Chapter IV: Contains Some Surprises

"You see the ingenuity of the whole affair," Whitlock remarked, pointing to the plain deal table in the barely-furnished room wherein we stood together next morning--the room in which the mysterious tragedy had been enacted. "This instrument was fitted up by one who was certainly an expert telegraph engineer. The transmitter, which bears a number, as you see, has been discovered by the Post Office to be one stolen about twelve months ago from the bag of a linesman while he was eating his dinner in an inn at Lyndhurst, in the New Forest."

"Could it have been arranged for the purpose of betting or Stock Exchange frauds?" I queried, standing beside the dark stain upon the floor which showed so gruesomely in the morning light.

"No; certainly not. I've abandoned that theory. Let's go over the house again."

Before following him I glanced around the room, every detail of which was already familiar to me. It was not large, and had probably been used as a study when the place was tenanted, for along the faded walls were black marks showing where bookcases had stood. Upon the centre of the floor was an old bit of ragged Brussels carpet probably to deaden the sound of footsteps. The chairs were old and rickety; while the old sofa, which had been used as a bed, was worn and frayed. In the centre of the couch was a deep cavity, showing that somebody had used it for months. The blanket was a dark army one and the eider-down quilt, once covered with dark green satin, was almost brown with age. Everything had been left as it was found, but during the whole of the previous day experts from Scotland Yard had been dusting the half-filled tumbler with a pale greenish chalk and photographing the finger-prints upon it; also taking prints from the door-plate and other polished surfaces in various parts of the room and the house.

The remains of some cold ham and bread--the unfortunate victim's supper--were still upon the plate, and her half-consumed lager beer showed that she had been probably interrupted in her meal by a passing message.

In the grey light of that autumn morning the room looked a dismal and mysterious dwelling-place. The door stood open, and as we conversed our voices echoed weirdly through the untenanted, neglected house.

Whitlock stood in the centre of the room, gazing thoughtfully around him. Every nook and corner of the place had been searched, in order to find some copied message, or something to give a clue to its late occupant. But all in vain. Discovery was apparently constantly dreaded, and everything which might lead to identification had been, from time to time, destroyed in the grate.

Upon the table were a number of books, new novels of the lighter kind--which showed the poor girl's taste for fiction--as well as some weekly papers, and a half-knitted cravat of dark blue silk.

Who could the beautiful girl be who had passed her days in such loneliness and secrecy? And with what motive?

My eye caught that tell-tale stain upon the unwashed floor-boards and I drew back in horror. I saw her startled face, for it was now haunting me continually.

I tried, time after time, to put its memory away from me but without avail. It appealed to me for vengeance.

Whitlock's voice roused me to a sense of my surroundings.

"Come, Mr Keene," he said. "Let's take another look round."

Together we went out into the big square hall, where the wide, old-fashioned stairs ran up to the first floor. It was a roomy old place, built a century ago with old-fashioned comfort and solidity. On each side of the hall were rooms--drawing-room, dining-room, morning-room and the study which we had just left. One after the other we entered.

The drawing-room, a big apartment with two deep bay windows, had once been decorated in white and gold, but the white was now grey and the gilt sadly tarnished. The ceiling showed that it had been a handsome room in the early Victorian days, but the cheap paper was now smoke-grimed and faded. The dark sage-green walls of the dining-room showed square marks where paintings had once hung, and the morning-room must, when tenanted, have been a pleasant apartment. But the neighbourhood had, in the last ten years, sadly deteriorated, and motor traction, with its attendant noise and dust, had rendered those hitherto comfortable "detached residences" practically uninhabitable by anyone with nerves.

Tenants who still remained in that thoroughfare were subjected to a miniature earthquake every two minutes, and small objects, pictures, ornaments and the like, were thrown down constantly and broken.

The rooms were entirely empty. In the drawing-room an old newspaper had been flung into the fireplace. Whitlock, picking it up, found that it was dated four months back, this going to prove that the mysterious tenant had occupied her room for that period, if not longer.

"But tell me, Whitlock," I asked, as we stood together, bending over the old news-sheet. "Your inquiries seem to show that you don't believe the woman who committed suicide was the assassin."

"No," he responded promptly. "You're quite right, Mr Keene. I have other suspicions."

"Of what?" I asked, recollecting Julian Little's strange attitude.

"Of this strange affair," he replied, with that delightful vagueness which he was so fond of assuming.

"Then why did the other woman take her life instead of facing the magistrate?"

"Who can tell? Women are mostly strange, hysterical creatures. She had a motive, of course; but it may have been a most remote one."

"And it may have been very closely connected with the cause of the tragedy."

"It may," he admitted. "But," he went on, "I somehow feel that there should be some clue to the affair remaining in this place. A man was connected with it, without a doubt, but he is a mystery and at present undiscovered."

As we stood there a loud metallic clicking reached our ears from the adjoining room. It sounded through the empty house, and next moment we heard the sound of flying footsteps ascending the kitchen stairs.

"Hark!" shouted Whitlock, "there's the telegraph!" but the words were scarcely out of his mouth before the male clerk from the Post Office was at the little deal table listening to the ticking of the instrument.

Another moment and we were also at his side.

He was scribbling the message upon a piece of paper, while we looked over his shoulder in eagerness.

But it was nothing. An ordinary message from a husband in Portsmouth to his wife in Leeds, telling of his safe arrival.

So we turned away in disappointment, and ascended the stairs to the first floor, entering a room where, in a cupboard, the victim's skirt, blouse, hat and other clothing were still hanging.

"Now," exclaimed Whitlock, taking down the skirt from its peg and holding it out, "there's an interesting point here. Last night I got a costumier to examine these things, and he has declared that they belonged to neither of the two dead women. The measurements are quite different to the clothes they were wearing. Therefore there arises a new query: To whom do they belong?"

I handled the garments myself. This fresh fact was indeed puzzling.

A dozen Pressmen I knew, having learnt of the tragedy through my account in the _Evening Herald_ of the previous night, were now haunting the neighbourhood, but at Whitlock's order all information was being refused by the police. As I looked from the window of the empty room I saw two of my journalistic rivals, both of them reporters of evening papers, standing together on the opposite pavement.

Passing into the back bedroom, I noticed in the empty grate the unsmoked half of a cigarette, and picked it up. Eagerly Whitlock examined it, and after minute scrutiny said--

"This was smoked not earlier than a week ago, and it proves two things. First, that a man was in the habit of coming here, and, secondly, that he had a connoisseur's taste for cigarettes, because--look!--printed in blue on the paper, don't you see, is the trade-mark of a Greek temple and some lettering in Greek. Greek cigarettes are not smoked in London, therefore he is probably a traveller."

A traveller! I recollected all that had passed in our chambers on the previous night. Only a month before Julian Little had been in Athens, interviewing the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs regarding the Macedonian troubles! I looked again at the unsmoked portion of the cigarette, but it was unlike any I had seen before.

"We may find that this Greek firm have an agent in London, and perhaps trace the person to whom the cigarettes are supplied," remarked Whitlock, carefully placing it in an old envelope he took from his pocket.

The vague suspicion upon my friend Julian was increasing. But suspicion of what? Surely not of the murder of the girl with the angel face, now lying cold and still in the mortuary?

And yet had not the constable distinctly stated that the girl's face was cold when he discovered her. Therefore the crime must have been committed at least an hour, or perhaps longer, before its discovery.

Of Julian's movements on that night I had no idea. I had been sent down to Grimsby upon another matter, and had only arrived at King's Cross at five that morning. At half-past, when I entered our chambers, he was sleeping soundly in his room.

Surely he was the very last person to suspect of having any hand in that mysterious and dastardly crime! Yet had not guilt been written plainly upon his face?

Following Whitlock, I passed from room to room. He was in search of any cupboard or cavity in which other belongings of the illegal occupant might be concealed. For fully an hour we made diligent investigation, leaving no hole or corner undisturbed. Suddenly, when in the servants' quarters at the top of the house, in a room with a sloping ceiling, my friend the inspector, while tapping the wall with his fist, produced a hollow sound, and next moment we saw that a door flush with the wall, being papered over, had escaped detection on the previous day.

So well had the wall-paper concealed the door that one might enter the room a hundred times without noticing it. The window was small, and the place consequently badly lighted, while the door apparently gave access to a large space beneath the sloping roof.

But it was locked, and the key was missing. His curiosity aroused, Whitlock descended to the garden, where he discovered a piece of old iron--a rusty, bent poker, I think--and, returning quickly, broke the lock and opened the door.

Beyond was darkness, and the low roof sloped to the floor as we had conjectured. Whitlock, striking a match, stepped within.

"Halloa!" he exclaimed in surprise. "What's this?" And he raised from the floor a small, cheap, brown leather suit-case, apparently quite new, and brought it out into the centre of the empty room.

It was locked, but in a few moments the brass fastening yielded to the leverage of the piece of iron and the lid flew open, disclosing a tangled mass of green telegraph-tape bearing messages, which was evidently being, for some unknown purpose, preserved. Being in the Morse alphabet neither of us could read it, but Whitlock, after satisfying himself that nothing else remained in the cupboard, took the great bundle of paper-tape in his arms to carry it down to the Post Office clerk below.

As he lifted it from the suit-case, however, my eye caught an object which, perhaps fortunately, he did not see--an object which caused me to hold my breath in sheer amazement, but which, next instant, I snatched up in my hand and held concealed.

It was inconceivable, incredible! My brain was awhirl.

Last night Julian Little had, I recollected, warned me vaguely against Daisy Marvin, the twenty-year-old daughter of James Marvin, news editor of the _Evening Herald_, and my chief. He knew that we loved each other; that though she had adopted the variety stage as a profession, I adored her. Her photographs on post-cards were in every shop window, and great posters of her in her huge stage hat and dancing skirt stared at Londoners from hoardings everywhere.

Both her talent and her beauty were acknowledged. Her father being a journalist and her father's friends being journalists, she always received favourable "notices" in the Press, and managers knew well that if she were in their bill their "shows" would not be ignored. A line of news is worth a good deal as an advertisement, therefore Daisy--my own sweet-faced Daisy, whom I loved so well--was on her way to become chief among the "stars," with a salary of from £100 to £200 a week. There is great affinity between journalism and the stage, yet old Marvin had always openly expressed himself against Daisy marrying a Pressman--being ambitious enough to hope that her face and talent might attract some scion of a noble house. Therefore our love was a secret one, and I had often to resort to all sorts of ruses in order to meet her and talk with her alone.

But the little object I had just discovered, and the secret of which I kept to myself, caused me an agony of doubt, of wonder, of fear.

The revelation staggered me.

What I had found was my own portrait--the one I had given her a year ago! It was circular, about the size of a penny, enclosed in a small gold rim and attached to a fine golden chain. She wore it always beneath her dress, and she had many times told me that it never left her, save when she was compelled to discard it in her stage _décolleté_.

Why was it there, in that empty house of mystery?

Had both she and Julian Little some connection with the astounding affair?

I slipped the little trinket into my jacket pocket, and followed Whitlock downstairs like a man in a dream.

"Look!" he exclaimed, holding out the armful of tape to the telegraph clerk, who was seated near the instrument, idling over the morning newspaper. "I wish you'd just see what this is all about."

The man rose, but as he did so the instrument clicked again, and, quickly reseating himself at the table, he commenced to scribble the passing message.

"Good heavens!" he gasped, glancing up at us in utter surprise an instant later. "Listen! This is most extraordinary! There's some mystery here. What can it mean?"