Chapter II: Concerns the Curious Affair at Barnes

"Was it still dark?" asked Little, whose interest in the affair seemed rather unusual, for he always set his face against sensational journalism, and often raised his voice against my too lurid descriptions in the evening edition of the _Herald_.

"Day was just breaking," I went on. "The constable opened the window and, entering the empty house, walked along a short passage to where he saw a light shining beneath the door. He pushed it open, and a sight met his eyes which astonished him. The room, a small one, was comfortably furnished. The only illumination, however, was a child's night-light burning under a little yellow glass dome upon the table, and this was scarcely sufficient to reveal the farther corners of the room. Along one side was an old horsehair couch with a sheet, blanket, and eider-down quilt upon it, showing that the usurping occupant made it both living and sleeping room, while opposite was an easy-chair, and a small table upon which were a quantity of new books and the remains of some food. To first appearances it was the room of a caretaker, and the constable was about to retire, grumbling to himself that he had not been informed that the place was inhabited, when he was startled to hear, in a corner of the room, a sharp intermittent clicking. Opening his bull's-eye he threw the light upon the dark corner, where there was revealed something that was certainly unusual--a small deal table with a telegraph instrument screwed down to it. And as he looked the instrument clicked away some message which he, of course, could not understand."

"A telegraph instrument!" cried Julian, in quick surprise. "That doesn't appear in to-night's 'special.'"

"No," I replied, smiling. "I'm keeping a few facts over till to-morrow. There were reasons why the presence of the instrument should not at present be mentioned. Whitlock asked me to say nothing about it. I got the whole story exclusive."

"A real first-class 'scoop,'" declared Little, in journalistic slang.

"Yes. Not bad, was it? Whitlock rang me up on the 'phone at nine yesterday morning, and I went at once to Barnes and saw the house."

"But the girl?"

"Ah! that's just it. Horton, the constable, was standing watching the clicking instrument, ticking some mysterious message to that lonely, unoccupied house, when of a sudden his eyes caught sight of something on the floor, close by the table. He turned his lantern upon it, and saw that it was a young girl about twenty, fully dressed, lying prostrate where she had fallen. The face was very beautiful, but very pale. He bent and touched it. It was icy cold. She was stone-dead! Horrified at the discovery, he turned to go out for assistance, when he saw, standing in the doorway, pale and startled, another woman, very good-looking, and about two years older than her dead companion. She----"

"That isn't in the 'special,' either," Little remarked.

"No; I held it all back until to-day, and the remainder I shall give to-morrow," I answered. "The whole affair is so absolutely extraordinary in every detail. Let me finish. Well, Horton, face to face with the woman, asked how it was that the girl was dead. The new-comer started, looked at the body, then at the constable, but made no response. Trembling from head to foot she stood there, her face livid, her jaws set, her eyes glaring at the officer, as though staring into eternity. Twice the constable repeated his question. 'I--I know nothing!' she stammered at last. 'Then I shall be compelled to trouble you to come to the station with me,' was Horton's reply, for the whole circumstances warranted, in his opinion, the detention of this woman, whose attitude showed guilt."

"But he had not ascertained that the girl had died by foul means," interrupted the special correspondent.

"He surmised it. For an ordinary constable Horton was above the average intelligence," I asserted. "He put many inquiries to the woman, but she would vouchsafe no reply. He is convinced, however, from the fact that she had her hat on, that she followed him into the house--probably through the same window as that by which he had entered."

"In that case, why did he arrest her?"

"Because of her guilty attitude," I answered. "Wait until you hear all, and then judge whether or not the constable was justified in his action. They stood together in the room, beside the prostrate body of the girl, the instrument still clicking on, the woman staring at the lifeless form, her countenance white to the lips. 'Who is this girl?' he demanded of her again. 'I--I don't know,' was the woman's reply. Therefore, finding that he could obtain no information, he compelled her to accompany him to the door, unlocked it, and brought her out into Bridge Road, where, after calling assistance with his whistle, he took her to the police-station. There the inspector endeavoured to obtain from her her name and address and the name of the dead woman, but without avail. She steadily declined to utter one single word, even though he threatened to detain her. Therefore he had her placed in the cells, while he himself went round to the empty house with the divisional surgeon to examine the body. When he returned he went to the cell to further question the woman."

"And what statement did she make?"

"None. She was dead--committed suicide."

"Suicide!" he gasped, staring at me. "What? She's dead! Dead?"

"Yes. She had swallowed prussic acid, and so carried her secret to the grave."

"By Jove! Extraordinary--most extraordinary!" exclaimed Julian, tossing his cigar away and rising to stretch his long legs. "Then the theory is--what?"

"Well, there are a good many," I replied. "When the doctor came to examine the poor girl they found she'd been shot through the heart. She had no hat or jacket on, and the inference--because a pair of woman's boots, a pink chiffon scarf, and a cycling skirt were found in a cupboard in another room--is that she had lived all alone in that house for some considerable time and with some mysterious purpose."

"Connected with that telegraph instrument, I should think," remarked Little, who now seemed to evince the utmost interest in the affair.

"Yes. That instrument is a very mysterious factor," I said. "I was with Whitlock and three other men from Scotland Yard when they searched the premises. They had with them a telegraph inspector from the Post Office, and he traced a wire cunningly concealed, passing out of the window, along the wall of the back garden, and up an adjoining house to where run overhead several of the trunk lines from London to the south of England. One of these--the Portsmouth line--was tapped by that wire by a very ingenious contrivance, so arranged that it would escape the eye of any linesman on the lookout for 'faults,' and in a manner that it might be disconnected at will. Whitlock is pretty cute. He wouldn't let me publish anything about this, and he's put on a Post Office telegraphist night and day, in the hope that some message will come through that may give a clue to the motive of the strange affair."

"Then the theory is that the girl herself was a telegraph clerk?"

"Yes; or, at anyrate, she could read all messages which passed between Portsmouth and London whenever she switched on her communication."

"Did you see the dead girl?"

"Yes--at the mortuary. She was very beautiful, with long fair hair and a perfect complexion. Myself, I don't think she was a clerk, but a lady. She's refined, with soft white hands, and her dress, though a plain blouse and skirt, was expensive and well made."

"Anything which may lead to identification?" asked Julian Little, in a changed voice, turning from me. It struck me that since he had risen from his chair he had grown strangely uneasy.

"Nothing. Her only ornament is a ring with two small diamonds and an emerald--one of quite an ordinary pattern--while none of her clothes bear either laundry-marks or initials."

"And the woman who committed suicide rather than answer questions?" he asked, his face still turned from me. "What of her?"

"The same--only from her clothing the laundry-marks have been recently cut; and there are other things--such as the cutting away of a waistbelt from her bodice, which no doubt bore the dressmaker's name--which show that she intended to conceal her identity if arrested."

Little gave vent to a sigh of relief, I thought. Yet next instant I laughed at my foolishness. It was mere fanciful suspicion. Before he had turned, his face, usually so full of careless merriment, had undergone a change, and was white and drawn and haggard. Now, as he faced me again, it had resumed its normal appearance.

"Then both women are complete mysteries?"

"Yes. They lie side by side at the mortuary, their lips sealed by death."

"And what's Whitlock's opinion?" he asked, with an eagerness he endeavoured in vain to suppress.

"He has none. He's utterly confounded."

"The tapping of the wire is, I take it, the chief point. When the motive for that is discovered, the truth of the affair will possibly be exposed."

I shook my head.

"The message which Horton watched has been discovered, from the duplicates in the Central Telegraph Office, to be one of no importance--a mere commercial message from the Southampton office of one of the steam-ship companies regarding the sailing of a ship and her number of passengers. Indeed, all day yesterday one of Whitlock's assistants was engaged in examining the duplicates of messages over that particular line, but he has, up to the present, discovered nothing suspicious. That is why he thinks it is yet to come."

"And as you've published a portion of the affair in the 'special' to-night the sender of that expected message will probably not give himself away--eh?"

"It may have been a conspiracy against someone entirely unconscious of the tapped wire at Barnes," I argued.

"Yes," he said thoughtfully. "But do you anticipate the truth ever being discovered?"

"Who knows?" I exclaimed. "Certainly the features of the affair are most extraordinary. Whitlock, Gunton, Meyer, and a whole crowd from Scotland Yard have been investigating to-day. I spent the day down there with them, and we lunched all together at the Red Lion. By all it's regarded as an absolute and complete enigma. The motive must have been a very strong one to induce a girl to live in an empty house all alone, watching that telegraph instrument."

"But did nobody enter the house?"

"A clerk of the landlady's agent was there about nine months ago," I answered. "After that the eccentric old lady refused to let the place and was travelling abroad, so the agent did not bother further. For fully nine months it has not been entered, so far as is known, except by the girl now found dead. Another feature is that the lock on the chain around the gates--which had always been found in its place by the police--had been so arranged that it opened by pressure at the side, not requiring any key, and could be locked by simply closing it. The interior mechanism of the lock had been taken out and another substituted."

"And how long is the girl supposed to have lived there?"

"At least for four months is the general opinion."

"She must have had a pretty dismal time of it," he remarked thoughtfully.

"That's just what Whitlock says. How did she get food? No neighbours ever saw her go in or out, therefore she must have done so at night. But the shops would then be all closed, therefore someone must have brought her supplies. That she lived there is proved by the cheap enamelled cooking utensils in the kitchen. The gas was not cut off, so she used the gas stove."

"Well, the other papers will be on it pretty busily in the morning, no doubt," he remarked somewhat uneasily. His sudden nervousness seemed quite unaccountable.

"The 'mornings' are on it now, of course. But they'll learn nothing. I've taken jolly good care to keep the story all to myself," I declared, with a journalist's pardonable pride of exclusive information.

Scarcely had the words fallen from my lips when there was a loud double knock at our outer door, and on opening it I found my friend John Whitlock, inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department, standing upon the mat.

"Come in, old chap!" I cried, greeting him warmly, and ushering him into our sitting-room. He had, no doubt, some fresh information for me.

As Whitlock entered Julian Little rose, and the pair faced each other as I introduced them.

Upon Whitlock's ruddy countenance was an expression of keen inquiry, while Little's face instantly blanched to the lips as he learned the identity of the modestly-dressed man in the dark blue overcoat with velvet collar, who had called upon us so unexpectedly.

He turned quickly away to the writing-table, in order to hide his confusion and gain time to recover himself, while Whitlock, fixing his dark eyes upon mine with meaning glance, took a cigar from the box I handed him.

"I expect you'll want to talk, so I'll leave you together," Little said, in a hard, changed voice, when, a few moments later, holding his breath and turning, he again faced the famous detective.

"No, Mr Little," responded our visitor, in clear, distinct tones. "Please don't leave us, I beg of you. What I have to say may be said openly, before you."

The man addressed, glancing for an instant into Whitlock's hard, serious face, sank into his armchair, inert, staring, breathless.

Then, for the first time, I became convinced that Julian, my closest friend, knew more than he chose to admit concerning that amazing affair at Barnes, where a woman had calmly and deliberately gone to her death rather than reveal her identity.

Never was guilt more plainly written upon a man's face than upon his.

I held my breath, amazed and wondering.

What was the truth?