “well, he is not exactly generous. For example, six months ago, he discovered that the man and his wife who looked after Mayfield, which is a very small house, were in the habit of giving the pieces of food left over to one of their poorer relatives, and he fired them on the spot! When I was there this year, he was shutting up all the rooms in the house except his own bedroom and his dining-room, which he uses also as a study.”

“What does he do for servants?” asked Tab, and the other shook his head.

“He has his valet, Walters, and two women who come in every day, one to cook and one to clean. But for the cook he has built a small kitchen away from the house.”

“He must be a cheerful companion,” said Tab.

“He is not exactly exhilarating. He has a fresh cook every month. I met Walters the other day and he told me that the new cook is the best they’ve had,” admitted the other, and there followed a silent interval of nearly five minutes.

Then Tab got up and knocked the ashes from his pipe.

“She certainly is pretty,” he said, and Rex Lander looked at him suspiciously, for he knew that Tab was not talking about the cook.

III

Mr. Jesse Trasmere sat at the end of a long, and, except in his immediate vicinity, bare table. At his end it was laid and Mr. Trasmere was slowly and deliberately enjoying a lean cutlet.

The room gave no suggestion of immense wealth and paid no silent tribute either to his artistic taste or his acquaintance with China. The walls were innocent of pictures, the furniture old, European and shabby. Mr. Trasmere had bought it second-hand and had never ceased to boast of the bargain he had secured.

If there were no pictures, there were no books. Jesse Trasmere was not a reader, even of newspapers.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon and through the folds of his dressing-gown, the grey of his pyjama jacket showed open at his lean throat, for Mr. Trasmere had only just got out of bed. Presently he would dress in his rusty black suit and would be immensely wakeful until the dawn of tomorrow. He never went to bed until the grey showed in the sky, nor slept later than two o’clock in the afternoon.

At six-thirty, to the second, Walters, his valet, would assist him into his overcoat, a light one if it was warm, a heavy, fur-lined garment if it was cold, and Mr. Trasmere would go for his walk and transact whatever business he found to his hand. But before he left the house there was a certain ceremonial, the locking of doors, the banishment of the valet to his own quarters, and the disappearance of Mr. Trasmere through the door which led from his study-dining-room to the basement of the house. This done he would go out. Walters had watched him from one of the upper windows scores of times, walking slowly down the street, an unfurled umbrella in one hand, a black bag in another. At eight-thirty to the minute he was back in the house. He invariably dined out. Walters would bring him a cup of black coffee and at ten o’clock would retire to his own room, which was separated from the main building by a heavy door which Mr. Trasmere invariably locked.

Once in the early days of his service, Walters had expostulated.

“Suppose there is a fire, sir,” he complained.

“You can get through your bath-room window on to the kitchen and if you can’t drop to the ground from there, you deserve to be burnt to death,” snarled the old man. “If you don’t like the job you needn’t stay. Those are the rules of my establishment and there are no others.”

So, night after night, Walters had gone to his room and Mr. Trasmere had shuffled after him in his slippered feet, had banged and locked the door upon him and had left Walters to solitude.

This procedure was only altered when the old man was taken ill one night and was unable to reach the door. Thereafter a key was hung in a small, glass-fronted case, in very much the same way as fire-keys are hung. In the event of his illness, or of any other unexpected happening, Walters could secure the key and answer the bell above his bed-head. That necessity had not arisen.

Every morning the valet found the door unlocked. At what hour old Jesse came he could not discover, but he guessed that his employer stopped on his way to bed in the morning to perform this service.

Walters was never allowed an evening off. Two days a week he was given twenty-four hours’ leave of absence, but he had to be in the house by ten.

“And if you are a minute later, don’t come back,” said Jesse Trasmere.

As the old man’s valet, Walters had exceptional opportunities for discovering something more about his master than Mr. Trasmere would care to have known. He was for a very particular reason anxious to know what the basement contained. Once he had met a man who had been engaged in the building of the house, and learnt that there was a room below, built of concrete, but though he had, with the greatest care and discretion, searched for keys which might, during the daily absence of his employer, reveal the secret of this underground room he had never succeeded in laying his hand upon them. Mr. Trasmere had apparently only one key, a master key, which he wore round his neck at night, and in the same inaccessible position in his clothing during the daytime, and Walters’ search had been in vain, until one morning, when taking Mr. Trasmere his shaving-water, the servant found him suffering from one of those fainting fits which periodically overcame him. There was a cake of soap handy and Walters was a resourceful man.

Mr. Trasmere looked up from his plate and fixed his servant with his grey-blue eyes.

“Has anybody called this morning?”

“No, sir.”

“Have any letters come?”

“Only a few. They are on your desk, sir.”

Mr. Trasmere grunted.

“Did you put the notice in the paper that I was leaving town for two or three days?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” said Walters.

Jesse Trasmere grunted again.

“A man is coming from China, and I don’t want to see him,” he explained. He was oddly communicative at moments to his servant, but Walters, who knew his master extremely well, did not make the mistake of asking questions. “No, I don’t want to see him,” the old man chewed a tooth-pick reflectively and his unattractive face bore an expression of distaste. “He was a partner of mine, twenty, thirty years ago, a card-playing, gambling, drinking man, who gave himself airs because—well, never mind what he gave himself airs about,” he said impatiently, as though he anticipated a question which he should have known never would have been put to him. “He was that kind of man.”

He stared at the fireless grate with its red brick walls and its microscopic radiator and clicked his lips.

“If he comes, he is not to be admitted. If he asks questions, you’re not to answer. You know nothing ... about anybody. Why he’s coming at all ... well, that doesn’t matter. He’s just trash, a soakin’ dope. He had his chance, got under it and went to sleep. Phew! That fellow! He might have been rich, but he sold ... and sold. A soak! Rather drink than sit in the Empress of China’s council ... she’s dead. White trash ... nothing ... h’m.”

He glared up of a sudden and asked harshly:

“Why the hell are you listening?”

“Sorry, sir, I thought....”

“Get out!”

“Yes, sir,” said Walters with alacrity.

For half-an-hour old Jesse Trasmere sat where the valet had left him, the red end of his tooth-pick leaping up and down eccentrically. Then he got up, and, going to an old-fashioned bureau, opened the glass front.

He brought to the table a shallow bowl of white porcelain, half-filled with Indian ink. His second visit to the secretaire produced a thick pad of paper. It was unusually large and its texture of a peculiar character. From an open-work iron box he took a long-handled brush and sitting down again dipped the fine point into the ink.

Another long interval of inaction and he commenced to write, beginning at the top right-hand corner and working down the page. The grotesque and intricate Chinese characters appeared with magic rapidity. He finished one column and commenced another and so until the page was covered except for two spaces beneath the last and the penultimate line.

Laying down the brush, he felt with the slow deliberation of age, in his right-hand waistcoat pocket and pulled out an ivory cylinder as big round as a large pencil. He slipped one end out and pressed it on the paper. When he took the stamp away there appeared within a red circle two Chinese characters. This was Jesse Trasmere’s “hong”, his sign manual; a thousand merchants from Shanghai to Fi Chen would honour cheques which bore that queer mark, and those for startling sums.

When the paper was dry he folded it into a small compass and getting up, went to the empty fireplace. Outside on the stairs a deeply-interested Walters craned his neck to see what happened. From his position and through the fanlight above the door, he commanded a view of at least a third of the room. But now Jesse had passed out of sight and although he stretched himself perilously he could not see what was happening. Only, when the old man reappeared the paper was no longer in his hand.

He touched a bell and Walters came at once.

“Remember,” he rasped, “I am not at home—to anybody!”

“Very good, sir,” said Walters a little impatiently.

Mr. Trasmere had gone out that afternoon when the visitor called.

It was unfortunate for the old man’s scheme that the China mail had made a record voyage and had arrived thirty-six hours ahead of her scheduled time. Mr. Trasmere was not a reader of newspapers, or he would have learnt the fact in that morning’s paper.

Walters answered the bell after some delay, for he was busily engaged in his own room on a matter that was entirely private to himself, and when he did answer the tinkling summons it was to find a brown-faced stranger standing on the broad step. He was dressed in an old suit which did not fit him, his linen was stained and his boots were patched, but his manner would not have been out of place in Lorenzo the Magnificent.

With his hands thrust into his trousers pockets, his soiled soft hat on the back of his head, he met the enquiring and deferential gaze of Walters with a calm and insolent stare, for Mr. Brown was rather drunk.

“Well, well, my man,” he said impatiently, “why the devil do you keep me waiting on the doorstep of my friend Jesse’s house, eh?” He removed one of his hands from his pocket, possibly not the cleanest one, and tugged at his short grey beard.

“Mr.—er—Mr. Trasmere is out,” said Walters, “I will tell him you have called. What name, sir?”

“Wellington Brown is my name, good fellow,” said the stranger. “Wellington Brown from Chei-feu. I will come in and wait.”

But Walters barred the way.

“Mr. Trasmere has given me strict orders not to admit anybody unless he is in the house,” he said.

A wave of anger turned Wellington Brown’s face to a deeper red.

“He has given orders!” he spluttered. “That I am not to be admitted—I, Wellington Brown, who made his fortune, the swindling old thief! He knows I am coming!”

“Are you from China, sir?” blurted Walters.

“I have told you, menial and boot-licking yellow-plush, that I am from Chei-feu. If you are illiterate, as you appear to be, I will explain to you that Chei-feu is in China.”

“I don’t care whether Chei-feu is in China or in the moon,” said Walters obstinately. “You can’t come in, Mr. Brown! Mr. Trasmere is away—he’ll be away for a fortnight.”

“Oh, won’t I come in!”

The struggle was a brief one, for Walters was a man of powerful physique, and Wellington Brown was a man nearer to sixty than fifty. He was flung against the stone wall of the porch and might, in his bemused condition, have fallen had not Walters’ quick hand grabbed him back.

The stranger breathed noisily.

“I’ve killed men for that,” he said, jerkily, “shot ’em down like dogs! I’ll remember this, flunkey!”

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” said Walters, aggrieved that any onus for the unpleasantness should rest on him.

The stranger raised his hand haughtily.

“I will settle accounts with your master—remember that, lackey! He shall pay, by God!”

With drunken dignity, he walked unsteadily through the patch of garden that separated the house from the road, leaving Walters a puzzled man.

IV

At nine o’clock that night the bell of Tab Holland’s flat rang long and noisily.

“Who the dickens is that?” he growled.

He was in his shirt-sleeves, writing for dear life and the table was strewn with proofs of his industry.

Rex Lander came out of his bedroom.

“Your boy, I expect,” he said. “I left the lower door open for him.”

Tab shook his head.

“The office is sending for the copy at eleven,” he said. “See who it is, Babe.”

Mr. Lander grumbled. He always grumbled when he was called upon for physical effort. He opened the door and Tab, hearing a loud and unfamiliar voice, joined him. On the landing without, was a bearded, swaying figure and he was talking noisily.

“What is wrong?” asked Tab.

“Everything, sir,” hiccoughed the caller, “everything is wrong. A man, a gen’leman cannot be robbed with impunity or assaulted by me-menials with—with—” He considered a moment and added: “impunity.”

“Bring him in, the poor soused herring,” said Tab, and Mr. Wellington Brown swaggered and staggered into the sitting-room. He was abominably intoxicated.

“Wish of you young gen’lemen is Rex Lander?”

“That is my name,” said the puzzled Rex.

“I’m Wellin’ton Brown of Chei-Feu. A pensioner at the mercy of a dam’ ol’ scound’l! A pension’r! He pays me a pittance out of what he robbed me. I can tell you some’n about ol’ Trasmere.”

“Trasmere, my uncle?” asked the startled young man.

The other nodded gravely and sleepily.

“I can tell you some’n about him. I was his bookkeeper ’n sec’tary. I know! I’ll tell you some’n about him!”

“You can save your breath,” said Rex coldly. “Why have you come here?”

“Because you’re ’is nephew. Thas why! He robbed me—robbed me!” he sobbed. “Took bread out ’f the mouth of innocent child—that what! Took bread out ’f orphan’s mouth and robbed me, swin’led me out ’f my share Mancurian Trading Syn’cate, an’ then gave me remittance ’n said ‘Drink yourself to death’—thas what he said!”

“And did you?” asked Tab sardonically.

The stranger eyed him unfavourably.

“Who’s this?” he demanded.

“This is a friend of mine,” said Rex, “and you’re in his flat. And if the only business you have is to abuse my uncle, you can get out just as soon as you like.”

Mr. Wellington Brown tapped the young man’s chest with a grimy forefinger.

“Your uncle is a rascal! Get that! A low thief!”

“Better write and tell him so,” said Tab, briskly. “Just now I am engaged in churning out two yards of journalese, and you’re disturbing my thoughts.”

“Write to him!” roared Mr. Brown delightedly, “write to him! Thas good—best thing I’ve heard for years! Why—!”

“Get out!”

Babe Lander threw open the door with a crash and the visitor glared at him.

“Like uncle, like nephew,” he said, “like nephew, like lackey—I’m goin’. And let me tell you—”

The door slammed in his face.

“Phew!” said Babe, wiping his brow. “Let’s open the window and let in some fresh air!”

“Who is he?”

“Search me,” said Rex Lander. “I’ve no illusions about Uncle Jesse’s early friends. I gather that he’s been a pensioner of the old boy’s, and there is probably some truth in his charge that he was robbed. I cannot imagine uncle giving money away from charitable motives. Anyway, I’m seeing him tomorrow and I’ll ask.”

“You’ll see nothing,” said Tab. “Do you ever read the fashionable intelligence or society news? Uncle is leaving town tomorrow.”

Rex smiled.

“That is an old trick when he doesn’t want to be seen—by Joab! It is the Wellington who has put his name in the society column!”

Tab paused, pen in hand.

“Silence will now reign,” he commanded, “whilst a great journalist deals adequately with the Milligan Murder Appeal.”

Rex looked at him, admiringly.

“How you can stick your nose at the grindstone is a source of wonder to me,” he said. “I couldn’t—”

“Shut up!” snapped Tab, and the desirable silence was his. He finished the last page at eleven, sent off his copy by a punctual messenger, then filling his pipe, stretched himself luxuriously in his mission chair.

“Now I’m a free man until Monday afternoon—”

The hall telephone signalled at that moment and he got up with a groan.

“Boast not!” he growled. “That is the office or I’m a saint!”

It was the office, as he had so intelligently foreseen. He snapped a few words at the transmitter and came back to the room. And Tab was very voluble.

A Polish gentleman concerned in certain frauds on insurance companies had been arrested, escaped again, and having barricaded himself in his house, was keeping the police at bay with the aid of boiling water and a large axe.

“Jacko is enthusiastic about it,” said the savage Tab, speaking thus disrespectfully of his city editor, “says it is real drama—I told him to send the dramatic critic. Gosh—I did his job the other night.”

“Going out?” asked Rex with mild interest.

“Of course I’m going out, you thick-headed jibberer!” said the other unkindly as he struggled into the collar he had discarded.

“I thought all that sort of stuff was invented in the office,” said the young architect monstrously. “Personally I never believe what I read in newspapers.”

But Tab had gone.

At midnight he joined a little group of police officers that stood at safe range from the besieged house, whose demented occupant had found a shot-gun. Tab was with them until the door of the house was stormed and the defender borne down and clubbed to a state of placidity.

At two o’clock in the morning, he and Carver, the chief of the detectives engaged in the case, adjourned to the police mess and had supper. It was half-past three and the streets were lit by the ghostly light of dawn, when he started to walk home.

Passing through Park Street, he heard the whirr of wheels and a motor-car flew past him. It had gone a hundred yards when there came to him the explosion of a burst tire. He saw the car swerve and stop. A woman alighted and examined the damage. Apparently she was alone, for he saw her open the tool-box on the running-board, and take out a jack. He hastened his footsteps and crossed to the middle of the road. The only other person in sight was a cyclist down the road who had dismounted and was examining his wheel.

“Can I be of any assistance?” asked Tab.

The woman started and turned.

“Miss Ardfern!” he said in astonishment.

For a second she seemed uncomfortable and then with a quick smile:

“It is Mr. Tab! Please forgive the familiarity, I cannot remember your other name.”

“Don’t try,” he said, taking the jack from her hands, “but if you are very anxious to remember, I am called Holland.”

She said nothing whilst he was raising the car. When he was knocking the torn wheel free, she said:

“I am out rather late, I have been to a party.”

There was light enough for him to see that she was dressed very plainly and that the shoes she wore were heavy and serviceable. He would have gone farther and said that she was dressed poorly. Inside the car on the seat by her side was a square black case, smaller but deeper than a suit-case. Perhaps she had changed her clothes—but for all their surprising agility in this direction, actresses do not change their clothes to go home from a party.

“I have been to a party too,” he said, jerking off the wheel and rolling it to the front of the car, “a surprise party with fireworks.”

“A dance?”

Tab smiled to himself.

“I only danced once,” he said, “I saw the gentleman taking aim with the shot-gun and danced right merrily yo ho!”

He heard the quick intake of her breath.

“Oh, yes, it was the Pole. We heard the shots and I knew that he had taken refuge in his house before I left the theatre.”

The wheel was replaced now, the tools returned and the old wheel strapped to the car.

“That is O. K.,” said Tab stepping back. “Oh no, it was nothing,” he said hastily as she began to thank him, “nothing at all.”

She did not offer to drive him home. He rather hoped that she would; indeed, her method of going was a little precipitate, and she was out of sight before he realized that she was gone.

What on earth was she doing at that time in the morning he wondered? A party she had said, but again it occurred to him that fashionable actresses did not go to parties in that kind of outfit.

Rex was awake when he reached home and came out to him. Strangely enough, although they discussed the happenings of the night, Tab did not mention his meeting with Ursula Ardfern.

V

“Ursula Ardfern,” Tab woke with the words on his lips. The hour was eleven and Rex had been out and was back again.

“L’ami de mon oncle has been—did you hear him?” asked Rex, stopping his towel-encompassed companion on his way to the bath-room.

“Who—Bonaparte?”

“Wellington is his name, I believe. Yes, he came rather subdued and apologetic, but full of horrific threats toward Uncle Jesse. I turned him out.”

“Why did he come?”

Rex Lander shook his head.

“Heaven knows! Unless it was that he simply had to find somebody who knew uncle well enough to be interested in hearing him curse the old man. I’ve persuaded him to leave town until the end of next week. But I must say that I was impressed by the brute’s threats. He says he will kill Uncle Jesse unless he makes reparation.”

“Twiff!” said Tab contemptuously and went to his tub. Over his breakfast (Rex had had his two hours before) he returned to the subject of Mr. Jesse Trasmere and his enemy.

“When a man soaks he’s dangerous,” he said. “There isn’t any such thing as a harmless drunkard, any more than there is a harmless lunatic. Carver and I had a talk on the matter early this morning and he agreed. That man is certainly intelligent, which is more than you can say of the majority of detectives. Not that it is their faults, poor fellows; they are the victims of a system which calls for a sixty-nine inch brain.”

“Eh?”

“A sixty-nine inch brain,” explained Tab, and there was really no excuse for Babe Lander to be puzzled, for Tab was on his favorite topic, “is the brain of a man who is chosen for the subtle business of criminal investigation, not because he is clever, or shrewd or has a knowledge of the world, but because he stands sixty-nine inches in his stockings and has a chest expansion to thirty-eight. Funny, isn’t it? And yet detectives are chosen that way. They have to strip hard, very hard, but they need not think very hard. Do you ever realize that Napoleon and Julius Cæsar, to mention only two bright lads, could never have got into the police force?”

“It hasn’t struck me before,” admitted Rex. “But I’ve never had any doubt as to the size of your brain, Tab.”

There were exactly seventy inches of Tab, though he did not look so tall, having thickness and breadth to his shoulders. He had a habit of stooping, which made him seem round-shouldered. This trick came from pounding a typewriter or crouching over a desk which was just a little too low for him. He was fresh-coloured, but brown rather than pink. His face was finer drawn than is usual in a man of his build, his eyes deep-set and steadfastly grey. When he spoke he drawled a little. Those who knew him very well indeed detected one imperfection of speech. He could not say “very”—it was “verthy” but spoken so quickly that only the trained and acquainted ear could detect the lisp.

He came to journalism from one of the Universities bringing no particular reputation for learning, but universally honoured as the best three-quarter back of his time. Without being rich he was comfortably placed and as he was one of those fortunates who had innumerable maiden-aunts he received on an average one legacy a year, though he had studiously neglected them because of their possessions.

It would be more true to say that Tab leapt into journalism, and that particular department of journalism which he found most fascinating, when he dived off the end of a river pier and rescued Jasper Dorgon, the defaulting banker who had tried to commit suicide, and had extracted an exclusive story from the banker whilst both sat in a state of nudity before a night watchman’s fire watching their clothes dry.

“Let it strike you now, Babe,” he said. “The sixty-ninth inch brain, the generally accepted theory that anything under the sixty-nine inch level is solid ivory is the theory that keeps Lew Vann and old Joe Haspinell and similar crook acquaintances of mine dining in the Grand Criterion when they ought to be atoning for their sins in the Cold Stone Jug. But Carver is a good man. He thinks, though it is against regulations.”

“What does he think about Wellington?”

“Didn’t tell him,” said Tab. “You ought to warn your uncle.”

“I’ll see him today,” nodded Rex.

They went out together before the lunch hour. Tab had a call to make at the office and afterwards he was meeting Carver for lunch. Carver, a lanky and slow-speaking man, was ordinarily no conversationalist. On some subjects he was impressively interesting, and as Tab provided the subject, two hours slipped away very quickly. Before they left the restaurant, Tab told him of the drunken stranger and his threats against Jesse Trasmere.

“I don’t worry about threats,” said Carver, “but a man with a grievance, and especially a Number One grievance, like this man has, is pretty certain to cause trouble. Do you know old Trasmere?”

“I’ve seen him twice. I was once sent to his house to make an inquiry about an action that the municipality started against him for building without the town architect’s permission. Rex Lander, who is a kindergarten architect, by-the-way, and rooms with me, is his nephew and I’ve heard a whole lot about him. He writes to Rex from time to time; letters full of good advice about saving money.”

“Lander is his heir?”

“Rex hopes so, fervently. But he says it is just as likely that Uncle Jesse will leave his money to a Home for the Incurably Wealthy. Talking of Trasmere, there goes his valet, and he seems in a hurry.”

A cab dashed past them, its solitary passenger was Walters, a pinched-faced man, bareheaded, and on his face a tense, haggard look that immediately arrested the attention of the two men.

“Who did you say that was?” asked Carver quickly.

“Walters—old Trasmere’s sergeant,” replied Tab, “looks pretty scared to me.”

“Walters?” The detective stood stock still, thinking. “I know that man’s face. I’ve got him! Walter Felling!”

“Walter who?”

“Felling—he was through my hands ten years ago and he has been convicted since. Walters, as you call him, is an incorrigible thief! Old Trasmere’s servant, eh? That’s his speciality. He takes service with rich people and one fine morning they wake up to find their loose jewelry and money and plate gone. Did you notice the number of the cab?”

Tab shook his head.

“The question is,” said the detective, “has he made a get-away in a hurry, or is he on an urgent errand for his boss? Anyway we ought to see Trasmere. Shall we take a cab or walk?”

“Walk,” said Tab promptly. “Only the detectives of fiction take cabs, Carver. The real people know that when they present their cab bills to the head office, a soulless clerk will question each item.”

“Tab, you certainly know more about the interior economy of thief-catching than an outsider ought to know,” responded the detective gloomily.

Between them and Trasmere’s house was the better part of a mile. Mayfield, the dwelling place of old Jesse, was the one ugly building in a road which was famous for the elegance of its houses. Built of hideously yellow brick, without any attempt at ornamentation, it stood squat and square in the middle of a cemented “garden.” Three microscopic circles of earth had been left at the urgent request of the builder, wherein Mr. Jesse might, if he so desired, win from the sickly earth such blooms and blossoms as might delight his eye. To this he reluctantly agreed, but only after there had been pointed out to him the fact that such an alteration to his plans would save a little money.

“It isn’t exactly the Palace of the Fairy Prince, is it?” said Tab, as he pushed open the cast iron gate.

“I’ve seen prettier houses,” admitted Carver, “I wonder—”

So far he got, when the front door was flung violently open and Rex Lander rushed out. His face was the colour of chalk, his big baby eyes were staring wildly. They fell upon the two men on the concrete walk and his mouth opened to speak, but no words came.

Tab ran to him.

“What is wrong?” he demanded and that something was badly wrong one glance at Babe Lander told him.

“My uncle,” he gasped. “Go look.”

Carver rushed into the house and through the open door of the dining-room. It was empty, but at the side of the fireplace was a narrower door.

“Where is he?” asked the detective.

Rex could only point to the narrow aperture.

There was a flight of stone stairs which terminated in a narrow passage, barred by yet another door, which was also open. The corridor was well-lighted by three globes set at intervals in the ceiling, and the acrid smell of exploded cordite filled the confined space of the passage, which was empty.

“There must be a room opening from here,” said Carver, “whose are these?”

He stooped and picked up an old pair of gloves that lay on the floor and pushed them into his pocket.

He looked round for Rex Lander. That young man was sitting on the top step of the stairs, his face in his hands.

“There’s no sense in questioning him,” said Carver in an undertone, “where is his uncle?”

Tab walked rapidly down the passage and came to a door on the left. It was a narrow door painted black, and deeply recessed in the thick wall. There was no handle and only a tiny keyhole. Four inches from its top was a steel plate pierced with small holes for the purpose of ventilation. He pushed the door, but it was locked. Then he peered through the ventilator.

He saw a vault which he guessed was about ten feet long by eight feet wide. Fixed to the rough walls were a number of steel shelves, loaded up with black iron boxes. A brilliant light came from a globe in the vaulted roof, and he saw plainly.

At the farther end of the room was a plain table, but it was not at this he was looking, but at the figure crouched against one of its legs. The face was turned in his direction.

It was the face of Jesse Trasmere and he was dead.

VI

Tab gave way to the detective and waited whilst Carver looked.

“There’s no sign of a weapon—but by the smell there has been some shooting,” he said. “What is that on the table?”

Tab peered through the ventilator.

“It looks like a key to me,” he said.

They tried the door, but it resisted their combined weight.

“The door is much too thick and the lock too strong for us to force,” said Carver at last. “I’ll telephone headquarters, Tab. See what you can get out of your friend.”

“I don’t think he’ll tell me much for some time. Come along, Babe,” said Tab kindly, taking the other’s arm. “Let us get out of this beastly atmosphere.”

Unresisting, Rex Lander allowed himself to be led back to the dining-room, where he dropped into a chair.

Carver had finished his telephoning and had returned long before Rex had recovered sufficiently to give a coherent narrative. His face was blanched, he could not control his quivering lips, and it was a considerable time before he could tell his patient hearers all that he knew.

“I came to the house this afternoon by appointment,” he said. “My uncle had written to me asking me to see him about an application which I had made to him for a loan. He had previously rejected my request, but as had often happened, he relented at the last moment, for he was not a bad man at heart. As I was pressing the bell, the door opened and I saw Walters—Walters is my uncle’s valet.”

The detective nodded.

“He looked terribly agitated, and he had a brown leather bag in his hand. ‘I am just going out, Mr. Lander,’ he said—”

“Did he seem surprised to see you?”

“He seemed alarmed,” said Rex. “It struck me when I saw him that my uncle must be ill and I asked him if anything was the matter. He said that my uncle was well but he had sent him on a very important errand. The conversation did not last more than a minute, for Walters ran down the steps and into the road before I could recover from my amazement.”

“He wore no hat?” asked Carver.

Rex shook his head.

“I stood in the hall for a moment, knowing that my uncle does not like people to come in upon him unless they are properly announced. You see, Mr. Carver, the situation was rather a delicate one for me. I had come here in the role of a supplicant, and naturally I did not wish to prejudice my chance of getting the fifty which my uncle had promised me. I went to uncle’s living-room but he was not there, but the door which I knew led to the strong-room was open and he could not be far away. I sat down and waited. I must have been there ten minutes and then I began to smell something burning, as I thought, but which was, in fact, the smell of gunpowder or whatever they use in cartridges, and I was so thoroughly alarmed that I went down the steps and after a little hesitation, knowing how my uncle hated being overlooked, I went on to the door of the vault. It was locked and I rapped on the ventilator but had no reply. Then I peeped through. It was horrible,” he shuddered. “As fast as I could I ran up the stairs into the street, intending to call a policeman and I saw you.”

“Whilst you were in the house you heard no sound to suggest that there was anybody else present? Where are the servants?”

“There is only the cook,” said Rex and Carver went in search of her.

But the kitchen was closed and deserted. It was apparently the cook’s day off.

“I’ll make a search of the house,” said Carver. “Come along, Tab, you are in this case now and you had better stay with it.”

The search did not take a very long time. There were two rooms used by Mr. Trasmere, the remainder were locked up and apparently unused. A passage-way led to Walters’ sleeping apartment, which had originally been designed as a guest room and was larger than servants’ quarters usually are. The room was meagrely furnished and there was evidence that Mr. Walters had not anticipated so hurried a flight. Some of his clothing hung on pegs behind the door, others were found in a wardrobe, whilst a cup filled with coffee stood on the table. Carver dipped his little finger into the liquid. It was still warm.

A cloth had been thrown hurriedly over some bulky object at one end of the table, and this the detective removed. He whistled. Clamped to the edge of the table was a small vice and scattered about were a number of files and other tools. Carver turned the screw of the vice and released the object in its grip. It was a small key of peculiar shape, and the man must have been working upon it recently, for steel filings covered the base of the tool.

“Then friend Walters was making a key,” said Carver. “Look at that plaster cast! That is an old dodge of his. I suppose he got an impression of the key on soap or wax and has been working at it ever since.” He looked at the thing in his palm curiously. “This may save us a great deal of trouble,” he said, “for unless I am mistaken, this is the key of the strong-room.”

A few minutes later the house was filled with detectives, police photographers and coroner’s officers. They came on a useless errand, for the door remained locked. Tab took advantage of their arrival to escort his friend home.

Before he went, Carver drew him aside.

“We shall have to keep in touch with Mr. Lander,” he said. “He may be able to throw a great deal of light upon this murder. In the meantime I have sent out all station calls to pull in Felling—who is Wellington Brown?”

“Wellington Brown? That is the man who has been threatening Trasmere—I told you about him at lunch.”

Carver pulled an old pair of gloves from his pocket.

“Mr. Wellington Brown was in that underground corridor,” he said quietly, “and was sufficiently indiscreet to leave his gloves behind—his name is written inside!”

“You will charge him with the murder?” asked Tab, and Carver nodded.

“I think so. Either he or Walters. At any rate, we shall hold them on suspicion, but I cannot be more definite until we’ve got inside that vault.”

Tab escorted his friend to the flat, and leaving him, hurried back to Mayfield, by which fanciful name Trasmere had called his grim house.

“We’ve found no weapon of any kind,” said the detective whom he found sitting in Trasmere’s dining-room with a plan of the house before him. “Maybe it is in the vault, in which event it looks like a case of suicide. I have been on the telephone with the boss of Mortimers, the builders. They say that there is only one key in existence for that vault—I was speaking to Mr. Mortimer himself and he knows. Trasmere made a special point about the lock and had twenty or thirty manufactured by different locksmiths. Nobody knows which one he used, and Mortimer says that the orders were so imperative that there should be no duplicate key, that it is unlikely—in fact, I think, impossible—that the murderer could have entered the vault except by the aid of Trasmere’s own key. However, we shall soon know; I have the best workman in town working at the unfinished key in Felling’s room and he says it is so far advanced that he is in no doubt he will be able to open the vault tonight.”

“Then it is useless in its present state?”

The other nodded.

“Quite useless, we have tried it and the locksmith, who is an expert, says that it wouldn’t fit into the keyhole as it was when we found it.”

“Then you suggest it is a case of suicide? That old man Trasmere went into the vault, locked himself in and then shot himself.”

Carver shook his head.

“If the revolver is found in the vault, yours would be a very sound theory, though why Trasmere should shoot himself is entirely beyond me.”

At a quarter to eleven that night three men stood before the door of the Trasmere vault, and the shirt-sleeved workman inserting the key, the lock snapped back. He was pushing the door open when Carver caught his arm.

“Just leave it as it is,” he said and the locksmith, obviously disappointed that he should be denied a full view of the tragedy which he had only half glimpsed went back to gather up his tools.

“Now,” said Carver, drawing a long breath and pulling a pair of white gloves from his pocket, he put them on.

Tab followed him into the chamber of death.

“I’ve telephoned for the doctor. He’ll be here in a few seconds,” said Carver, looking down at the silent figure leaning against the table legs. He pointed to the table. In the exact centre lay a key, but what brought the exclamation to the detective’s lips, was the fact that the one half was stained red. The fluid which had run from it had soaked into the porous surface of the table.

“Blood,” whispered the detective and gingerly lifted the flat steel.

There was no doubt about it. Though the handle was clean, the lower wards appeared as though they had been dipped in blood.

“This disposes of the suicide theory,” said Carver.

His first search was for the pistol which had obviously slain the man. There was no sign of any weapon. He passed his hand under the limp body and Tab shivered to see the head drop wearily to the shoulder.

“Nothing there—shot through the body too. Suicides seldom do it that way.”

His quick fingers searched the silent figure. There was nothing of any value.

Carver straightened himself and stood, fist on hip, surveying the dreadful sight.

“He was standing here when he was shot—he never knew what killed him. As a faked suicide it is inartistic—part from the absence of weapon, the old man was shot in the back.”

If there were any doubts on the subject they were set at rest when the doctor made his brief examination.

“He was shot at the range of about two yards,” he said. “No, Mr. Carver, it is impossible that he should have committed suicide, there is no burning whatever. Besides, the bullet has entered the back, just beneath the left shoulder and of course, death must have been instantaneous. It is impossible that the wound can have been self-inflicted.”

Again came the police photographers, and after they had gone, leaving the vault thick with the mist of exploded magnesium, the two men were left to their search. The first boxes were, for the main part, filled with money. There was very little gold, but a great deal of paper of various nationalities. In one box Carver found five million francs in thousand franc notes, another was packed with English five pound notes, another was full of hundred dollar bills fastened in packets of ten thousand. Only two of these boxes were locked and only one that they looked at that night contained anything in the nature of documents. For the most part they were old leases, receipts painted on thin paper in Chinese characters and which they only knew were receipts because somebody had written a translation on their backs. They were bracketed neatly in folders, on each of which was described in a fine flowing hand, the nature of its contents.

On one thick bundle fastened with rubber bands was an old label: “Trading correspondence, 1899.”

In his search Tab, who was looking through the box, found a folded manuscript which he brought out.

“Here is his will,” he said, and Carver took it from him. It was written in the crabbed boyish hand which Tab had come to know so well and it was very short. After the conventional preamble, it went on:

“I leave my property and effects whatsoever, to my nephew, Rex Percival Lander, the only son of my deceased sister, Mary Catherine Lander, nee Trasmere, and I appoint him sole executor of this my will.”

It was witnessed by Mildred Green, who described herself as a cook, and by Arthur Green, whose description of his profession was valet. Their addresses were Mayfield.

“I think those are the two servants the old man discharged for pilfering some six months ago. The will must have been executed a few weeks before they left.”

Tab’s first feeling was one of pleasure that at last his friend was a rich man. Poor Rex, little did he dream that he would come into his inheritance in so tragic a fashion.

Carver put the document back into the box and continued the examination of the door which Tab had interrupted.

“It isn’t a spring lock, you notice,” he said. “So, therefore, it couldn’t have been slammed by a murderer who first shot Trasmere and then made his escape. It has to be locked either from the inside or the outside. If there was any reasonable possibility of Trasmere having shot himself, the solution would have been simple. But he did not shoot himself. He was shot here, the door was locked upon him and the key returned to the table—how?” He took the key and tried one of the air-holes of the ventilator. The point of the key scarcely entered. “There must be some other entrance to the vault,” he said.

The sun was up before they finished their examination of the room. The walls were solid. There was neither window nor fireplace. The floor was even more substantial than the walls.

In a last hopeless endeavor to solve the mystery, Carver called in an expert to inspect the ventilator. It was made of steel, a quarter of an inch thick, and fastened into the door itself. There were no screws with which it could have been taken out and even if it had been removed, only the tiniest of mortals could have crept through.

“Still,” said Carver, “if we could suppose that the ventilator was removable, we might have taken a leaf from Edgar Allen Poe and thought seriously of a trained monkey being introduced.”

“There is the theory of the duplicate key—”

“Which I dismiss,” said Carver. “I am satisfied that no duplicate key was used. If a duplicate key had been procurable, Felling or Walters as you call him, would have found his way to it. He is the cleverest man in that business and he has lived on duplicate keys all his life. He must have known that it was impossible to gain admission by such a method or he wouldn’t have taken the trouble to make one. He is a specialist in that line of business, probably the finest locksmith of the underworld.”

“Then you suggest that this key was used?” Tab pointed to the table.

“I not only suggest it, but I would swear to it,” said Carver quietly. “Look!” He pulled the door open so that the light fell upon the outside keyhole. “Do you see the little blood-spots?” he asked. “That key has not only been used from the outside, where it has left unmistakable markings, but the same has happened on the inside of the door.”

He swung the door again and Tab saw the tell-tale stains.

“That door was unlocked from the inside after the old man was dead and locked again upon him.”

“But how did the key get back to the table?” asked the bewildered reporter.

Mr. Carver shook his head.

“A medical student was once asked by a professor whether Adam was ever a baby, and he replied: ‘God knows’—that is my answer to you!” he said. “We will leave the other boxes until tomorrow, Tab.”

Carver led the way out of the vault, locked the door with the duplicate key and put it in his pocket.

“My brain is dead,” said Tab.

And it was then that he saw the new pin.

VII

From where he stood the light caught it and sent up a thread of silvery reflection. He stooped mechanically and picked it up.

“What is that?” asked the detective curiously.

“It looks to me like a pin,” said Tab.

It was a very ordinary pin, silvery bright and about an inch and a half in length. In that sense it was of an unusual size, though it was the kind that is commonly used by bankers, who delight in fastening large documents together by this barbarous method. It was not straight; there was a slight bend in it, but otherwise it had not remarkable features. Tab looked at it stupidly.

“Give it to me,” said Carver. He took it in his white-gloved hand and walked to a position under one of the lights. “I don’t suppose it has any significance,” he said, “but I’ll keep it.” He put the pin carefully away in the match-box where he had put the key. “Now, Tab,” he said more briskly as they went out of the house together into the bright sunlight, two unshaven, weary-looking men, “you have the story of your life, but go easy on any clues we have found.”

“I didn’t know we had found any,” said Tab, “unless the pin is a clue.”

“Even that I should not mention,” said Carver gravely.

When he got back to his flat Tab found the lights of the sitting-room blazing and Rex Lander, fully dressed, asleep on the settee.

“I waited up till three,” yawned Rex. “Have they caught Walters or whoever it was?”

“Not when I left Carver, which was ten minutes ago,” replied Tab. “They suspect that man Brown. His gloves were found in the passage.”

“Brown, the man from China?—It was pretty awful, wasn’t it?” asked Babe in a hushed voice, as though the fearfulness of those moments through which he had passed were only now appealing to him in their sheer terror. “My God, what an awful thing! I’ve tried not to think about it all night, that horrible memory persisted so that it nearly drove me mad.”

“I have one bit of good news for you, Rex,” said the other as he began to prepare for bed. “We found your uncle’s will. That is unofficial.”

“You found the will, did you?” said the other listlessly. “I am afraid I am not interested in his will just now. Who gets the money, the Dogs’ Home, or the Cats’ Creche?”

“It goes to a stout young architect,” said Tab with a grin, “and I can see our little home breaking up. Maybe I’ll come and see you when you are rich, Babe, if you’ll know me.”

Rex’s impatient gesture silenced him.

“I’m not thinking about money—I’m thinking about other things,” he said.

Tab slept for four hours and woke to find that Rex had gone out.

When he came into the street the special editions of the Sunday newspapers were selling with stories of the murder.

The news editor had not arrived when Tab reached the office, but he turned in the rough narrative of the tragedy to guide the office in its general search for Walters and Brown.

He went on to Mayfield, but Carver was not there and the police sergeant in charge of the house was indisposed to admit him. Carver being a single man, lived in lodgings. Tab surprised him in the act of shaving.

“No, there is no news of Felling, and Brown, who is a much more difficult proposition, has disappeared from view. Why is he more difficult? Because he is unknown. In comparison, tracing Walters is child’s play. Yet we haven’t even found him,” said the inspector wiping his face, “which is rather surprising, considering that we know his usual haunts and acquaintances. None of these say they have seen him. The cab-driver has come forward in answer to our hurry up call, and says he set down Felling at the Central Station. They stopped on the way to buy a hat, apparently.”

Carver had not been to the station that morning and even if he had, he could not have given the news which was to startle Tab later in the day.

“Have you formed any fresh theory, Carver?”

Carver looked out of the window and pulled his long nose thoughtfully.

He was a tall thin man with a lean face that was all lines and furrows. In repose it was melancholy in the extreme, and his gentle apologetic tone seemed somehow in keeping with his appearance.

“There are several theories, all more or less fluid,” he said.

“Has it occurred to you,” asked Tab, “that the shot might have been fired through one of the ventilator holes?”

Carver nodded several times before he answered.

“It occurred to me after I left you and I went back to make sure, but there was no blackening of the grating such as there would be if a pistol of sufficient small calibre had been pressed against one of the holes and fired, added to which, there is this important fact, that the bullet of the size the doctors found in Trasmere’s body would not go through any such hole.” Carver shook his head. “No, the murder was committed actually in the vault, either by Brown, by Walters or by some third person.”

Tab had a few independent enquiries to pursue, one of which related to the cook. She had already been questioned by the police, he discovered, when he reached her little suburban home. A quiet, motherly and unimaginative woman, there was little she could tell him.

“It was my day off,” she said. “Mr. Trasmere said he was going into the country, though I don’t suppose he was. He had said that before, but Walters told me to take no notice. I have never seen Mr. Trasmere,” she said, to Tab’s surprise. “All my orders came through Mr. Walters, and practically I was never inside the house except once, when the cleaning woman did not turn up in the morning and I helped Walters to tidy the master’s sitting-room. I remember that morning because I found a little black lid—well it was hardly a lid, I have got it here if you would like to see it. I have often wondered what it was for.”

“Lid,” said Tab. “What kind of a lid?”

“It was like the lid of a small pill-box,” explained the woman, “about the size of a threepenny piece. I picked it up and asked Mr. Walters what it was for, and he said he didn’t know. It was on the floor near the table and I brought it home, meaning to ask my husband what it was.”

She went out of the room and returned with the “lid” which proved, on examination, to be a celluloid cap such as typists use to cover their keys.

“Had Mr. Trasmere a typewriter?”

“No, sir,” she answered, shaking her head, “not so far as I know. I have never seen one. As I say, I have only been that once into the house. The kitchen is built away from the living rooms, although it is connected; Mr. Trasmere gave strict orders that I was to keep to my kitchen.”

Tab looked at the little cap which he held between his finger and thumb. It was undoubtedly part of a typist’s equipment, and yet Mr. Trasmere had never employed a typist. He always wrote to Rex in his own hand.

“Are you sure nobody came during the day to take your master’s correspondence?” he asked.

“No, I am perfectly sure Mr. Walters would have told me. He used to complain how dull it was because nobody came to the house at all and he was rather partial to young women, so I am sure I should have heard. Have they found Mr. Walters? I’m certain he didn’t do it.”

Tab satisfied her on that point.

“Do you know the Greens?” he asked, remembering just as he was on the point of leaving the house, the witnesses to the old man’s will.

“No, sir, not really,” she said. “Mrs. Green was cook before me and I saw her once, the day I came, and Mr. Green too. They were a very nice couple and I don’t think the master treated them very well.”

“Where are they now?”

“I don’t know, sir,” she said. “I did hear that they had gone to Australia. They were middle-aged people, but very strong and healthy and Mr. Green was always talking about going to Australia where he was born and settling down there.”

“Did Green or his wife have any hard feelings against Mr. Trasmere?”

She hesitated.

“Well, they naturally felt sore because they had been accused of thieving, and Mr. Green seemed to feel the disgrace terribly, especially when the master had their boxes searched because he had lost some valuable silver and a gold watch.”

This was news to Tab. He had heard of the food pilfering, but he had not heard of the other losses.

She could tell him very little more, except that Green had acted as a sort of butler.

“Was Walters there at the time?” asked Tab.

“Yes, sir; he was Mr. Trasmere’s valet. After Mr. Green went Mr. Walters was butler and valet, too.”

Tab went straight to the office to write the story up to date, but he knew that it was a waste of labour, since some news was certain to come in before nightfall.

The news editor was at his desk when he pushed open the big swing doors and came into the news room to report.

“These front page crimes always come together in shoals,” complained the news editor bitterly. “I have another very good story—”

“Well, give it to a good story writer,” said Tab. “This case is going to occupy not only my time, but the time of half-a-dozen men very fully indeed. What is the new sensation?” he asked sarcastically.

“An actress has lost her jewels, which does not sound tremendously exciting,” said the news editor, fishing for two slips of paper on which he had made a rough note of the case, “but you needn’t bother about that. I’ll put another man on the story as soon as I can get one.”

“Who is the actress?”

“Ursula Ardfern,” replied the editor, and Tab’s jaw dropped.

VIII

“Ursula Ardfern! She is not the kind of person who would mislay her jewels for the sake of a few lines of advertising,” he said. “Where did she lose them?”

“It is rather a curious story,” said the editor, leaning back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. “She went into a post office on Saturday morning on her way to the theatre for the matinee, bought some stamps putting the jewel-case down on the counter by her side. When she looked round the case was gone. It happened so suddenly and in such a surprisingly short space of time that she could not believe her eyes and did not even complain to the Post Office officials. Her own story is, that she thought she must be suffering from some kind of delusion and that she had not brought the jewel-case out at all. She went back to her suite at the Central Hotel and searched every room. By the time she was through, it was near the hour for her matinee, and she hurried down to the theatre—anyway, to cut a long story short, she did not report her loss to the police until this morning.”

“She wouldn’t,” said Tab stoutly. “She’s the kind of girl who would hate the publicity of it and would do all she could to make sure there was not a simple explanation of their loss before she put the matter in the hands of the police.”

“You know her, eh?”

“I know her in the sense that a reporter knows almost everybody from the Secretary of State to the hangman,” said Tab, “but I’ll take this story if you like. There will be nothing doing on the Trasmere case before the evening. She stays at the Central, does she?”

The other nodded.

“You will need to exercise a little ingenuity,” he said, “especially if what you say about her hating publicity is true. I’d like to get a photograph of the actress who hated publicity and hang it up in this office,” he added.

At the Central Hotel, Tab found himself up against a blank wall.

“Miss Ardfern is not receiving callers,” said the enquiry clerk. He was not even certain that she was in.

“Will you send my card up?”

The clerk very emphatically said that he would not send up anybody’s card. Tab went straight to the supreme authority. Fortunately he knew the hotel manager very well, but on this occasion Crispi was not inclined to oblige him.

“Miss Ardfern is a very good customer of ours, Holland,” he said, “and we don’t want to offend her. I will tell you, in the strictest confidence, that Miss Ardfern is not in the hotel.”

“Where is she?”

“She went away this morning in her car to her country cottage. She always spends Sunday and Sunday night in the country and I know that she does not want to see any reporters, because she came back this morning especially to tell me that the staff were to answer no enquiries relative to herself.”

“Where is this country cottage—come on, Crispi,” wheedled Tab, “or the next time you have a robbery in this hotel I’ll make a front page item of it.”

“That is blackmail,” murmured Crispi, protestingly. “I am afraid I cannot tell you, Holland. Maybe if you got a Hertford directory—”

In the office library he found the directory and turned its pages. Against the name of “Ardfern Ursula” was “Stone Cottage, near Blisville Village.”

This distance from town was some forty-five miles and the route carried him past an unfinished building which one day was to play its part in the ending of many mysteries. Tab covered the ground on a fast motor-cycle in just over an hour. He leant his machine against a very trim hedge, opened the high garden gate, and walked into the beautiful little garden that surrounded Stone Cottage, which was not ill-named, though the stone which composed its walls was completely hidden by purple flowering creeper.

In the shade of a tree he saw a white figure stretched at her ease, a figure which sat bolt upright in her deep garden chair at the click of the gate-lock.

“This is too bad of you, Mr. Tab,” said Ursula Ardfern, reproachfully. “I particularly asked Crispi not to tell anybody where I was.”

“Crispi didn’t tell. I found you in a directory,” said Tab cheerfully.

The sunlight was very kind to Ursula and it seemed to him that she looked even more beautiful in these surroundings than she had in the generous setting and the more merciful lighting of the theatre.

She was slimmer than he had thought, and conveyed an extraordinary impression of hurt youth. Somewhere, sometime, this girl had suffered, he thought, yet there was no hint of old pain in her unlined face, no suggestion of sorrow or remorse in her clear blue eyes.

“I suppose you have come to cross-examine me about my jewels,” she said, “and I will allow you, on one condition, to ask me any question you wish.”

“What is the condition?” he smiled.

“Bring up that chair.” She pointed across the strip of lawn. “Now sit down,” and when he had obeyed, “the condition is this: that you will confine yourself to saying that I have no recollection of the jewels being taken, but I shall be very glad to have them back and pay a suitable reward, that they were not as expensive as most people thought and that I am not insured against loss by theft.”

“All of which I will faithfully record,” said Tab. “I am an honest man and keep my promises. I admit it.”

“And now I will tell you, for your own private ear,” she said, “that if I never see those jewels again, I shall be a very happy woman.”

He looked at her open-mouthed.

“You don’t think I am posing, do you?” she looked round at him suspiciously. “I see that you don’t. I am not in the least worried that I shall have to play the part with property jewels as I did last night.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police before?” he asked.

“Because I didn’t,” was her unsatisfactory but uncompromising reply. “You may put whatever interpretation you like upon my slackness. You may say or think that it was because of my humanity, my desire to save some person from being accused, or coming under suspicion of having stolen the pieces, when all the time they were smug in my bureau drawer, or you may think or say that I did not want to make a fuss about them. In fact,” she smiled, “you can do or say what you wish.”

“You don’t remember who was standing by you—”

She stopped him with a gesture.

“I remember nothing except that I bought ten stamps.”

“What was the jewelry worth?” he persisted.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I can’t even tell you that,” she said.

“Had they any history?”

She laughed.

“You are very persistent, Mr. Tab.” Her eyes were smiling at him, though her face was composed. “And now, since you have surprised me in my Abode of Quiet, I must show you over my little domain.”

She took him round the garden and through the tiny pine-wood at the back of the house, chatting all the time, and then after leaving him, as she said, to ensure that her room was tidy, she beckoned him into a large and pleasant sitting-room, tastefully, if not expensively furnished, a cool, quiet haven of rest.

He had arrived at two o’clock and it was five o’clock before he reluctantly took his leave. And all that afternoon they had talked of books and of people and since she had not mentioned or spoken of the murder which had engrossed his thoughts until her soothing presence had made Mayfield seem very remote and crime a thing of distaste, he did not introduce so jarring a discordance into the lavender atmosphere of her retreat.

“What kind of a story do you call this?” snapped the news editor when Tab handed him two folios of copy.

“From a literary point of view,” said Tab, “it is a classic.”

“From a news point of view, it is rotten,” said the editor. “The only new fact you have discovered is that she loves Browning and maybe even the police know that!”

He grumbled but accepted the copy and with his blue pencil committed certain acts of savage mutilation, what time was Tab making his final round-up of the Trasmere case.

Here again, very little new matter was available. Walters and the man Wellington Brown were still at liberty, and he had to confine himself to a sketch of Trasmere’s life, material for which had, from time to time, been supplied to him by Babe.

The new millionaire he had not seen all day. When he got home that night, he found Rex Lander in bed and asleep and did not disturb him. He was tired to death and more anxious to make acquaintance with his hard pillow, than he was to discuss Ursula Ardfern. In truth, he was not prepared to discuss Ursula at all with any third person.

“I just loafed around,” said Rex the next morning, when asked to give an account of his movements. “I had a very bad night and was up early. You were sleeping like a pig when I looked in. I read your story in the ‘Megaphone’—by-the-way, you know that Miss Ardfern’s jewelry has been stolen?”

“I know that very well indeed,” said Tab, “I saw her yesterday.”

Rex was instant attention.

“Where?” he asked eagerly. “What is she like, Tab—I mean off the stage? Is she as beautiful—what colour eyes has she?”

Tab pushed back his chair and frowned at the young man across the table.

“Your curiosity is indecent,” he said severely, “really, Rex, I never dreamt that you were so interested in the lady.”

Rex did not meet his eyes.

“I think she is very beautiful,” he said doggedly. “I’d give my head to spend a day with her.”

“Phew!” said Tab, “why you young devil, you are in love with her!”

Rex’s babyish face went crimson.

“Stuff,” he said loudly. “I am very fond of her. I have seen her a hundred times, I suppose, though I have never spoken to her once. She is my idea of the perfect woman. Beautiful of face, with the loveliest voice I have ever heard. I am going to know her one day.”

This revelation of Babe’s secret passion was, for some reason which Tab could not define, an extremely disquieting one.

“My dear Babe,” he said more mildly, “the young lady is not of the loving or marrying sort—”

Suddenly he remembered.

“Why, you are a millionaire now, Babe! Jumping Moses!”

Rex blushed again and then Tab whistled.

“Do you mean in all seriousness that you are truly fond of her?”

“I adore her,” said Rex in a low voice. “I got so rattled when I heard a fellow say she was going to be married, that I had to send you to see her.”

Tab interrupted him with a roar of delighted laughter.

“So that was why I was sent on a fool’s errand, eh?” he asked, his eyes dancing. “You subtle dog! It was to bring balm to your bruised heart that an eminent crime specialist must stand, hat in hand, in the dingy purlieus of a playhouse, begging admission to the great actress’s dressing-room.” He was serious in a moment. “I hope this isn’t a very violent attachment of yours, Rex,” he said quietly, “in the first place, it struck me that Ursula Ardfern is not of the marrying kind, that even your great possessions would not tempt her. In the second place—” he stopped himself.

“Well?” asked Rex impatiently. “What ever other just cause or impediment do you see?”

“I don’t know that it is any business of mine,” said Tab, “and I certainly am not in a position to give you fatherly advice.”

“You mean that an actress is the worst kind of a wife a man can have, I suppose. I have heard all that rubbish before. Poor Uncle Jesse when I spoke about it—”

“You spoke to him of your—liking for Ursula Ardfern?” asked Tab in surprise.

“Of course I didn’t,” said the other scornfully. “I approached it in a round-about sort of way. Uncle Jesse foamed at the mouth. It was then he told me that he was going to leave all his money away from me. He said horrible things about actresses.”

Tab was silent, a little puzzled at himself. What did it matter to him, anyway, that Rex Lander should be head over heels in love with the girl? Yet, for some mysterious reason, he regarded Babe’s passion as a personal affront to himself. It was ridiculous, childish in him and he laughed softly.

“You think it is darned funny, I daresay,” growled Rex, getting up from the table in a huff.

“I was laughing at myself for daring to give advice,” said Tab truthfully.

IX

Rex was in his own room when Carver called.

“I have had a talk with some of the High Ones,” he said, “and put it up to them that you might be of assistance to me. First of all they were horrified at the idea of a newspaper reporter being allowed even to smell inside information, but I persuaded them at last. I am on my way down to the house now, and I thought I would pick you up. I am going through those boxes that we didn’t search on Saturday.”

Tab heard with mingled feelings. To assist the police actively meant that his newspaper stories would suffer. He would not be allowed to use any of the information he secured, except in the tamest, most colourless form. If he remained outside, he was fairly certain to get a line to the crime, which he might use without laying himself open to the charge of breaking faith. There was no time to discover the mind of his chief on the subject—he had to make an instant decision.

“I’ll go,” he said. “This means, of course, that I shall only be able to write the punk stuff that the evening papers print, but I’ll take a chance.”

He was surprised, when he came out into Doughty Street, to find that a private car had been placed at Carver’s disposal. Knowing the parsimony of headquarters, he expressed his surprise.

“It is Mr. Trasmere’s own. He has had it garaged for the past year, but Mr. Lander gave us permission to get it out and offered to pay the running expenses.”

“Good old Babe,” said Tab, sinking back into the carriage seat. “He didn’t tell me anything about it.”

Nearing the house, Carver broke the silence.

“I have something to show you later,” he said. “Our men have been at the Post Office all night, making enquiries as to Mr. Trasmere’s correspondence. It appears that he has had a whole lot during the past year or two. We shall probably come across it in the boxes that remain unsearched. But that wasn’t the big thing we found. Most of the telegraph staff were off duty yesterday. It was only this morning that we learnt a telegram had been received at Mayfield about ten minutes before Walters disappeared.”

When they were in the sitting-room and the door was closed, Carver produced the telegram from his pocket. It was handed in at the General Post Office and ran:

“Remember 17th July, 1913. Newcastle police coming for you at three o’clock.”

It was unsigned.

“I have been searching the newspaper files this morning,” said Carver, “to discover the reference to that date. On the 17th July, 1913, I find that Felling was sent down to Newcastle for seven years, and the judge said that if he ever came before him again on a similar charge, he would send him down for life.”

“Then the telegram was despatched by some friend of Walters?” suggested Tab.

Carver nodded.

“It was delivered five minutes before he disappeared, that is to say, exactly at five minutes to three. I have seen the lad who delivered the telegram, and he says that Walters himself took in the message.”

“Would that account for his disappearance?”

“In a sense it might, yet it does not necessarily follow that Walters is innocent of the murder. The telegram may have come to him immediately after the murder was committed and have decided him to get away. If he was responsible for the murder, there would be even more reason why he should leave in a hurry. The arrival of the police, who would find the body, would, of course, have been fatal to him.”

“Did anybody see Wellington Brown go into the house?” asked Tab. It was a question he meant to have put before.

“Nobody,” said the detective. “At what hour he arrived only Walters can tell us.”

He folded the telegram and put it away, then unlocking the door from the study which led to the passage, he went down the steps and stopping only to switch on the lights, made his way into the vault. One by one the boxes were taken down, emptied of their contents and carefully examined.

Money was everywhere; banknotes, treasury bills, money in the greasy notes of a Chinese Government bank, money in the shape of Greek drachmas and Italian lira. Sometimes a box would contain nothing but these valuable squares of paper, sometimes a box held thick packets of correspondence addressed to Trasmere, at queer looking towns in Northern China. All bore the same clerkly number, generally written in green ink, and none of them threw any light whatever upon the tragedy they were investigating.

In the last box of all, the correspondence was more recent. It was mostly typewritten copies of letters, evidently addressed by the dead man to various corporations with whom he had dealings, and these they went through letter by letter.

“Where were those typed?” said Carver. “And when? He doesn’t seem to have kept a secretary.”

Until that moment Tab had forgotten the discovery of the typewriter-key-cover. Now he referred to the find.

“But he used to go out every night at half-past six and remain away until half-past eight,” said Tab. “Probably he went to some typewriting office—there are a few in the city which make a specialty of after-hours work.”

“That is possible,” admitted Carver. “There is nothing here. I have sent anything that looked important to the translators—I don’t think it is worth while sending the trading accounts of ’89.” He put the papers carefully back into the box. “And that’s the lot,” he said.

Tab was standing with his back to the lower shelf to the right hand of the door and his fingers were idly touching the plain strip of steel, when he felt something underneath and looking down, saw that the obstruction which his fingers had found was one of two slides on which hung a drawer. This had been pushed so far back that it was impossible to see it from where they had stood.

The detective stooped and picked it out.

“Hullo,” he said, “what are these?”

He brought out first a small box of Chinese workmanship. It was exquisitely lacquered in pale green. Lifting off the lid he saw that it was empty.

“Nothing there—some curio he was hoarding,” said Carver.

Next he produced a small brown jewel-case from the drawer and putting it on the broad shelf, opened it.

Even before he saw the heart-shaped ruby brooch that was pinned to the satin lining of the lid, Tab knew what it was.

“Those are Ursula Ardfern’s jewels,” he said, and they looked at one another.

“The jewels that were stolen on Saturday morning?” asked the detective incredulously.

Tab nodded and the detective took out an emerald cross, turned it over, looked at its face, then put it back again.

“On Saturday morning,” he said slowly, “if I remember the facts aright, and I only read them in the newspaper this morning, Miss Ursula Ardfern went into a post office to buy some stamps. Whilst she was there she put her jewel-case by her side, and looking round, discovered it was gone. Thinking she had made some mistake, she went back to her hotel and searched her room. She reported it to the police on Sunday morning.”

“That is the case as I understand it,” said Tab, who was as dumb-founded as his companion.

“And three or four hours after Miss Ardfern lost her jewels, Trasmere was murdered in this room. The jewels were here at that time, because obviously nobody has been in or out of this room since Trasmere was murdered, except possibly the murderer; in other words, in the space of two hours, the jewels were stolen and conveyed to Jesse Trasmere and locked in his strong-room—why?” He stared at Tab.

Tab could only stare back. Carver scratched his head, massaged the back of his neck irritably, rubbed his chin, and then: “In other circumstances, one would say that Trasmere was a receiver. I have known some very unlikely people who were receivers of stolen property and grew rich on the proceeds, and I have known very unlikely folk to loan money, not only to actresses, but very substantial people, on the security of their jewels. Had we not Miss Ardfern’s report of their loss, the obvious explanation would have been that these had been pledged to Trasmere in security for a loan.”

“I am perfectly sure she doesn’t know Trasmere. I happen to be—an—an acquaintance of hers,” said Tab quickly.

Again the detective was giving contortional evidence of his perplexity. His long face was longer still, his down-turned face more melancholy.

“Anyway, there is no question of pledge. The only thing we have to decide is, whether he was the kind of man who would receive stolen property.” He glanced round at the black boxes which filled the shelves and shook his head. “The probability is all against that theory,” he said. “Trasmere was too rich a man to run the risk. Besides we should have found other property. It is not likely that he would act as receiver for one gang of thieves, and for only one of their crimes.”

He hoisted himself to the top of the table, pushed his hands in his trousers pockets and with his chin on his breast, considered.

“Now, that beats me,” he said at last. “I admit that I am thoroughly and absolutely beaten. You are perfectly sure that these are Miss Ardfern’s jewels?”

“I am absolutely certain that it is her jewel-case. Probably at headquarters they have a description of the jewels which are lost,” said Tab.

“Then we’ll settle that little mystery at once.”

He was telephoning for a quarter of an hour, taking notes all the time, and when he hung up the receiver, he turned to Tab.

“Without having carefully looked at the pieces in that box,” he said, “I think it is absolutely certain that those jewels are Miss Ardfern’s. She gave a fairly complete list to the police, but could not remember every item. We will go along and check our inventory.”

He had not been at work long before it was clear that the jewelry was Ursula Ardfern’s property.

“Go along and see her, Tab,” said Carver. “Take the empty box with you—we had better hold on to the jewelry a little longer—and ask her to identify the case.”

X

Ursula had only arrived a few minutes before Tab reached the Central Hotel, and the ban against reporters must have been lifted, because Ursula saw him immediately.

She took the case from his hand slowly and with a face from whence all expression had fled.

“Yes, this is mine,” she said. She lifted the lid. “Where are the jewels?” she asked quickly.

“The police have those.”

“The police?”

“It was found in the strong-room of Jesse Trasmere, the old man who was murdered on Saturday afternoon,” said Tab. “Have you any idea how they came into his possession?”

“None,” she said emphatically. “I did not know Mr. Trasmere.”

He told her about the murder, but apparently she had already read the details and seemed loath to discuss the matter until he told her the part that he himself was taking in the tracking of the murderer.

“Where did you find these?” she asked.

“In his strong-room. The curious thing is, we turned out all the boxes, ran over all the papers and found nothing of importance. It was only by accident that we discovered this case. It was in a little drawer pushed far under one of the shelves.”

“You went through all the papers,” she repeated mechanically. “What sort of papers—did he have—many?”

“Quite a number,” said Tab, surprised that after definitely and decidedly changing the subject, she had returned to it voluntarily. “Old bills and accounts, copies of letters and that sort of thing. Nothing of any very great importance. Why do you ask?”

“I had a friend once, a girl who was interested in Mr. Trasmere,” she answered. “She told me that he was keeping a number of documents connected with her family. No, I don’t remember her name. She was an actress I met on tour.”

“There was nothing in his papers except purely business records,” said Tab.

Tab was very sensitive to atmosphere. He could have sworn when he came into the room that she had keyed herself up to meet him. There was no reason why she should, except the reluctance to discuss the robbery, and she had maintained that tense attitude throughout the interview. Now he was as certain that she was relieved. He sensed, rather than saw, a relaxation of mind. Probably it was only his imagination, but imagination had never played such a trick upon him before.

“When are the police going to give me my beautiful jewels?” she asked almost gaily.

“I am afraid they will retain those until after the court proceedings are through. There must be an inquest, you know.”

“Oh,” she said, and seemed disappointed. Then again she returned to the murder. “It seems all so dreadful and mysterious,” she said quietly. “How do you account for it, Mr. Holland? One of the newspapers says that it was impossible that any other hand than Mr. Trasmere’s could have locked the door and yet they are equally certain that he did not commit suicide. And who is the man Brown, for whom they are searching?”

“He is an adventurer from China who was at some time or other a sort of secretary to old Trasmere.”

“A secretary?” she said quickly. “A man—how do you know that?”

“Brown told me himself. I saw him the day before the murder. Apparently Trasmere had treated him badly and had held him off for years by paying him a sum of money.”

She bit her lip in thought.

“Why did he come back?” she said, half to herself. “He might have lived comfortably on the allowance. I suppose it was a good allowance?” she added quickly. “That is all you want to see me about, Mr. Holland?”

“You may have to go to the police station to identify the jewelry,” said Tab, “and they are pretty certain to ask you how the box came into Mr. Trasmere’s possession.”

She did not answer this, and he left her with an odd feeling of uneasiness.

Going to report the result of his interview to Carver, he found that energetic man crawling about the vault on all fours. He looked over his shoulder at the sound of Tab’s footsteps.

“Was Saturday wet or fine?” he asked.

“It was a particularly fine day.”

“Then this must be a blood impression.” He pointed to the floor, and Tab went on his knees at his side. There was a faint half-moon printed on the edge of the concrete. “That is the edge of a heel, and a rubber heel,” said Carver, “which proves beyond any doubt whatever, that somebody came into the vault after the old man was killed, probably went close to the body to see the effect of the shot, and in doing so, got a little of the blood on a part of his heel. The rubber accounts for his coming on Trasmere without the old man hearing him. There is no other impression that I can find.”

“Which brings us back to the question of the duplicate key.”

“There was no duplicate key, you can cut that idea right out,” said Carver, getting up and dusting his knees. “I have been into the matter very thoroughly with the manufacturers, and although they each claim to have the best kind of lock and are naturally inclined to take an uncharitable view of their rivals, they say that the maker of our particular key is reliable and he says that it was in the hands of his most trustworthy man, and that no second key was ever made. Not only that, but no drawing of the key was kept. In fact, the lock, just before it was fitted, was altered by the manufacturer’s expert, here on the premises. I am seeing him tomorrow, but from what I learn on the telephone he says that we can dismiss from our minds the possibility of there being a duplicate.”

“But Walters was making—”

“Walters hadn’t finished his job, and even if he had, he could not have fashioned a key that would have unlocked this door, clever as he was. No, the blood-stained key is the key that locked the door. What is more, it is the key which the old man carried on a thin silver chain round his neck. We found the broken ends of the chain in his clothing after the body was searched. Then again, there are the bloodstains, both on the inside and on the outside of the door. That is the most remarkable feature of the case, that after the murder, the door was locked both from the inside and the outside. At one period, after the death of Trasmere, the murderer must have been locked in this vault with him. If I did not know it was an absolute impossibility, I should say that it was locked finally from the inside, the key was placed on the table and the murderer disappeared through some secret entrance, which we know very well does not exist.”

“Have you tested the roof?”

“I have tested everywhere—roof, walls, floor and door,” said Carver. “A fact, which may or may not be important, is that there is about an eighth-of-an-inch of space between the bottom of the door and the floor. If the key had been found on the floor there would be no mystery about the matter, because the murderer could have pushed it under and, with a flick of his finger, sent it into the middle of the room. Here is the situation in a nut-shell.” He ticked off the points on his finger. “Trasmere is murdered in a vault, the door of which is locked. The murderer is either Brown, who has threatened him, or Walters who has been robbing him. Inside the locked vault is found the only key which could open or close it. Note this particular, that Trasmere was shot in the back.”

“Why is that important?”

“As proving that at the moment of his murder Trasmere was in no fear. He was not expecting either to be shot or hurt. And now we add to the situation, which is sufficiently baffling, the discovery in the vault of a jewel-case belonging to an eminent actress, from whom it has been stolen on the very day of the murder. This is the case which I must take to a coroner’s jury. It doesn’t look very good to me.”

It did not “look very good” to the coroner’s jury, which contented itself a week later with returning a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown, and added a rider expressing its dissatisfaction with the inefficiency of the police.

The day that verdict was returned, Ursula Ardfern fainted twice in the course of her performance and was carried home to her hotel in a condition of collapse.

XI

A murder lends to the locality in which it is perpetrated, a certain left-handed fame which those of its inhabitants who appear most disgusted, most enjoy. Human nature being what it is, trouble and misery have a larger sale value to newspapers, than have comfort and happiness. Nothing makes a newspaper reader more conscious of the emptiness of his journal, than to learn that his insignificant neighbour has unexpectedly inherited a fortune. Therefore, it is only natural that when the average man or woman finds himself or herself promoted from mere observer to participant, however indirect, he or she experiences a queer satisfaction that is no less satisfying because it is queer.

The woman of the house may shudder and make unusual efforts to “keep it from the children” but she listens avidly to the cook’s inside story of the crime that was committed next door, and presses for further details. The man may express his horror and indignation and talk of leaving his house and finding another in a less notorious neighbourhood, but for years he will point out to his visitors and guests the window of the room where the fell deed was done.

Opposite to Mayfield was the home of John Ferguson Stott, who, in addition to being a neighbour of the late Jesse Trasmere, was the employer of his nephew. This gave him an especial title to speak as an Authority. It supported him also in his determination to Say Nothing.

“It is bad enough, my dear, to be living in the street where this ghastly crime has been committed. I cannot afford to be dragged into the matter.”

He was a small, fat man, very bald, and he wore spectacles of great magnifying power.

“Eline says—” began his buxom wife.

Mr. Stott held up a podgy hand and closed his eyes.

“Servants’ gossip!” said he. “Let us keep out of this business. I cannot afford to have my name in the papers. Why, we should have the house full of reporters in no time! And the police, too. I had quite trouble enough over the dog’s license, ever to want to see the police again.”

He sat soberly in his place before the window, glaring out at the darkening street. A light flitted to and fro in one of the upper windows of Mayfield, came and went, and came again. The police were searching. He was interested. Tomorrow, when he met the men at Toby’s, he would be able to say: “They are still searching old Trasmere’s house. I saw them last night—the house is just opposite to mine.”

Presently the light disappeared for good and he turned to his wife.

“What did Eline say? Ring for her.”

Eline was a parlour-maid, grown of a sudden from the merest cipher in the great sum of parlour-maids, to an isolated and important factor.

“I’m sure it gives me the shivers to talk about it, sir,” she said. “Little did I ever think I should be mixed up in a case like this. I’m sure that I’d die if I was ever called into court to give evidence.”

“You will not be called into court,” said Mr. Stott decisively. “This must go no farther, do you understand that, Eline?”

Eline said she did, but she seemed in no way pleased that she was to be spared the painful publicity.

“I’ve had a toothache for the past fortnight—”

“You should have it out,” said Mr. Stott. An opportunity for advising sufferers to have their teeth extracted is one which no normal man can miss. “It is always best to deal drastically with a decaying tooth. Out with it my girl—well?”

“It comes on about half-past eleven and goes off at two. I could set the clock by it.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Stott testily, his interest in Eline’s misfortune ended, “but what did you see at Mayfield?”

“I usually sit at the window until the pain has gone,” said Eline, and Mr. Stott resisted the temptation to tell her that that was the very last place in the world she ought to sit, “and naturally anything that happens in the street I see. The first night I was sitting there, I saw a little motor-car drive up to the front of the house. A lady got out—”

“A lady?”

“Well, she might have been a woman,” admitted Eline. “But she got out, opened the gates and drove into the garden. I thought that was funny, because Mr. Trasmere hasn’t a garage, and I knew there was nobody staying with him.”

“Where did the car go?”

“Just into the garden. There is plenty of room for it because it is not exactly a garden—more like a yard than anything. I think she took the car near the house and put out all the lights. Then she went up the steps and opened the door. There was a light in the passage the first night and I saw her taking the key out before she shut the door. She hadn’t been in the house a few minutes before I saw a man on a bicycle coming along the road. He jumped down and propped the machine against the curb. What struck me about him was the funny way he walked. Sort of queer little steps he took. He was smoking a cigar.”

“Where did he go?” asked Mr. Stott.

“Only as far as the gate and leant on it, smoking. By and by he threw away his cigar and lit another and I saw his face—it was a Chinaman!”

“Good God!” said Mr. Stott. The mental picture she conjured of a Chinaman lighting a cigar in the vicinity of Mr. Stott’s stately home, was a particularly revolting one.

“Just before the policeman came along, he went back to his bicycle and rode away, but after the policeman had passed, he came back again and stood leaning on the gate until the front door of Mayfield opened. Then he sort of slunk back to his bicycle and rode in the opposite direction. I mean opposite to the way he had come. He had hardly got out of sight before I saw the lady come down and open the gates. Soon after, she brought out the car, got down, closed the gates again, and drove away. And then I saw the Chinaman riding behind and pedalling like mad as if he was trying to catch up to the car.”

“Extraordinary!” said Mr. Stott. “This happened once?”

“It happened every night—Friday was the last night,” said Eline impressively, “the lady in the car, the Chinaman and everything. But on Sunday night two Chinamen came and one went into the garden and was there for a long time. I knew the other one was a Chinaman because he walked so curiously. But they didn’t come on bicycles. They had a car which stopped at the far end of the street.”

“Remarkable!” said Mr. Stott, and stroked his smooth face.

Eline had finished her story but was reluctant to surrender her position as news gleaner.

“The police have been taking things away from the house all day,” reported the observer, “boxes and trunks. The girl at Pine Lodge told me that they are leaving there tonight. They’ve been keeping guard on the house ever since the murder.”

“Very, very extraordinary; very remarkable,” said Mr. Stott. “But I don’t think that it is any business of ours. No. Thank you, Eline. I should certainly have that tooth out. You mustn’t be a baby and American dentistry has reached such a high level of efficiency that—”

Eline listened respectfully but nervously and went up to her room to plug the aching molar with Dr. Billbery’s Kure-Ake.

It seemed to Mr. Stott that his head had scarcely touched the pillow before there came a knock upon the panel of his bedroom door.

“Yes?” he asked fiercely in case it was a burglar, who was in this polite manner seeking admission to his chamber.

“It is Eline, sir—they’re there!”

Mr. Stott shivered and, conquering an almost irresistible desire to pull the bedclothes over his head and pretend that he had been talking in his sleep, he got reluctantly out of bed and pulled on his dressing-gown. As to Mrs. Stott, she never moved. She went to bed, as she had often said, to sleep.

“What is it, Eline—waking me up at this time in the morning?” asked Mr. Stott irritably.

“They are there—the Chinamen. I saw one getting through the window,” said the girl, her teeth chattering to the serious disturbance of Dr. Billbery’s Kure-Ake.

“Wait a moment until I get my stick.”

Mr. Stott kept hanging to his bed-rail, a heavily loaded cane. He had no intention of going nearer to Mayfield than the safe side of his dining-room window, but the holding of the stick gave him the self-confidence of which he was in need.

Cautiously the girl let up the blind of the dining-room window and unfastened the catch. The sash slid up noiselessly and gave them an interrupted view of Mayfield.

“There’s one!” whispered Eline.

Standing in the shadow was a figure. Mr. Stott saw it plainly. They watched in silence for the greater part of half-an-hour. Mr. Stott had an idea that he ought to telephone for the police, but refrained. In the case of ordinary burglars, he would not have hesitated. But these were Chinese, notoriously clannish and vengeful. He had read stories, in which Chinaman had inflicted diabolical injuries upon men who had betrayed them.

At the end of the half-hour’s vigil, the door of Mayfield opened and a man came out and joined the other. Together they walked up the road and that was the last Mr. Stott saw of them.

“Very remarkable!” said Mr. Stott profoundly. “I’m glad you called me, Eline. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. But you must say nothing about this, Eline—nothing. The Chinese people are very bloodthirsty. They would think no more of putting you into a barrel full of sharp pointed nails and rolling you down a hill, than I should think of—er—lacing my shoes.”

So Maple Manor kept its grisly secret and none knew of Yeh Ling’s visit to the house of death or his search for the tiny lacquer box wherein Jesse Trasmere kept a folded sheet of thin paper elegantly inscribed in Chinese characters by Yeh Ling, in his own hand.

XII

“Ursula Ardfern is leaving the stage and is going to live in the country.”

Tab made the announcement one evening when he came home from the office.

Rex scarcely seemed interested.

“Oh?” said Rex.

That was all he said. He seemed as disinclined as Tab to discuss the lady.

It was his last night at the Doughty Street flat. He was still suffering from shock, and his doctor had advised a trip abroad. He had suggested that at the end of his vacation he would return to Doughty Street, but on this point Tab was firm.

“You have a lot of money, Babe,” he said seriously, “and a man who has a lot of money has also a whole lot of responsibilities. There are about a hundred and forty-five reasons why our little menage should be broken up, and the most important from my point of view is, that I will not be demoralized by living cheek by jowl with a man of millions. You have a certain place to take in society, certain duties to perform, and you can’t keep up the position that you are entitled to keep, in a half-flat in Doughty Street. I don’t suppose you ever want to go to Mayfield to live.”

Rex shuddered.

“I don’t,” he said with great earnestness. “I shall shut the place up and let it stand for a few years, until the memory of the crime is forgotten, and then perhaps somebody will buy it. I am pretty comfortable here, Tab.”

“I am not thinking so much about your comfort as my own,” replied Tab calmly. “It isn’t going to do me a lot of good in any way. Consider yourself ejected.”

Rex grinned.

He sailed for Naples the next afternoon, and Tab went down to the boat to see him off. No mention of Ursula Ardfern was made until the landing bell was ringing.

“I am holding you to your promise, Tab, to introduce me to Miss Ardfern,” he said, and frowned as though at some unhappy recollection. “I wish to heaven she hadn’t been mixed up in the business at all. How on earth do you account for her jewel-case being in poor Uncle Jesse’s vault? By-the-way, the key of that devil room is in my trunk if the police want it. I don’t suppose they will, for they have the other key now.”

He had asked this question about Ursula’s jewels so many times before, that Tab could not keep count of them. Therefore, he did not attempt to supply a satisfactory solution.

Standing on the pier he watched the big ship gliding down the river, and on the whole was glad that the companionship had broken up. He liked Rex and Rex liked him, and they had shared happily the mild vicissitudes which came to young men with large ambitions and limited incomes. Of the two, Tab had been the richer in the old days, and had often helped the other through the morasses which grip the ankles of men who systematically live beyond their means. And now Babe was in calm waters: forevermore superior to the favours of crabbed uncles and business-like employers: no more would he start at every knock the postman rapped, or scowl at the letters which arrived, knowing that more than half of them were bills he could not hope to satisfy.

Nearly a month had passed since the inquest, and all that Tab had heard about Ursula was that she had been very ill and was now in the country, presumably at the Stone Cottage. He had some idea of going down to see her, but thought better of it.

Meanwhile, he had made respectful enquiries about the girl who had so impressed him.

Ursula Ardfern’s story was a curious one. She had appeared first in a road company, playing small parts and playing them well. Then without any warning, she blossomed forth into management, took a lease of the Athenæum and appeared playing a secondary role in an adaptation of Tosca—the lead being in the capable hands of Mary Farrelli. The dramatic critics were mollified by her modesty and pleased with her acting: said they would like to see her in a more important part, and hoped that her season would be prosperous. They asked, amongst themselves, who was the man behind the show and found no satisfactory answer. When Tosca came off, after a run of three months, she staged “The Tremendous Jones”, which played for a year, and this time she was the leading actress. She had gone from success to success, was on the very threshold of a great career. The simple announcement that she had retired from the stage forever was not very seriously believed. Yet it was true. Ursula Ardfern had appeared for the last time before the foot-lights.

The day that Rex sailed she saved Tab any further cogitation by writing to him. He found the letter at the office.

“Dear Mr. Holland: I wonder if you would come to Stone Cottage to see me? I promise you rather a sensational ‘story’, though I realize that it will lose much of its importance because I will not have my name mentioned in connection.”

Tab would have liked to have gone then and there. He was up the next morning at six, and chafed because he could not in decency arrive at the house much before lunch.

It was a glorious June day, warm, with a gentle westerly wind, such a day as every doctor with a convalescent patient in his charge, hails with joy and thankfulness.

She was reclining where he had seen her on his first visit to Hertford, but this time she did not rise, but held out a thin, white hand, which he took with such exaggerated care that she laughed. She was paler, thinner of face, older looking in some indefinite way.

“You won’t break it,” she said. “Sit down, Mr. Tab.”

“I like Mr. Tab very much better than I like Mr. Holland,” said Tab. “It is glorious here. Why do we swelter in the towns?”

“Because the towns pay us our salaries,” she said drily. “Mr. Holland, will you do something for me?”

He longed to tell her that if she asked him to stand on his head, or lie down whilst she wiped her feet upon him, she would be gladly obeyed. Instead:

“Why, of course,” he said.

“Will you sell some jewels for me? They are those which were found—in poor Mr. Trasmere’s vault.”

“Sell your jewels,” he said in amazement, “why? Are you——” he checked himself.

“I am not very poor,” she said quietly, “I have enough money to live on without working again—my last play was a very great success, and happily the profits——” She stopped dead. “At any rate, I am not poor.”

“Then why sell your jewelry? Are you going to buy others?” he blurted out.

She shook her head, and a smile dawned in her eyes.

“No, my plan is this: I am going to sell the jewelry for what it is worth, and then I want you to distribute the money to such charities as you think best.”

He was too astonished to answer, and she went on:

“I know very little about charities and their values. I know in some cases all the money subscribed is swallowed up in officials’ salaries. But you will know these.”

“Are you serious?” he at last found his voice to ask.

“Quite,” she nodded gravely. “I think they are worth from twelve to twenty thousand. I am not sure. They are mine,” she went on a little defiantly, and unnecessarily so, thought Tab, “and I may do as I wish with them. I want them to be sold and the money distributed.”

“But my dear Miss Ardfern——” he began.

“My dear Mr. Holland!” she mocked him, “you must do as I tell you if you are going to help me at all.”

“I’ll certainly carry out your wishes,” he said, “but it is a weighty lot of money to give away.”

“It is a weighter lot of money to keep,” she said quietly. “There is another favour I ask—you must not write that I am the donor. You can describe me as a society woman, a retired trades-woman, or as anything you like, except as an actress, and of course my name must not even be hinted. Will you do this?”

He nodded.

“I have them here,” she said. “I kept them at the hotel and had them sent down to me by special messenger yesterday. And now that that business is over, come inside and lunch.”

It was very dear to have her leaning on his arm; her dependence thrilled him. He wanted to take her up in his arms and carry her through that sweet-smelling place, slowly and with dignity, as nurses carry sleeping babies. He wondered what she would think and say, if she guessed his thoughts. It made him hot to consider the possibility for a second.

She did not go direct to the house, but took him through a sunken patch hidden by low bushes, and he stopped and admired, for here a master hand had laid out a Chinese garden with tiny bridges and dwarf trees and great clumps of waxen rock flowers that harboured a faint and delicate scent, a hint of which came up to him.

“You were thinking of carrying me,” she said, apropros of nothing.

Tab went a fiery red.

“But for the proprieties, I should like it. Do you like babies, Mr. Tab?”

“I love ’em,” said he, glad to reach a less embarrassing topic.

“So do I—I have seen so many when I was a child. They are wonderful. It seems to me that they are so near to the source of life they bring with them the very fragrance of God.”

He was silent, impressed, a little bewildered. Where had she seen “so many” babies? Had she been a nurse? She had not been talking for effect.... He knew an actress once, the only other one he had interviewed, who had quoted Ovid and Herrick and had talked with astonishing ease and fluency on the Byzantine Empire. He learnt from a friend that she possessed an extraordinary memory and had read up these subjects before he came, in order to get a good story about herself. She had the story.

No, Ursula was different. He wished he had lifted her up in his arms when she had spoken about being carried.

Over the meal the talk took a personal turn.

“Have you many friends?” she asked.

“Only one,” smiled Tab, “and he’s now so rich that I can scarcely call him a friend. Not that Rex wouldn’t repudiate that.”

“Rex?”

“Rex Lander,” said Tab, “who by-the-way, is very anxious to be introduced to you. He is one of your most fervent admirers.” Tab felt that he was being very noble indeed, and he experienced quite a virtuous glow at his own unselfishness.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“He is old Trasmere’s nephew.”

“Why, of course,” she said quickly, and went red. “You have spoken about him before.”

Tab tried to remember. He was almost certain that he had never mentioned Rex to the girl.

“So he is very rich? Of course, he would be. He was Mr. Trasmere’s only nephew.”

“You saw that in the newspaper?”

“No, I guessed, or somebody told me; I haven’t read any account of the murder, or any of the proceedings. I was too ill. He must be very rich,” she went on. “Is he anything like his uncle?”

Tab smiled.

“I can’t imagine two people more dissimilar,” he said. “Rex is—well, he’s rather stoutish,” he said loyally, “and a lazy old horse. Mr. Trasmere, on the contrary, was very thin, and, for his age, remarkably energetic. When did I mention Rex?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I can’t recall the time and place. Please don’t make me think, Mr. Holland. Where is Rex now?”

“He has gone to Italy. He sailed yesterday,” said Tab, and thereupon the girl’s interest in Rex Lander seemed to suffer eclipse.

“I should like to have had Trasmere’s real story,” said Tab, “he must have lived an interesting life. It is rather curious that we found nothing in the house reminiscent of his Chinese experience but a small lacquer box, which was empty. The Chinese fascinate me.”

“Do they?” she looked at him quickly, “they fascinate me in a way by their kindness.”

“You know them; have you lived in China?”

She shook her head.

“I know one or two,” she said, and paused as though she were considering whether it was advisable to say any more. “When I first came to town from service—”

He gaped at her.

“I don’t quite get that—by ‘service’ what do you mean? You don’t mean domestic service—you weren’t a cook or anything?” he asked jocularly, and to his amazement she nodded.

“I was a sort of tweeny maid: peeled potatoes and washed dishes,” she said calmly, “I was only thirteen at the time. But that is another story, as Mr. Kipling says. At this age, and before I went to school, I met a Chinaman whose son was very ill. He lodged in the house where I was staying. The landlady wasn’t a very humane sort of person, and being Chinese, she thought the poor little boy had some mysterious Eastern disease which she would ‘catch.’ I nursed him, in a way,” she said apologetically, but Tab knew that the apology was not for her condescension, but for her lack of nursing skill. “The father was very poor then, a waiter in a native restaurant, but he was ever so grateful. Quite an extraordinary man—I have seen him since.”

“And the child?”

“Oh, he got better—his father was dosing him with quaint proprietary medicines. I think he was suffering from enteric fever, and nursing is the only thing that cures that. He’s in China now—quite an important person.”

“I should like to have that other story,” said Tab. “Kipling gets my goat. That ‘other story’ of his is never told. I think he must have had them in his mind when he referred to them, but he got lazy on it.”

“My other story must keep,” she smiled. “Some day—perhaps—but not now. The father of the boy laid out my little Chinese garden, by-the-way.”

Tab had come by train and there was a long walk to the station. He stayed to the very last moment, and then had to hurry to catch the one fast express of the afternoon. He had gone a leisurely hundred yards from the front gate (you cannot walk fast if you turn around at intervals for a glimpse of a cool white figure) when he saw a dusty roadfarer coming toward him. The awkward gait of the walker, his baggy clothes, the huge Derby hat pulled down to his ears, attracted Tab’s attention long before he could distinguish the man’s features. When he did, it was with a spasm of surprise. The walker was a Chinaman and carried in his hand a flat packet.

The oriental deviated from the straight path to cross the road. Without a word he carefully unwrapped a thin paper cover and exposed a letter. It was addressed to “Miss Ursula Ardfern, Stone Cottage,” and on the wrapper Tab saw a number of Chinese characters which he guessed were directions to the messenger.

“Tell,” said the man laconically. He evidently knew little English.

“That house on the left,” said Tab pointing. “How far have you come, Chink?”

“Velly well,” said the man, and taking the letter folded it again in its covering and trotted off.

Tab looked after him, wondering. How curious a coincidence, he thought, that they should have been talking about the Chinese only half-an-hour before?

He had to run and then only caught the train as it was pulling out of the station.

The inexorable and constitutionally discontented news editor was not at all satisfied with the story as Tab wrote it.

“It loses half its value if we can’t give her name,” he complained, “and after we’ve started the interest going, the ‘Herald’, or some other paper, will find out who is the owner of the jewels and get all the fat of the story! Can’t you persuade her?”

Tab shook his head.

“What’s the great idea—is she going into a convent or something?”

“She didn’t mention it,” said Tab impatiently. “There it is—take it or leave it, Jacques. It is a good item, and if you don’t like it, I’ll take it to the chief.”

A threat which invariably ended all discussion, for Tab was an important personage on the staff of the ‘Megaphone’ and his word carried weight.

XIII

Mr. Stott combined the implacable qualities of the feudal lord with an amiable leaning toward the society and approval of his fellow men. There was a cafe near his office which was extensively patronized by grave business men, directors, bank managers and superior cashiers. The price of luncheon had been scientifically fixed by the proprietor, so that whilst it was within the means of men of substance and standing, it was just beyond the reach of those whose limited incomes did not permit the luxury of lunching at Toby’s, though it was well worth the money to sit at meat with men who had offices labelled “private” and drove to their business in polished limousines.

Mr. Stott referred to the wistful folk who passed the door of Toby’s to be swallowed up in less exclusive establishments, as the hoi polloi, which he understood was an Italian expression. Toby’s had almost acquired the status of a club. Occasionally, ignorant strangers wandered in to test the gastronomical excellence of the kitchen, and these were usually accommodated in obscure corners away from the hearing of intimate gossip.

Mr. Stott had recently become a person to be listened to with respect, and the necessity for keeping the regular patrons of Toby’s aloof from the vulgar herd, was doubly urgent by reason of the very important matters that had to be discussed.

“What I can’t understand, Stott,” said one of his hearers, “is why the devil didn’t you send for the police?”

Mr. Stott smiled mysteriously.

“The police should have been there,” he said, “and by-the-way, I need not remind you fellows that what I say to you is in absolute confidence. I am scared out of my life lest that babbling servant of mine starts talking. You can never trust these gossiping girls. I confess, though, that I had half a mind, not to send for the police, but to tackle the Chinks myself. I should have done it, too, but the girl was so frightened of being left alone.”

“Have they come since?” asked another interested hearer.

“No; nor the woman—you remember that I told you of the woman who used to drive up to Mayfield every night in her car?”

“It seems to me that the police ought to know,” interrupted the first speaker. “One of your servants is bound to talk. As you say, you can’t trust ’em! And then the authorities will want to know why you haven’t reported the matter.”

“It is not my business,” said Mr. Stott pharisaically, “It is for the police to get busy. I’m not at all surprised that the coroner’s jury made the remark they did. Here is a man murdered—”

He exhibited the crime graphically.

“At any rate, I’m keeping out of it—these Chinese criminals are dangerous fellows to monkey with.”

He had paid his bill and was walking out of the cafe, when somebody touched him on the arm, and he swung round to see a tall, melancholy and long faced man.

“Excuse me; Mr. Stott, I believe?”

“That is my name. I haven’t the pleasure—”

“My name is Carver—I am an Inspector of Police, and I want you to tell me something about what was seen outside of Mayfield, both before and after the murder.”

Mr. Stott’s face fell.

“That servant of mine has been talking,” he said annoyed. “I knew she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.”

“I know nothing about your servant, sir,” said Carver, sadly, “but I have been sitting in Toby’s for the past three days and I have heard quite a lot. It sounded to me almost as if you were the principal speaker on the subject, but maybe I was mistaken.”

“I shall say nothing,” said Mr. Stott firmly, and the detective sighed.

“I shouldn’t hurry to make up my mind on that subject if I were you,” he said, “it is certain to be a difficult business explaining to the Public Prosecutor why you have kept silence so long—it looks very suspicious, you know, Mr. Stott.”

Mr. Stott was aghast.

“Suspicious—me—Good heavens! Come to my office, Mr. Carver—suspicious! I knew I should be dragged into it! I’ll fire Eline tonight!”

When Tab in the course of duty, called that night at the station, he heard the story from Carver.

“If the poor nut had only had the pluck to telephone to the police when the girl first told him the story, we could have caught those birds. As it is, there’s no sense in keeping the house under observation any longer. Who was the woman? That puzzles me. Who was the woman who, night after night, garaged her car in Trasmere’s garden and let herself into the house carrying a square black bag?”

Tab did not answer. The identity of the woman was no mystery to him. She was Ursula Ardfern.

The fabric of supposition fitted piece to piece. He remembered how he had come upon her in the deserted streets at dawn surveying a burst tyre and the plainness of her dress. Inside the car was a square black case, but—

Ursula working hand in glove with Chinamen; Ursula privy to these stealthy coming and goings, these midnight burglaries at Mayfield? That was unthinkable.

“—their reason for breaking in after we had left the place is beyond me,” Carver was saying. “I can only suppose that they hoped that we had overlooked something of value.”

“In Mayfield?—there is nothing there now?”

“Only the furniture and one or two articles we took away but have since returned, such as the green lacquer box. As a matter of fact, they only went back yesterday. Mr. Lander thought of selling all the furniture and effects by auction, and I believe that before he left he put the matter in the hands of an agent. The Chinamen intrigue me,” he said, “though it is by no means certain that both Stott and his servant aren’t mistaken. I gather they were considerably panic stricken and even I wouldn’t undertake to distinguish a Chinaman from a European by the light of a match.”

Tab went up into Carver’s private office, and they sat talking until close on eleven o’clock, at which hour their conversation was violently interrupted by the ring of the telephone.

“Call through for you, sir,” said the voice of the sergeant on the desk, and a second later Carver recognised the agitated voice of Mr. Stott.

“They’re here now! They’ve just gone in! The woman has opened the door—they’ve just gone in!”

“Who? Is that Stott—do you mean into Mayfield?” asked Carver quickly.

“Yes! I saw them with my own eyes. The woman’s car is outside the door.”

“Go and get its number, quick,” said Carver sharply, “find a policeman and tell him, and if you can’t find one, detain the woman yourself.”

He heard Mr. Stott’s feeble expostulation, and jumped for his hat.

They boarded the first taxi-cab they could find, and raced through the town at a break-neck pace, turning into one end of the quiet avenue in which Mayfield was situated, just as the tail lights of a car turned the corner at the other end.

Mr. Stott was standing on the side-walk, pointing dumbly, but with hysterical gestures, at the place where the car had been.

“They’ve gone,” he said hollowly. “—couldn’t find a policeman: they’ve gone!”

“So I notice,” said Carver. “Did you take the number of the car?”

Mr. Stott shook his head and made a choking noise in his throat. Presently he commanded his speech.

“Covered over with black paper,” he said.

“Who was it?”

“A Chinaman and a woman,” said the other.

“Why in hell didn’t you stop them?” snapped Carver.

“A Chinaman and a woman,” repeated Stott miserably.

“What was she like?”

“I didn’t get near enough to see,” Mr. Stott made the confession without shame. “There ought to have been police here—lots of police—. It is disgraceful. I am going to write to the—”

They left him quivering threats. Carver ran across the concrete garden, unlocked the door and switched on all the lights in the hall. Nothing, so far as he could see, had been disturbed. The door to the vault was locked, and had not been tampered with. Apparently the dining-room had. The fireplace of the house was a broad deep cavity lined with red brick, and pointed with a yellow cement. An electric radiator had replaced the stove, and Carter had made a very thorough examination both of the recess and of the wide chimney above. But he saw at a glance that his inspection had been short of perfect. One of the bricks had been taken out. It lay on the table, with its steel lid open, and Carver surveyed it thoughtfully.

“That is one on me,” he said. “It looks like the face of a brick, doesn’t it? Look at that artistic cement pointing all round the edge? It isn’t cement at all, but steel. In fact, this must be about the only secret drawer in the house. I ought to have made more thorough enquiries from the builders.”

The box was empty except for a tiny rubber band. They found its fellow on the table.

“There was something of importance in that box which has been taken out; probably a bundle of papers, more likely two bundles. The rubber bands suggest two. Anyway, they’re gone.”

He glanced around the room.

“And the green lacquer box has gone,” he said. “I know it was here, because I put it on the mantelshelf with my own hands.”

He opened the door leading to the vault and satisfied himself that nobody had gained admission to the underground room.

“We had better go along and see this police critic,” he said grimly.

It appeared that he had done Mr. Stott an injustice, for greatly fearing, he had crossed the road whilst the people were in the house, and he had made honest attempts to find a policeman, having sent the toothachy Eline on that errand, which was successful, if the success was somewhat belated, for the policeman arrived with her whilst the Inspector was talking to the merchant.

“I not only crossed the road,” said Mr. Stott, “but I went inside the garden. They must have seen me, for the light in the dining-room went out suddenly, and they came flying down the steps together.”

“And passed you, of course?”

“They did not pass me,” explained Mr. Stott emphatically, “because I was on the other side of the road before they were out of the gate. I do not think anything would have passed me.”

“What was the woman like?” asked Carver again.

“I have an idea she was young, but I did not see her face. She was dressed in black and as far as I could see, veiled. The other man was small; he only came up to her shoulder.”

“That is that,” said Carver disconsolately, when they came away. “They ought to have been caught, if that man had the spunk of a rabbit. You are very silent, Tab—what are you thinking?”

“I am wondering,” said Tab truthfully, “just wondering.”

“What are you wondering?” growled the other.

“I am wondering whether old Trasmere was a much worse man than any of us imagine,” said Tab calmly.

XIV

Early in the morning Tab paid a fruitless visit to Stone Cottage. The woman who acted as caretaker told him that the young lady had returned to town, and it was at the Central Hotel that he saw her.

Never had he approached an enquiry, professional or otherwise, with such reluctance. On most matters Tab had very definite views. His mentality was such that he never hesitated to form a judgment, or wavered in his convictions. That type of mind cannot understand in others the vacillating hesitancy, which so often distinguishes them in their judgment of people and things. And yet, strive as he did, he could not reduce to a formula, his own chaotic feelings in relation to Ursula Ardfern. One thing he knew. It was no vicarious interest he was showing—he did not even in his own mind regard himself as standing for Rex Lander.

Tab thought best with a pen in his hand, yet when in cold blood he endeavoured to reduce to writing the exact state of his mind in relation to Ursula Ardfern, the white sheet of paper remained white to the end.

The moment he entered her sitting-room, Tab felt that Ursula knew the object of his visit.

“You want to see me very badly, don’t you?” she said, without preliminary, and he nodded.

“What is it?”

Unless he was dreaming, her voice held a subtle caress, and yet that was a ridiculous exaggeration: perhaps “kindness” were a better word.

“Somebody went into Mayfield last night, accompanied by a Chinaman, and they got away just before the police arrived,” said Tab awkwardly, “and that isn’t all; that same somebody has been in the habit of visiting Trasmere between eleven at night and two in the morning, and this practice has been going on for a considerable time.”

She nodded.

“I told you I did not know Mr. Trasmere,” she said quietly. “It is the only lie I have told you. I knew Mr. Trasmere very well, but there were reasons why it would have been fatal for me to have admitted my friendship with him. No, not one lie—two.” She held up her fingers to emphasize her words.

“The other was about the lost jewel-case,” said Tab huskily.

“Yes,” she replied.

“You didn’t lose it at all.”

She shook her head.

“No, I didn’t lose it at all; I knew where it was all the time, but I was—panic stricken, and had to make a decision on the spur of the moment. I do not regret it.”

There was a pause.

“Do the police know?” she asked.

“About you? No. I think they might find out—not from me.”

“Sit down.” She was very calm. He thought she was going to explain, and was quite satisfied that the explanation was a very simple one, but she had no such intention, as her first words told him.

“I can’t tell you now the why of everything. I am too—what is the word? Too tense. I am not so sure that that is the word, either, but my defences are in being. I dare not relax one of them, or the whole would go. Of course, I knew nothing of the murder—you never dreamt I did?”

He shook his head.

“I did not know until Sunday morning, when I was driving out to Stone Cottage,” she said. “It was only by accident that I bought a paper in the street, and then I made my decision. I went straight to the police station with my story of the lost jewel-case. I knew it was in the vault and I had to find some explanation.”

“How did it come to be in the vault?” Tab knew that the question was futile before it was half out.

“That is part of the other story,” she smiled faintly. “Do you believe me?”

He looked up at her quickly, and their eyes met.

“Does it matter whether I believe or not?” he asked quietly.

“It matters a great deal to me,” she said in the same tone.

It was his gaze that fell first.

Then in a different and more cheery voice, she went on:

“You have to help me, Mr. Tab. Not in the matter we have been discussing—I don’t mean that.”

“I’ll help you in that,” said Tab.

“I think you will,” she answered quickly, “but for the moment, ungracious as it may sound, I do not need help. The other matter is more personal. Do you remember telling me about your friend?”

“Rex?” he asked in surprise.

She nodded.

“He went to Naples, didn’t he? I had a letter from him written on board.”

Tab smiled.

“Poor old Rex. What did he want, your photograph?”

“More than that,” she said quietly. “You won’t think I am horrible if I betray his confidence, but I must, if you are to help me. Mr. Lander has done me the honour of asking me to marry him.”

Tab looked at her open-mouthed.

“Rex?” he said incredulously.

She nodded.

“I won’t show you the letter, it would hardly be fair; but he has asked me to give my answer in the agony column of the ‘Megaphone’. He says that he has an agent in London who will send it by wireless, and I was wondering—” she hesitated.

“If I were the agent?” said Tab, “No, I know nothing whatever about this.”

She drew a sigh.

“I’m glad,” she said inconsequently. “I mean, I’m glad that you won’t be hurt even indirectly.”

“Do you intend putting in the advertisement?”

“I have already sent it to the paper,” she said. “Here is a copy.” She went to her writing-table and brought back a slip of paper and Tab read:

“Rex: What you ask is quite impossible. I shall never make any other reply.

U.”

“One does get that kind of letters,” she said, “and as a rule they are not worth while answering. Had I not known he was a friend of yours, I don’t think I should have taken the trouble—yes I would,” she nodded slowly. “Mr. Trasmere’s nephew has certain claims to refusal.”

“Poor old Rex,” said Tab softly. “I had a wireless from him this morning saying that he was enjoying the voyage.”

He took up his hat.

“As regards the other matter, Miss Ardfern,” he said, “you must tell me in your own time, if you wish to tell me at all. But you must understand that there is a very big chance that the police will trace you, in which case I may be of assistance. As matters stand, I am just a sympathetic observer.”

He held out his hand with a smile and she took it and held it in both of hers.

“For twelve years I have been living in a nightmare,” she said, “a nightmare which my own vanity created. I think I am awake now, and when the police trace me—and I am so certain they will trace me that I have left the stage—”

“Was that the reason?” he exclaimed in surprise.

“That is one of the two reasons,” she said. “When they trace me, I think I shall be glad. There is still something of the old Eve in me,” she smiled a little sadly, “to make exposure a painful possibility.”

One last question he asked as he stood at the door.

“What was in the box? The box that looked like a brick and was hidden in the fireplace?”

“Papers,” she replied. “I only know they were papers written in Chinese. I do not know what they were about yet.”

“Had they—could they possibly supply a clue to the murderer?”

She shook her head and he was satisfied.

He smiled at her and with no other word, went out. All doubts that he had had as to his feeling toward her were now set at rest. He loved this slim girl with the madonna-like face, whose moods changed as swiftly as April light. He did not think of Rex, or the heartache which her message would bring, until later.

There was no very satisfactory portrait of Wellington Brown in existence. On the ship which brought him from China, a fellow passenger had taken a snapshot of a group in which Mr. Brown’s face, slightly out of focus, loomed foggily. With this to work on, and with the assistance of Tab, something like a near-portrait was constructed and circulated by the police. Every newspaper carried the portrait, every amateur detective in the country was looking for the man with the beard, whose gloves had been found outside the death chamber of Jesse Trasmere.

Less fortunate was the lot of Mr. Walter Felling, alias Walters. He had been in prison, and his portraits, full face and profile, were available for immediate distribution. He watched the hunt from one of those densely crowded burrows where humanity swelters and festers on the hot days and nights. In the top room of a crowded tenement, he grew more and more gaunt as the days went by, for the fear of death was in his heart.

Despite the efficient portraiture it is doubtful whether he would have been recognized by the most lynx-eyed policeman, for his beard had reached a considerable length and suspense and terror had wasted his plump cheeks into hollows and cavities that had changed the very contours of his face. He knew the law; its fatal readiness to accept the most fragmentary evidence when a man was on trial for murder. His very movement had been an acknowledgment of guilt, would be accepted as such by a judge who would lay out the damning points, against him with a cold and remorseless thoroughness.

Sometimes at night, especially on rainy nights, he would creep out into the streets. Always they seemed to be full of police—he would return in a panic to spend another restless night, when every creak of the stairs, every muffled voice in the rooms below made him jump to the door.

Walters had doubled back to town, the only safe place of refuge. In the country he would have been a marked man and his liberty of short duration. Avoiding the districts which knew him well, and the friends whose loyalty would not stand the test of a murder charge, he came to the noisy end of Reed Street, posing as an out-of-work engineer.

Here he read every newspaper which he could procure, and in each journal every line that dealt with the murder. What had Wellington Brown to do with it? The appearance of that man in the case bewildered him. He remembered the visitor from China very well. So he, too, was a fugitive. The knowledge brought him a shade of comfort. It was as though a little of the burden of suspicion had been lifted from himself.

One night when he was taking the air, a Chinaman went pad-padding past him and he recognized Yeh Ling. The proprietor of the Golden Roof was one of the few Chinamen in town who seldom wore European dress, and Walters knew him. Yeh Ling had come to Mayfield on several occasions. He had worn European dress then and had excited no surprise, for Mr. Trasmere’s association with the Far East was well known. Yeh Ling must have seen him, for he had passed at a moment when the light of a street lamp fell upon Walters’ face. But he made no sign of recognition and the fugitive hoped that Yeh Ling had been absorbed in his thoughts. Nevertheless, he hurried home again to sit in his darkened room and start painfully at every sound.

Had he known that Yeh Ling had both seen and identified him, he would not have slept at all that night. The Chinaman pursued his course to the unsavoury end of Reed Street; children who saw him screamed derisively; a frowsy old woman standing in a doorway yelled a crude witticism, but Yeh Ling passed on unmoved. Turning sharply into a narrow alleyway, he stopped before a darkened shop and tapped upon a side door. It was opened at once and he passed into a thick and pungent darkness. A voice hissed a question and he answered in the same dialect. Then, without guide, he made his way up the shaky stairs to a back room.

It was illuminated by the light of four candles. The walls were covered by a cheap paper, its crude design mellowed by age, and the only furniture in the room was a broad divan on which sat a compatriot, a wizened old Chinaman who was engaged in carving a half-shaped block of ivory which he held between his knees.

They greeted one another soberly and the old man uttered a mechanical politeness.

“Yo Len Fo,” said Yeh Ling, “is the man well?”

Yo Len Fo shook his head affirmatively.

“He is well, excellency,” he said. “He has been sleeping all the afternoon and he has just taken three pipes. He has also drunk the whiskey you sent.”

“I will see him,” said Yeh Ling and dropped some money upon the divan.

The old man picked this up, uncurled himself and putting down his ivory carefully, led the way up another flight of stairs. A small oil lamp burnt on the bare mantelpiece of the room into which Yeh Ling walked. On a discoloured mattress lay a man. He wore only shirt and trousers and his feet were bare. By the side of the mattress was a tray on which rested a pipe, a half-emptied glass and a watch.

Mr. Wellington Brown looked up at the visitor, his glazed eyes showing the faintest light of interest.

“’Lo, Yeh Ling—come to smoke?”

His language was a queer mixture of Cantonese and English, and it was in the former tongue that Yeh Ling replied.

“I do not smoke, Hsien,” he said and the man chuckled.

“Hsien?—‘The Unemployed One’, eh—funny how names stick—wasser time?”

“It is late,” said Yeh Ling, and the head of the man drooped.

“See ol’ Jesse tomorrow—” he said drowsily, “got—lot of business—”

Yeh Ling stooped and his slim fingers encircled the man’s wrist. The pulse was weak but regular.

“It is good,” he said, turning to the old carver of ivory. “Every morning there must be air in this room. No other smoker must come, you understand, Yo Len Fo? He must be kept here.”

“This morning he wanted to go out,” said the keeper of the establishment.

“He will stay for a long time. I know him. When he was on the Amur River, he did not leave his house for three months. Let there be one pipe always ready. Obey.”

He went softly down the stairs and into the night.

Only once did he glance back as he made his unhurried way to the side door of the Golden Roof. But that glance was sufficient. The man he had seen loafing at the entrance of the alleyway was watching him. He saw him now walking on the other side of the road, a dim, secretive figure. Yeh Ling slipped into his private door, bent down and raised the flap of a letter-slot. The man had come to a halt on the other side of the road. The reflected light from the blazing signs on the main street illuminated his back, but his face was in shadow.

“It is not a policeman,” said Yeh Ling softly and then as the man strolled back into the darkness, he called his stunted servant.

“Follow that man who wears a cap. You will see him on the other side of the road, he is walking toward the houses of the noisy women.”

A quarter of an hour later the stunted man came back with a story of failure and Yeh Ling was not surprised. But the watcher was neither policeman nor reporter, of this he was sure.

XV

In the course of his professional duties Tab Holland had been brought into contact with the master of the Golden Roof on two occasions. The first followed a small scandal, which only remotely touched the restaurant (the woman who was the subject of Tab’s investigation had dined there at an important date) and once in connection with a dead-season topic dealing with the nutritive values of food.

He had found the Chinaman reserved to a point of taciturnity, monosyllabic in speech; a most unsatisfactory person.

Tab knew nothing about him except that he was a successful Chinaman who had gravitated into the restaurant business. He asked Jacques for enlightenment, well knowing that if the news editor could not satisfy his curiosity, it was because Yeh Ling was altogether uninteresting. Jacques was one of those rarities, to whom reference is so frequently made that it might be imagined they were as common as straws in a stable. He was a veritable “mine of information.” The genus occurs sometimes in newspaper offices. Jacques knew everybody and everybody’s wife. He knew why they married. He also knew why stars twinkled and the chemical composition of tears. Quote him a line from any classic and he would give you its predecessor and that which followed. He knew the dates of all important earthquakes and was an authority on the Mogul Emperors. He could sketch you with equal facility the position of Frossard’s second corps at Rezonville on August 17th, 1870, or the military situation at Thermopylæ—and dates.

The only serious students of the “Megaphone” reference library were the reporters who went there to confound Jacques. They never succeeded.

“Yeh Ling? Yes—queer bird. An educated Chink—got a son who is quite a swell scholar by Chinese standards. He ought to make a good story some day; that house he is building at Storford—it is on the way to Hertford; says that one day his son will be the Chinese Ambassador here and he wants him to have a house worthy of his position. That is what he told Stott. Know Stott? He is a dud architect who knows it all. Weird little devil who looks as if he might have been clever with a different kind of brain. Stott laid out the ground work, sort of Chinese temple with two enormous concrete pillars that are going to stand half-way down the drive. The Pillar of Cheerful Memories and the Pillar of Grateful Hearts. That’s what he is going to call them. Stott thought it was heathenish and wondered if the Bishop would like it. Yes, you ought to see that place, Tab. No, it isn’t built. Yeh Ling has nothing but Chink labour. The Secretary of the Builders’ Union went to see him about it. Yeh Ling said his ancestors had a union of their own which put the bar upon non-Taoist labour. Taoism——”

“I hate to wade into the foaming torrent of your eloquence,” said Tab gently, “but how did you come to meet Stott?”

“Same lodge,” said Jacques. “It is not for me to talk down a brother craftsman—are you one of us by-the-way?”

Tab shook his head.

“Ought to be. Get a little respect for authority into your system. As I was saying, I don’t want to knock Stott, but he’s not everybody’s meat. Go and see that temple or whatever it is, Tab. Might be a good story.”

On the first idle day he had, Tab took his motor bicycle and went out to Storford. He was not entirely without hope that he would see Ursula—her house was only seven miles beyond Storford Hill, and he had reason to know that she had withdrawn herself to her country home. In a letter telling this she had told him in so many words that when she wanted him she would send for him.

He saw the building from a distance.

He had noticed it before—it was hardly possible to miss seeing it, for it stood on the crest of one of the few hills the country boasted. The walls were half finished and heavy wooden uprights rose like the palings of a fence above the queerly laid courses. And one of the pillars already lifted its lofty head. It flanked on one side a broad pathway which was half the width of the house, and stood some fifty feet above the ground, being crowned by a small stone dragon.

Tab wondered if this was the Pillar of Grateful Hearts or that which stood, or would stand, for cheerful memories.

Its diameter must have been fully five feet. Near at hand was one of the wooden moulds in which it was cast, and a Chinese workman was scraping the interior.

Tab walked through a break in the low hedge which separated Yeh Ling’s new home from the road and now stood regarding with interest the activities of the blue-bloused workmen. Their industry was remarkable. Whether they were running bricks and mortar, or cutting out the garden (already taking shape) or walling up the terraces, they moved quickly, untiringly, wholly absorbed in their occupations. Never once did they stop to lean upon their spades and picks to discuss the chances of the new administration, or to tell one another how Milligan got his black eye.

Nobody seemed to notice Tab. He strolled further into the land and there was none to challenge his right. A gang of men were gravelling and rolling the broad path and one of these said something which sent the others into a fit of that chittering laughter which is peculiar to the East. Tab wondered what was the joke.

Turning to walk back to the road, he saw that a car had stopped at the break in the hedge, and his heart gave a leap, for its occupant was Ursula.

“What do you think of it?” she asked.

“It is going to be rather wonderful—how do you like the idea of having a Chinaman for a neighbour? I forgot—you rather like the Chinese?”

“Yes,” she said shortly. “There could be worse neighbours than Yeh Ling.”

“You know him?”

He wondered if she would deny acquaintance or evade the question.

“Very well,” she said calmly, “he is the proprietor of the Golden Roof. I often dine there. You know him too?”

“Slightly,” said Tab, looking back at the unfinished house. “He must be rich.”

“I don’t know. One never really knows what money is required to build a place like this. The labour is cheap and it seems a very simple kind of house.”

And then with a wave of her hand, she drove on. She might at least have asked him to lunch, he thought indignantly.

A week went past, a drab week for a discontented Tab Holland, for now there was neither a likelihood of, nor an excuse for, a chance meeting.

A sedative week for hiding Walters. References to the murder seldom appeared now in the newspapers, and he had found a man who had offered to get him a job as a steward on an outward bound liner.

A week of drugged sleep for a besotted man, curled up on a mattress at the top of Yo Len Fo’s house.

But for Inspector Carver an exceptionally busy week though there was no newspaper record of his activities.

Tab no longer spent his evenings at home. The flat seemed horribly empty now that the love-sick Rex had gone. He had had a radio from him saying that he was improved in health. The message was cheerful enough, so that Ursula’s refusal could not have bitten very hard.

By the end of the week, life had become an intolerable dreariness, and to make matters worse, nothing was happening in the great world that called for Tab’s intervention and interest. He was in that condition of utter boredom when there happened the first of those remarkable incidents which, in his official account of the case, Inspector Carver refers to as “The Second Activity.”

The flats, one of which Tab occupied, had originally been apartments in a private house. With little structural alterations they had been turned into self-contained suites. On each of the landings was a door of one of the four flats. Admission to the house was by the front door, and the landlord had so arranged matters that, whilst the key of each flat was different, all keys opened the street-door. It was, therefore, possible to go in and out without observation, unless by chance one of the other tenants happened to be on the stairs or in the passage-way at the time.

On Saturday night Tab knew he would be alone in the house; the other three tenants invariably spent the week-end out of town. One was a middle-aged musician who lived on the top floor. Beneath him was a young couple engaged in literary work; then came Tab’s flat, and the ground floor suite was occupied by a man whose profession was unknown, but who was generally believed to be connected with an advertising agency. He was seldom at home, and Tab had only seen him once.

The Saturday night happened to be the occasion of an annual dinner of his club, and Tab dressed and went out early, spent a mildly exhilarating evening and returned home at half-past twelve. There was nothing in first appearance to suggest that anything unusual had happened in his absence, except that the lights in his sitting-room were burning and he had switched them off before he went out.

His first impression was that the waste of current was due to his own carelessness, but then he recalled very clearly that he had turned out the light and closed the sitting-room door before he went out. Now the sitting-room door was open, as also was the door of Rex’s old room.

XVI

Tab smiled to himself. He who had investigated so many burglaries had never imagined that he would be favoured by the attention of those midnight adventurers. He went into Rex’s room, turned the switch and had only to take one glance to know that somebody had been very busy indeed in his absence. Under the bed which his companion had occupied, were two shallow trunks, filled with those of Rex Lander’s belongings which he had not taken with him. One of these had been pulled out, placed on the bed and opened. It had been opened unscientifically with a chisel, which Tab knew was his property, and must have been taken from the tool-box in the kitchen. The lock was wrenched off and the contents of the box were scattered on the bed. The other trunk had not been touched. Whether the thief had been successful in his quest Tab did not know, because he was ignorant of the box’s contents. He guessed he must have been disappointed, for beyond a quantity of underlinen, more or less in a state of disrepair, a few books and drawing instruments, and a packet of letters which Tab saw at a glance were from Jesse Trasmere, there was nothing at all valuable in the trunk.

He went to his own room, but none of his things had been touched. And then he began a careful search of the other rooms in the flat. They yielded, however, no clue as to the identity of the mysterious visitor, and Tab got on to the ’phone to Carver and was lucky to find him.

“Burglars? That’s poetic justice, Tab,” said Carver’s sad voice. “I’ll come right along.”

The detective was at the house in ten minutes.

“If this had happened in the daytime I could find a fairly simple explanation,” said Tab, “because the front door below is left open until nine, and the tenant who comes in or goes out nearest to nine o’clock, closes it. We keep the door open because it saves a lot of running up and down stairs, but the street-door was closed when I came home.”

“How would it have been a simple matter to burgle the flat?” asked Carver, and Tab explained that there was a window on the landing through which a sure-footed and skilful adventurer might emerge on to a narrow ledge by which the kitchen window could be reached.

“He didn’t go that way I should think,” said Carver, after he had inspected the kitchenette. “No, the burglar opened the door like a gentleman. Do you know whether Mr. Lander had anything worth stealing in that trunk?”

Tab shook his head.

“I am perfectly certain he hadn’t,” he said. “Poor old Rex had nothing of value except the money he drew from his uncle’s estate just before he left.”

Carver went back to Rex’s room and carefully emptied the trunk item by item.

“It was something at the bottom of the trunk. I should imagine it was in this box.”

He handled a little wooden box with a sliding lid.