CHAPTER XXXIV

Messrs. Trent & Son:Gentlemen—Please give the bearer my jewels—or such of them as are finished, if you have not done with all—that he may bring them to me immediately, as I have instant need of them.

Messrs. Trent & Son:

Gentlemen—Please give the bearer my jewels—or such of them as are finished, if you have not done with all—that he may bring them to me immediately, as I have instant need of them.

Yours faithfully,Margaret Larue.

This she passed over to the stage manager, with a request to “Please read that, Mr. Lampson, and certify over your signature that it is authentic, and that you vouch for having seen me write it.” After which she got up suddenly, and said as calmly as she could: “Mr. Super Master, I want to borrow one of your men to go on an important errand to Trent & Son for me. This one will do,” signalling out herbrother. “Spare him, please. This way, my man—come quickly!”

With that she suddenly caught up the note she had written—and which the stage manager had, as requested, certified—and, beckoning her brother to follow, walked hurriedly off the stage to a deserted point in the wings.

“Why have you done this dreadful thing?” she demanded in a low, fierce tone as soon as he came up with her. “Are you a fool as well as a knave that you come here and risk losing your only support by a thing like this?”

“I wanted to see you—I had to see you—and it was the only way,” he gave back in the same guarded tone. “The wife is dead. She died last night, and I’ve got to get money somewhere to bury her. I’d no one to send, since you’ve taken Ted away and sent him to school, so I had to come myself.”

The knowledge that it was for no more desperate reason than this that he had forced himself into her presence came as a great relief to Miss Larue. She hastened to get rid of him by sending him to Trent & Son with the note that she had written, and to tell him to carry the parcel that would be handed to him to the rooms she was occupying in Portman Square—and which she made up her mind to vacate the very next day—and there to wait until she came home from rehearsal.

He took the note and left the theatre at once, upon which Miss Larue, considerably relieved, returned to the duties in hand, and promptly banished all thought of him from her mind.

It was not until something like two hours afterward that he was brought back to mind in a somewhat disquieting manner.

“I say, Miss Larue,” said the stage manager as she came off after thrice rehearsing a particularly trying scene, and, with a weary sigh, dropped into a vacant chair at his table,“aren’t you worried about that chap you sent with the note to Trent & Son? There’s been time for him to go and return twice over, you know; and I observe that he’s not back yet. Aren’t you a bit uneasy?”

“No. Why should I be?”

“Well, for one thing, I should say it was an extremely risky business unless you knew something about the man. Suppose, for instance, he should make off with the jewels? A pretty pickle you’d be in with the parties from whom you borrowed them, by Jove!”

“Good gracious, you don’t suppose I sent him for the originals, do you?” said Miss Larue with a smile. “Trent & Sonwouldthink me a lunatic to do such a thing as that. What I sent him for was, of course, merely the paste replicas. The originals I shall naturally go for myself.”

“God bless my soul! The paste replicas, do you say?” blurted in Mr. Lampson excitedly. “Why, I thought—Trent & Son will be sure to think so themselves under the circumstances! They can’t possibly think otherwise.”

“‘Under the circumstances’? ‘Think otherwise’?” repeated Miss Larue, facing round upon him sharply. “What do you mean by that, Mr. Lampson? Good heavens! not that they could possibly be mad enough to give the man the originals?”

“Yes, certainly! Good Lord! what else can they think—what else can they give him? They sent the paste duplicates here by their own messenger this morning! They are in the manager’s office—in his safe—at this very minute; and I was going to bring them round to you as soon as the rehearsal is over!”

Consternation followed this announcement, of course. The rehearsal was called to an abrupt halt. Mr. Lampson and Miss Larue flew round to the front of the house in a sort of panic, got to the telephone, and rang up Trent & Son, who confirmed their worst fears. Yes, the man had arrivedwith the note from Miss Larue something over an hour ago, and they had promptly handed him over the original jewels. Not all of them, of course, but those which they had finished duplicating and of which they had sent the replicas to the theatre by their own messenger that morning. Surely that was what Miss Larue meant by the demand, was it not? No other explanation seemed possible after they had sent her the copies and—Good Lord! hadn’t heard about it? Meant the imitations? Heavens above, what an appalling mistake! What was that? The man? Oh, yes; he took the things after Mr. Trent, senior, had removed them from the safe and handed them over to him, and he had left Mr. Trent’s office directly he received them. Miss Larue could ascertain exactly what had been delivered to him by examining the duplicates their messenger had carried to the theatre.

Miss Larue did, discovering, to her dismay, that they represented a curious ruby necklace, of which the original had been lent her by the Duchess of Oldhampton, a stomacher of sapphires and pearls borrowed from the Marquise of Chepstow, and a rare Tudor clasp of diamonds and opals which had been lent to her by the Lady Margery Thraill.

In a panic she rushed from the theatre, called a taxi, and, hoping against hope, whirled off to her rooms at Portman Square. No Mr. James Colliver had been there. Nor did he come there ever. Neither did he return to the squalid home where his dead wife lay; nor did any of his cronies nor any of his old haunts see hide or hair of him from that time. Furthermore, nobody answering to his description had been seen to board any train, steamship, or sailing-vessel leaving for foreign parts, nor could there be found any hotel, lodging-house, furnished or even unfurnished apartment into which he had entered that day or upon any day thereafter.

In despair, Miss Larue drove to Scotland Yard and put the matter into the hands of the police, offering a reward of£1,000 for the recovery of the jewels; and through the medium of the newspapers promised Mr. James Colliver that she would not prosecute, but would pay that £1,000 over tohimif he would return the gems, that she might restore them to their rightful owners.

Mr. James Colliver neither accepted that offer nor gave any sign that he was aware of it. It was then that Scotland Yard, in the person of Cleek, stepped in to conduct the search for both man and jewels; and within forty-eight hours some amazing circumstances were brought to light.

First and foremost, Mr. Henry Trent, who said he had given the gems over to Colliver, and that the man had immediately left the office, was unable, through the fact of his son’s absence from town, to give any further proof of that statement than his own bare word; for there was nobody but himself in the office at the time, whereas the door porter, who distinctly remembered James Colliver’s entrance into the building, as distinctly remembered that up to the moment when evening brought “knocking-off time” James Colliver had never, to his certain knowledge, come out of it!

The next amazing fact to be unearthed was that one of the office cleaners had found tucked under the stairs leading up to the top floor a sponge, which had beyond all possible question been used to wipe blood from something and had evidently been tucked there in a great hurry. The third amazing discovery took the astonishing shape of finding in an East End pawnbroker’s shop every one of the missing articles, and positive proof that the man who had pledged them was certainly not in the smallest degree like James Colliver, but was evidently a person of a higher walk in life and more prosperous in appearance than the missing man had been since the days when he was a successful actor.

These circumstances Cleek had just brought to light when Miss Larue, having found the gems, determined to drop thecase, and refused thereafter so much as to discuss it with any living soul.

That her reason for taking this unusual step had something behind it which was of more moment than the mere fact that the jewels had been recovered and returned to their respective owners there could hardly be a doubt; for from that time onward her whole nature seemed to undergo a radical change, and, from being a brilliant, vivacious, cheery-hearted woman whose spirits were always of the highest and whose laughter was frequent, she developed suddenly into a silent, smileless, mournful one, who shrank from all society but that of her lost brother’s orphaned son, and who seemed to be oppressed by the weight of some unconfessed cross and the shadow of some secret woe.

Such were the facts regarding the singular Colliver case at the time when Cleek laid it down—unprobed, unsolved, as deep a mystery in the end as it had been in the beginning—and such they still were when, on this day, at this critical time and after an interval of eleven months, Mr. Maverick Narkom came to ask him to pick it up again.

“And with an element of fresh mystery added to complicate it more than ever, dear chap,” he declared, rather excitedly. “For, as the father vanished eleven months ago, so yesterday the son, too, disappeared. In the same manner—from the same point—in the selfsame building and in the same inexplicable and almost supernatural way! Only that in this instance the mystery is even more incomprehensible, more like ‘magic’ than ever. For the boy is known to have been shown by a porter into a room almost entirely surrounded by glass—a room whose interior was clearly visible to two persons who were looking into it at the time—and then and there to have completely vanished without anybody knowing when, where, or how.”

“What’s that?” rapped out Cleek, sitting up sharply. His interest had been trapped, just as Mr. Narkom knew that it would. “Vanished from a glass-room into which people were looking at the time? And yet nobody saw the manner of his going, do you say?”

“That’s it precisely. But the most astonishing part of the business is the fact that, whereas the porter can bring at least three witnesses to prove that he showed the boy into that glass-room, and at least one to testify that he heard him speak to the occupant of it, the two watchers who were looking into the place at the time are willing to swear on oath that he not only did not enter the place, but that the room was absolutely vacant at the period, and remained so for at least an hour afterward. If that isn’t a mystery that will want a bit of doing to solve, dear chap, then you may call me a Dutchman.”

“Hum-m-m!” said Cleek reflectively. “How, then, am I to regard the people who give this cross testimony—as lunatics or liars?”

“Neither, b’gad!” asseverated Narkom, emphatically. “I’ll stake my reputation upon the sanity and the truthfulness of every mother’s son and every father’s daughter of the lot of them! The porter who says he showed the boy into the glass-room I’ve known since he was a nipper—his dad was one of my Yard men years ago—and the two people who were looking into the place at the time, and who swear that it was absolutely empty and that the ladnevercame into it——Look here, old chap, I’ll let you into abit of family history. One of them is a distant relative of Mrs. Narkom—an aunt, in fact, who’s rather down in the world, and does a bit of dressmaking for a living. The other is her daughter. They are two of the straightest-living, most upright, and truly religious women that ever drew the breath of life, and they wouldn’t, either of ’em, tell a lie for all the money in England. There’s where the puzzle of the thing comes in. You simply havegotto believe that that porter showed the boy into that room, for there are reliable witnesses to prove it, and he has no living reason to lie about it; and you havegotto believe that those two women are speaking the truth when they say that it was empty at that period and remained empty for an hour afterward. Also—if you will take on the case and solve at the same time the mystery attending the disappearance of both father and son—you will have to find out where that boy went to, through whose agency he vanished, and for what cause.”

“A tall order that,” said Cleek with one of his curious, one-sided smiles. “Still, of course, mysteries which are humanly possible of creation are humanly possible of solution, and—there you are. Who is the client? Miss Larue? If so, how is one to be sure that she will not again call a halt, and spoil a good ‘case’ before it is halfway to completion?”

“For the best of reasons,” replied Narkom earnestly. “Hers is not the sole ‘say’ in the present case. Added to which, she is now convinced that her suspicions in the former one were not well grounded. The truth has come out at last, Cleek. She stopped all further inquiry into the mysterious disappearance of her brother because she had reason to believe that the elder Mr. Trent had killed him for the purpose of getting possession of those jewels to tide over a financial crisis consequent upon the failure of some heavy speculations upon the stock market. She held herpeace and closed up the case because she loves and is engaged to be married to his son, and she would have lost everything in the world sooner than hurt his belief in the honour and integrity of his father.”

“What a ripping girl! Gad, but therearesome splendid women in the world, are there not, Mr. Narkom? What has happened, dear friend, to change her opinion regarding the elder Mr. Trent’s guilt?”

“The disappearance of the son under similar circumstances to that of the father, and from the same locality. She knows now that the elder Mr. Trent can have no part in the matter, since he is at present in America, the financial crisis has been safely passed, and the son—who could have no possible reason for injuring the lad, who is, indeed, remarkably fond of him, and by whose invitation he visited the building—is solely in charge and as wildly anxious as man can be to have the abominable thing cleared up without delay. He now knows why she so abruptly closed up the other case, and he is determined that nothing under heaven shall interfere with the prosecution of this one to the very end. It is he who is the client, and both he and his fiancée will be here presently to lay the full details before you.”

“Here!” Cleek leaned forward in his chair with a sort of lunge as he flung out the word, and there was a snap in his voice that fairly stung. “Good heavens above, man! They mustn’t come here. Get word to them at once and stop them.”

“It wouldn’t be any use trying, I’m afraid, old chap; I expect they are here already. At all events, I told them to watch from the other side of the way until they saw me enter, and then to come in and go straightway to the public tearoom and wait until I brought you to them.”

“Well, of all the insane——Whatever prompted you to do a madman’s trick like that? A public characterlike Miss Larue, a woman whom half London knows by sight, who will be the target for every eye in the tearoom, and the news of whose presence in the hotel will be all over the place in less than no time! Were you out of your head?”

“Good lud! Why, I thought I’d be doing the very thing that would please you, dear chap,” bleated the superintendent, despairingly. “It seemed to me such a natural thing for an actress to take tea at a hotel—that it would look so innocent and open that nobody would suspect there was anything behind it. And you always say that things least hidden are hidden the most of all.”

Cleek struck his tongue against his teeth with a sharp, clicking sound indicative of mild despair. There were times when Mr. Narkom seemed utterly hopeless.

“Well, if it’s done, it’s done, of course; and there seems only one way out of it,” he said. “Nip down to the tearoom as quickly as possible, and if they are there bring them up here. It’s only four o’clock and there’s a chance that Waldemar may not have returned to the hotel yet. Heaven knows, I hope not! He’d spot you in a tick, in a weak disguise like that.”

“Then why don’t you go down yourself and fetch them up, old chap? He’d never spotyou. Lord! your own mother wouldn’t know you from Adam in this spiffing get-up. And it wouldn’t matter a tinker’s curse then if Waldemar was back or not.”

“It would matter a great deal, my friend—don’t deceive yourself upon that point. For one thing, Captain Maltravers is registered at the office as having just arrived from India after a ten years’ absence, and ten years ago Miss Margaret Larue was not only unknown to fame, but must have been still in pinafores, so how was he to have made her acquaintance? Then, too, she doesn’t expect to see me without you, so I should have to introduce myself and stop to explain matters—yes, and even risk her companiongetting excited and saying something indiscreet, and those are rather dangerous affairs in a public tearoom, with everybody’s eyes no doubt fixed upon the lady. No, you must attend to the matter yourself, my friend; so nip off and be about it. If the lady and her companion are there, just whisper them to say nothing, but follow you immediately. If they are not there, slip out and warn them not to come. Look sharp—the situation is ticklish!”

And just how ticklish Mr. Narkom realized when he descended and made his way to the public tearoom. For the usual four o’clock gathering of shoppers and sightseers was there in full force, the well-filled room was like a hive full of buzzing bees who were engaged in imparting confidences to one another, the name of “Margaret Larue” was being whispered here, there and everywhere, and all eyes were directed toward a far corner where at a little round table Margaret Larue herself sat in company with Mr. Harrison Trent engaged in making a feeble pretence of enjoying a tea which neither of them wanted and upon which neither was bestowing a single thought.

Narkom spotted them at once, made his way across the crowded room, said something to them in a swift, low whisper, and immediately became at once the most envied and most unpopular person in the whole assembly; for Miss Larue and her companion arose instantly and, leaving some pieces of silver on the table, walked out with him and robbed the room of its chief attraction.

All present had been deeply interested in the entire proceeding, but none more so than the tall, distinguished looking foreign gentleman seated all alone at the exactly opposite end of the room from the table where Miss Larue and her companion had been located; for his had been the tensest kind of interest from the very instant Mr. Narkom had made his appearance, and remained so to the last.

“Count Irma has told,” said Narkom. “It’s all out at last and ... I know now. I’m to lose you.”

“Count Irma has told,” said Narkom. “It’s all out at last and ... I know now. I’m to lose you.”

Even after the three persons had vanished from the room, he continued to stare at the doorway through which they had passed, and the rather elaborate tea he had ordered remained wholly untouched. A soft step sounded near him and a soft voice broke in upon his unspoken thoughts.

“Is not the tea to Monsieur’s liking?” it inquired with all the deference of the Continental waiter. And that awoke him from his abstraction.

“Yes—quite, thank you. By the way, that was Miss Larue who just left the room, was it not, Philippe?”

“Yes, Monsieur—the great Miss Larue: the most famous of all English actresses.”

“So I understand. And the lame man who came in and spoke to her—who is he? Not a guest of the hotel, I am sure, since I have never seen him here before.”

“I do not know, Monsieur, who the gentleman is. It shall be the first I shall see of him ever. It may be, however, that he is a new arrival. They would know at the office, if Monsieur le Baron desires me to inquire.”

“Yes—do. I fancy I have seen him before. Find out for me who he is.”

Philippe disappeared like a fleet shadow. After an absence of about two minutes, he came back with the desired intelligence.

“No, Monsieur le Baron, the gentleman is not a guest,” he announced. “But he is visiting a guest. The name is Yard. He arrived about a quarter of an hour ago and sent his card in to Captain Maltravers, who at once took him up to his room.”

“Captain Maltravers? So! That will be the military officer from India, will it not?”

“Yes, Monsieur; the one with the fair hair and moustache who lunched to-day at the table adjoining Monsieur le Baron’s own.”

“Ah, to be sure. And ‘passed the time of day’ with me, as they say in this peculiar language. I remember thegentleman perfectly. Thank you very much. There’s something to pay you for your trouble.”

“Monsieur le Baron is too generous! Is there any other service——”

“No, no—nothing, thank you. I have all that I require,” interposed the “Baron” with a gesture of dismissal.

And evidently he had; for five minutes later he walked into the office of the hotel, and said to the clerk, “Make out my bill, please—I shall be leaving England at once,” and immediately thereafter walked into a telephone booth, consulted his notebook, and rang up 253480 Soho, and, on getting it, began to talk rapidly and softly to some one who understood French.

Meantime Mr. Narkom, unaware of the little powder train he had unconsciously lighted, had gone on up the stairs with his two companions—purposely avoiding the lift that he might explain matters as they went—piloted them safely to the suite occupied by “Captain Maltravers,” and at the precise moment when “Baron Rodolf de Montravanne” walked into the telephone booth, Cleek was meeting Miss Larue for the first time since those distressing days of eleven months ago, and meeting Mr. Harrison Trent for the first time ever.

Cleek found young Trent an extremely handsome man of about three-and-thirty; of a highly strung, nervous temperament, and with an irritating habit of running his fingers through his hair when excited. Also, it seemed impossible for him to sit still for half a minute at a stretch; he must be constantly hopping up only to sit down again, and moving restlessly about as if he were doing his best to retain his composure and found it difficult with Cleek’s calm eyes fixed constantly upon him.

“I want to tell you something about that bloodstained sponge business, Mr. Cleek,” he said in his abrupt, jerky, uneasy manner. “I never heard a word about it until last night, when Miss Larue confessed her former suspicions of my dear old dad, and gave me all the details of the matter. That sponge had nothing to do with the affair at all. It was I that tucked it under the staircase where it was found, and I did so on the day before James Colliver’s disappearance. The blood that had been on it was mine, not his.”

“I see,” said Cleek, serenely. “The explanation, of course, is the good, old tried-and-true refuge of the story-writers—namely, a case of nose-bleeding, is it not?”

“Yes,” admitted Trent. “But with this difference: mine wasn’t an accidental affair at all—it was the result of getting a jolly good hiding; and I made an excuse to get away and hop out of town, so that the dad wouldn’t know about it nor see how I’d been battered. The fact is, I met one of our carmen in the upper hall. He was as drunk as alord, and when I took him to task about it and threatened him with discharge, he said something to me that I thought needed a jolly sight more than words by way of chastisement, so I nipped off my coat and sailed into him. It turned out that he was the better man, and gave me all that I’d asked for in less than a minute’s time; so I shook hands with him, told him to bundle off home and sleep himself sober, and that if he wouldn’t say anything about the matter I wouldn’t either, and he could turn up for work in the morning as usual. Then I washed up, shoved the sponge under the staircase, and nipped off out of town; because, you know, it would make a deuced bad impression if any of the other workmen should find out that a member of the firm had been thrashed by one of the employees—and Draycott had done me up so beautifully that I was a sight for the gods.”

The thing had been so frankly confessed that, in spite of the fact of having in the beginning been rather repelled by him, Cleek could not but experience a feeling of liking for the man. “So that’s how it happened, is it?” he said, with a laugh. “It is a brave man, Mr. Trent, that will resist the opportunity to make himself a hero in the presence of the lady he loves; and I hope I may be permitted to congratulate Miss Larue on the wisdom of her choice. But now, if you please, let us get down at once to the details of the melancholy business we have in hand. Mr. Narkom has been telling me the amazing story of the boy’s visit to the building and of his strange disappearance therein, but I should like to have a few further facts, if you will be so kind. What took the boy to the building, in the first place? I am told he went there upon your invitation, but I confess that that seems rather odd to me. Why should a man of business want a boy to visit him during business hours?”

“Good Lord, man! I couldn’t have let him see what he wanted to see if he didn’t come during business hours, couldI? But that’s rather ambiguous, so I’ll make haste to put it plainer. Young Stan—his Christian name is Stanley, as I suppose you know—young Stan is mad to learn the business of theatrical property making, and particularly that of the manufacture of those wax effigies, et cetera, which we supply for the use of drapers in their show windows; and as he is now sixteen and of an age to begin thinking ofsometrade or profession for the future, I thought it would save Miss Larue putting up a jolly big premium to have him taught outside if we took him into our business free, so I invited him to come and look round and see if he thought he’d like it when he came to look into the messy details.

“Well, he came rather late yesterday afternoon, and I’d taken him round for just about ten or a dozen minutes when word was suddenly brought to me that the representative of one of the biggest managers in the country had just called with reference to an important order, so, of course, I put back to the office as quickly as I could foot it, young Stan quite naturally following me, as he didn’t know his way about the place alone, and, being a modest, retiring sort of boy, didn’t like facing the possibility of blundering into what might prove to be private quarters, and things of that sort. He said as much to me at the time.

“Well, when I got back to the office, I soon found that the business with my visitor was a matter that would take some time to settle—you can’t give a man an estimate all on a jump, and without doing a bit of figuring, you know—so I told young Stan that he might cut off and go over the place on his own, if he liked, as it had been arranged that, when knocking-off time came, I was to go back with him to Miss Larue’s flat, where we all were to have supper together. When I told him that, he asked eagerly if he might go up to the wax-figure department, as he was particularly anxious to see Loti at work, and so——”

“Loti!” Cleek flung in the word so sharply that Trent gave a nervous start. “Just a moment, please, before you go any further, Mr. Trent. Sorry to interrupt, but, tell me, please: is the man who models your show-window effigies named Loti, then? Is, eh? Hum-m! Any connection by chance with that once famous Italian worker in wax, Giuseppe Loti—chap that used to make those splendid wax tableaux for the Eden Musée in Paris some eighteen or twenty years ago?”

“Same chap. Went all to pieces all of a sudden—clear off his head for a time, I’ve heard—in the very height of his career, because his wife left him. Handsome French woman—years younger than he—ran off with another chap and took every blessed thing of value she could lay her hands upon when—but maybe you’ve heard the story?”

“I have,” said Cleek. “It is one that is all too common on the Continent. Also, it happened that I was in Paris at the time of the occurrence. And so you have that great Giuseppe Loti at the head of your waxwork department, eh? What a come-down in the world for him! Poor devil! I thought he was dead ages ago. He dropped out suddenly and disappeared from France entirely after that affair with his unfaithful wife. The rumour was that he had committed suicide; although that seemed as improbable as it now turns out to be, in the face of the fact that on the night after his wife left him he turned up at the Café Royal and publicly——No matter! Go on with the case, please. What about the boy?”

“Let’s see, now, where was I?” said Trent, knotting up his brow. “Oh, ah! I recollect—just where he asked me if he could go up and see Loti at work. Of course, I said that he could; there wasn’t any reason why I shouldn’t, as the place is open to inspection always, so I opened the door and showed him the way to the staircase leading up to the glass-room, and then went to the speaking-tube and called up toLoti to expect him, and to treat him nicely, as he was the nephew of the great Miss Larue and would, in time, be mine also.”

“Was there any necessity for taking that precaution, Mr. Trent?”

“Yes. Loti has developed a dashed bad temper since last autumn and is very eccentric, very irritable—not a bit like the solemn, sedate old johnnie he used to be. Even his work has deteriorated, I think, but one daren’t criticise it or he flies into a temper and threatens to leave.”

“And you don’t wish him to, of course—his name must stand for something.”

“It stands for a great deal. It’s one of our biggest cards. We can command twice as much for a Loti figure as for one made by any other waxworker. So we humour him in his little eccentricities and defer to him a great deal. Also, as he prefers to live on the premises, he saves us money in other ways. Serves for a watchman as well, you understand.”

“Oh, he lives on the premises, does he? Where? In the glass-room?”

“Oh, no; that would not be possible. The character as well as the position of that renders it impossible as a place of habitation. He uses it after hours as a sort of sitting-room, to be sure, and has partly fitted it up as one, but he sleeps, eats, and dresses in a room on the floor below.”

“Not an adjoining one?”

“Oh, no; an adjoining room would be an impossibility. Our building is an end one, standing on the corner of a short passage which leads to nothing but a narrow alley running along parallel with the back of our premises, and the glass-room covers nearly the entire roof of it. As a matter of fact, Mr. Cleek, although we call it that at the works, the term Glass Room is a misnomer. In reality, it’s nothing more nor less than a good sized ‘lean-to’ greenhouse thatthe dad bought and had taken up there in sections, and its rear elevation rests against the side wall of a still higher building than ours, next door—the premises of Storminger the carriage builder, to be exact. But look here: perhaps I can make the situation clearer by a rough sketch. Got a lead pencil and a bit of paper, anybody? Oh, thanks very much, dear. One can always rely uponyou. Now, look here, Mr. Cleek—this is the way of it. You mustn’t mind if it’s a crude thing, because, you know, I’m a rotten bad draughtsman and can’t draw for nuts. But all the same, this will do at a pinch.”

Here he leaned over the table in the centre of the room and, taking the pencil and the blank back of the letter which Miss Larue had supplied, made a crude outline sketch thus:

group of houses

“There you are,” he said suddenly, laying the crude drawing on the table before Cleek, and with him bending over it. “You are supposed to be looking at the housesfrom the main thoroughfare, don’t you know, and, therefore, at the front of them. This tall building on the left marked 1 is Storminger’s; the low one, number 2, adjoining, is ours; and that cagelike-looking thing, 3, on the top of it, is the glass-room. Now, along the front of it here, where I have put the long line with an X on the end, there runs a wooden partition with a door leading into the room itself, so that it’s impossible for anybody on the opposite side of the main thoroughfare to see into the place at all. But that is not the case with regard to people living on the opposite side of the short passage (this is here, that I’ve marked 4), because there’s nothing to obstruct the view but some rubbishy old lace curtains which Loti, in his endeavour to make the place what he calls homelike, would insist upon hanging, andtheyare so blessed thin that anybody can look right through them and see all over the place. Of course, though, there are blinds, which he can pull down on the inside if the sun gets too strong; and when they are down, nobody can see into the glass-room at all. Pardon? Oh, we had it constructed of glass, Mr. Narkom, because of the necessity for having all the light obtainable in doing the minute work on some of the fine tableaux we produce for execution purposes. We are doing one now—The Relief of Lucknow—for the big exhibition that’s to be given next month at Olympia and——The place marked 6 at the back of our building? Oh, that’s the narrow alley of which I spoke. We’ve a back door opening into it, but it’s practically useless, because the alley is so narrow one can’t drive a vehicle through it. It’s simply a right of way that can’t legally be closed and runs from Croom Street on the right just along as far as Sturgiss Lane on the left. Not fifty people pass through it in a day’s time.

“But to come back to the short passage, Mr. Cleek. Observe, there are no windows at all on the side of our building, here: Number 2. There were, once upon a time, but wehad them bricked up, as we use that side for a ‘paint frame’ with a movable bridge so that it can be used for the purpose of painting scenery and drop-curtains. But therearewindows in the side of the house marked 5; and directly opposite the point where I’ve put the arrow there is one which belongs to a room occupied by a Mrs. Sherman and her daughter—people who do ‘bushel work’ for wholesale costume houses. Now, it happens that at the exact time when the porter says he showed young Stan into the glass-room those two women were sitting at work by that window, and, the blinds not being drawn, could see smack into the place, and are willing to take their oath that there was no living soul in it.”

“How do they fix it as being, as you say,‘the exact time,’ Mr. Trent? If they couldn’t see the porter come up to the glass-room with the boy, how can they be sure of that?”

“Oh, that’s easily explained: There’s a church not a great way distant. It has a clock in the steeple which strikes the hours, halves, and quarters. Mrs. Sherman says that when it chimed half-past four she was not only looking into the glass-room, but was calling her daughter’s attention to the fact that, whereas some few minutes previously she had seen Loti go out of the place, leaving a great pile of reference plates and scraps of material all over the floor, and he had never, to her positive knowledge, come back into it, there was the room looking as tidy as possible, and, in the middle of it, a table with a vase of pink roses upon it, which she certainly had not seen there when he left.”

“Hallo! Hallo!” interjected Cleek rather sharply. “Let’s have that again, please!” and he sat listening intently while Trent repeated the statement; then, of a sudden, he gave his head an upward twitch, slapped his thigh, and, leaning back in his seat, added with a brief little laugh, “Well, of all the blithering idiots! And a simple little thing like that!”

“Like what, Mr. Cleek?” queried Trent, in amazement. “You don’t surely mean to say that you can make anything important out of a table and a vase of flowers? Because, I may tell you that Loti is mad on flowers, and always has a vase of them in the room somewhere.”

“Does he, indeed? Natural inclination of the artistic temperament, I dare say. But never mind, get on with the story. Mrs. Sherman fixes the hour when she noticed this as half-past four, you say? How, then, does the porter who showed the boy into the glass-room fix it, may I ask?”

“By the same means precisely—the striking of the church clock. He remembers hearing it just as he reached the partition door, and was, indeed, at particular pains to take out his watch to see if it tallied with it. Also, three of our scene painters were passing along the hall at the foot of the short flight of steps leading up to the glass-room at the time. They were going out to tea; and one of them sang out to him laughingly, ‘Hallo, Ginger, how does that two-shilling turnip of yours make it? Time for tea at Buckingham Palace?’ for he had won the watch at a singing contest only the night before, and his mates had been chaffing him about it all day. In that manner the exact time of his going to the door with the boy is fixed, and with three persons to corroborate it. A second later the porter saw the boy push open the swing-door and walk into the place, and as he turned and went back downstairs he distinctly heard him say, ‘Good afternoon, sir. Mr. Trent said I might come up and watch, if you don’t mind.’”

“Did he hear anybody reply?”

“No, he did not. He heard no one speak but the boy.”

“I see. So, then, there is no actual proof that Lotiwasin there at the time, which, of course, makes the testimony of Mrs. Sherman and her daughter appear reliable when they say that the room was empty.”

“Still the boy was there if Loti wasn’t, Mr. Cleek.There’s proof enough that he did go into the place even though those two women declare that the room was empty.”

“Quite so, quite so. And when two and two don’t make four, ‘there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.’ What does Loti himself say with regard to the circumstance? Or hasn’t he been spoken to about it?”

“My hat, yes! I went to him about it the very first thing. He says the boy never put in an appearance, tohisknowledge; that he never saw him. In fact, that just before half-past four he was taken with a violent attack of sick headache, the result of the fumes rising from the wax he was melting to model figures for the tableau, together with the smell of the chemicals used in preparing the background, and that he went down to his room to lie down for a time and dropped off to sleep. As a matter of fact, he was there in his room sleeping when, at half-past six, I went for the boy, and, finding the glass-room vacated, naturally set out to hunt up Loti and question him about the matter.”

“When you called up to the glass-room through the speaking-tube, to say that the boy was about to go up, who answered you—Loti?”

“Yes.”

“At what time was that? Or can’t you say positively?”

“Not to the fraction of a moment. But I should say that it was about four or five minutes before the boy got there—say about five-and-twenty minutes past four. It wouldn’t take him longer to get up to the top of the house, I fancy, and he certainly did not stop at any of the other departments on the way.”

“Queer, isn’t it, that the man should not have stopped to so much as welcome the boy after you had been at such pains to tell him to be nice to him? Does he offer any explanation on that score?”

“Yes. He says that, as his head was so bad, he knew that he would probably be cross and crotchety; so as I hadasked him to be kind, he thought the best thing he could do was to leave a note on the table for the boy, telling him to make himself at home and to examine anything he pleased, but to be sure not to touch the cauldron in which the wax was simmering, as it tilted readily and he might get scalded. He was sorry to have to go, but his head ached so badly that he really had to lie down for a while.

“That note, I may tell you, was lying on the table when I went up to the glass-room and failed to find the boy. It was that which told me where to go in order to find Loti and question him. I’ll do him the credit of stating that when he heard of the boy’s mysterious disappearance he flung his headache and his creature comforts to the winds and joined in the eager hunt for him as excitedly and as strenuously as anybody. He went through the building from top to bottom; he lifted every trapdoor, crept into every nook and corner and hole and box into which it might be possible for the poor little chap to have fallen. But it was all useless, Mr. Cleek—every bit of it! The boy had vanished, utterly and completely; from the minute the porter saw him pass the swing-door and go into the glass-room we never discovered even the slightest trace of him, nor have we been able to do so since. He has gone, he has vanished, as completely as if he had melted into thin air, and if there is any ghost of a clue to his whereabouts existing——”

“Let us go and see if we can unearth it,” interrupted Cleek, rising. “Mr. Narkom, is the limousine within easy reach?”

“Yes, waiting in Tavistock Street, dear chap. I told Lennard to be on the lookout for us.”

“Good! Then if Miss Larue will allow Mr. Trent to escort her as far as the pavement, and he will then go on alone to his place of business and await us there, you and I will leave the hotel by the back way and join him as soonas possible. Leave by the front entrance if you be so kind; and—pardon, one last word, Mr. Trent, before you go. At the time when this boy’s father vanished in much the same way, eleven months ago, you had, I believe, a door porter at your establishment name Felix Murchison. Is that man still in your employ?”

“No, Mr. Cleek. He left about a week or so after James Colliver’s disappearance.”

“Know where he is?”

“Not the slightest idea. As a matter of fact, he suddenly inherited some money, and said he was going to emigrate to America. But I don’t know if he did or not. Why?”

“Oh, nothing in particular—only that I shouldn’t be surprised if the person who supplied that money was the pawnbroker who received in pledge the jewels which your father handed over to James Colliver, and that the sum which Felix Murchison ‘inherited’ so suddenly was the £150 advanced upon those gems.”

“How utterly absurd! My dear Mr. Cleek, you must surely remember that the pawnbroker said the chap who pawned the jewels was a gentlemanly appearing person, of good manners and speech, and Murchison is the last man in the world to answer to that description. A great hulking, bull-necked, illiterateanimalof that sort, without an H in his vocabulary and with no more manners than a pig!”

“Precisely why I feel so certainnowthat the pawnbroker’s ‘advance’ was paid over tohim,” said Cleek, with a twitch of the shoulder. “Live and learn, my friend, live and learn. Eleven months ago I couldn’t for the life of me understand why those jewels had been pawned at all; to-day I realize that it was the only possible course. Miss Larue, my compliments. Au revoir.” And he bowed her out of the room with the grace of a courtier, standing well out of sight from the hallway until the door had closed behind herand her companion and he was again alone with the superintendent.

“Now for it! as they used to say in the old melodramas,” he laughed, stepping sharply to a wardrobe and producing, first, a broad-brimmed cavalry hat, which he immediately put on, and then a pair of bright steel handcuffs. “We may have use for this very effective type of wristlets, Mr. Narkom; so it’s well to go prepared for emergencies. Now then, off with you while I lock the door. That’s the way to the staircase. Nip down it to the American bar. There’s a passage from that leading out to the Embankment Gardens. A taxi from there will whisk us along Savoy Street, across the Strand and up Wellington Street to Tavistock in less than no time; so we may look to be with Lennard inside of another ten minutes.”

“Righto!” gave back the superintendent. “And I can get rid of this dashed rig as soon as we’re in the limousine. But, I say; any ideas, old chap—eh?”

“Yes, two or three. One of them is that this is going to be one of the simplest cases I ever tackled. Lay you a sovereign to a sixpence, Mr. Narkom, that I solve the riddle of that glass-room before they ring up the curtain of any theatre in London to-night. What’s that? Lying? No, certainly not. There’s been no lying in the matter at all; it isn’t a case of that sort. The pawnbroker did not lie; the porter who says he showed the boy into the room did not lie; and the two women who looked into it and saw nothing but an empty room did not lie either. The only thing thatdidlie was a vase of pink roses—a bunch of natural Ananiases that tried to make people believe that they had been blooming and keeping fresh ever since last August!”

“Good Lord! you don’t surely think that that Loti chap——”

“Gently, gently, my friend; don’t let yourself get excited. Besides, Imaybe all at sea, for all my cocksureness. Idon’t think I am, but—one never knows. I’ll tell you one thing, however: The man with whom Madame Loti eloped had, for the purpose of carrying on the intrigue, enlisted as a student under her husband, and gulled the poor fool by pretending that he wished to learn waxwork making, when his one desire was to make love to the man’s worthless wife. When they eloped, and Loti knew for the first time what a dupe he had been, he publicly swore, in the open room of the Café Royal, that he would never rest until he had run that man down and had exterminated him and every living creature in whose veins his blood flowed. The man was an English actor, Mr. Narkom. He posed under thenom de théâtreof Jason Monteith—his real name was James Colliver! Step livelier, please—we’re dawdling!”

They that climb the highest have the farthest to fall.

It was after five o’clock when the limousine arrived at the premises of Trent & Son, and Cleek, guided by the junior member of the firm and accompanied by Superintendent Narkom, climbed the steep stairs to the housetop and was shown into the glass-room.

His first impression, as the door swung inward, was of a scent of flowers so heavy as to be oppressive; his second, of entering into a light so brilliant that it seemed a very glare of gold, for the low-dropped sun, which yellowed all the sky, flooded the place with a radiance which made him blink, and it was some little time before his eyes could accustom themselves to it sufficient to let him discover that the old Italian waxworker was there, busy on his latest tableau.

Cleek blinked and looked at the old man, serenely at first, then blinked and looked again, conscious of an overwhelming sense of amazement and defeat for just one fraction of a minute, and that some of his cocksure theories regarding the case had suddenly been knocked into a cocked hat.

No wonder Mr. Harrison Trent had spoken of deterioration in the art of this once celebrated modeller. No wonder!

The man was not Giuseppe Loti at all!—not that world-famed worker in wax who had sworn in those bitter other days to have the life of the vanished James Colliver.

Cleek’s equanimity did not desert him, however. It was one of his strong points that he always kept his mental balance even when his most promising theories were deracinated. He therefore showed not the slightest trace of the disappointment with which this utterly unexpected discovery had filled him, but, with the most placid exterior imaginable, suffered himself to be introduced to the old waxworker, who was at the time working assiduously upon the huge tableau-piece designed for the forthcoming Indian Exhibition, a well-executed assembly of figures which occupied a considerable portion of the rear end of the glass-room, and represented that moment when the relief force burst through the stockade at Lucknow and came to the rescue of the beleaguered garrison.

“A couple of gentlemen from Scotland Yard, Loti, who have come to look into the matter of young Colliver’s disappearance,” was the way in which Trent made that introduction. “You can go on with your work; they won’t interfere with you.”

“Welcome, gentlemen—most welcome,” said Loti, with that courtesy which Continental people never quite forget; then nodded, and went on with his work as he had been told, adding, with a mournful shake of the head: “Ah! a strange business that, signori; an exceedingly strange business.”

“Very,” agreed Cleek off-handedly and from the other end of the room. “Rippin’ quarters, these, signor; and now that I’ve seen ’em I don’t mind confessing that my pettheory has gone all to smash and I’m up a gum-tree, so to speak. I’d an idea, you know, that there might be a sliding-panel or a trapdoor which you chaps here might have overlooked, and down which the boy might have dropped, or maybe gone on a little explorin’ expedition of his own, don’t you know, and hadn’t been able to get back.”

“Well, of all the idiotic ideas—,” began Trent, but was suffered to get no further.

“Yes, isn’t it?” agreed Cleek, with his best blithering-idiot air. “I realize that, now that I see your floor’s of concrete. Necessary, I suppose, on account of the chemicals and the inflammable nature of the wax? You could have a rippin’ old flare-up here if that stuff was to catch fire from a dropped match or anything of that sort—eh, what? Blest if I can see”—turning slowly on his heel and looking all round the room—“a ghost of a place where the young nipper could have got. It’s a facer for me. But, I say”—as if suddenly struck with an idea—“you don’t think that he nipped something valuable and cut off with it, do you? Didn’t miss any money or anything of that sort which you’d left lying about, did you, Mr.—er—Lotus, eh?”

“Loti, if you please, signor. I had indeed hoped that my name was well known enough to—Pouffe!No, I miss nothing—I miss not so much as a pin. I am told he shall not have been that kind of a boy.” And then, with a shake of the head and a pitying glance toward the author of these two asinine theories regarding the strange disappearance, returned to his work of putting the finishing touches to a recumbent figure representing a dead soldier lying in the foreground of the tableau.

“Oh, well, you never can tell what boys will do; and it’s an old saying that ‘a good booty makes many a thief,’” replied Cleek airily. “Reckon I’ll have to hunt up something a bit more promising, then. Don’t mind my poking about a bit, do you?”

“Not in the slightest, signor,” replied the Italian, and glanced sympathizingly up at Trent and gave his shoulders a significant shrug, as if to say: “Is this the best that Scotland Yard can turn out?” when Cleek began turning over costume plates and looking under books and scraps of material which lay scattered about the floor, and even took to examining the jugs and vases and tumblers in which the signor’s bunches of cut flowers were placed. There were many of them—on tables and chairs and shelves, and even on the platform of the tableau itself—so many, in fact, that he was minded, by their profusion, of what Trent had said regarding the old waxworker’s great love of flowers.

He looked round the room, in an apparently perfunctory manner, but in reality with a photographic eye for its every detail, finding that it agreed in every particular with the description which Trent had given him.

There were the cheap lace curtains all along the glazed side which overlooked the short passage leading down to the narrow alley, but they were of so thin a quality, and so scantily patterned, that the mesh did not obstruct the view in any manner, merely rendering it a trifle hazy; for he could himself see from where he stood the window in the side of the house opposite, and, seated at that window, Mrs. Sherman and her daughter, busy at their endless sewing.

And there, too, were the blinds—strong blue linen ones running on rings and cords—with which, as he had been told, it was possible to arrange the light as occasion required. They were fashioned somewhat after the manner of those seen in the studios of photographers—several sectional ones overhead and one long one for that side of the room which overlooked the short passage; and, as showing how minute was Cleek’s inspection for all its seeming indifference, it may be remarked that he observed a peculiarity regarding that long blind which not one person in a hundred would have noticed. That is to say, that, whereas, whenone looks at a window from the interior of a room, one invariably finds that the blinds are against the glass, and that the curtains are so hung as to be behind them when viewed from the street, here was a case of the exactly opposite arrangement being put into force; to wit: It was the lace curtains which hung against the window panes and the big blind which was next the room, so that, if pulled down, a person standing within would see no lace curtains at all, while at the same time they would remain distinctly visible to anybody standing without.

If this small discrepancy called for any comment, Cleek made none audibly; merely glanced at the blind and glanced away again, and went on examining the books and the vases of flowers, and continued his apparently aimless wandering about the room.

Of a sudden, however, he did a singular thing, one which was fraught with much significance to Mr. Narkom, who knew the “signs” so well. His wandering had brought him within touching distance of the busy waxworker, who, just at that moment, half turned and stretched forth his hand to pick up a tool which had fallen to the floor, the act of recovering which sent his wrist protruding a bit beyond the cuff of his working-blouse. What Narkom saw was the quick twitch of Cleek’s eye in the direction of that hand, then its swift travelling to the man’s face and travelling off again to other things; and he knew what was coming when his great ally began to pat his pockets and rummage about his person as if endeavouring to find something.

“My luck!” said Cleek, with an impatient jerk of the head. “Not a blessed cigarette with me, Mr. Narkom; and you know what a duffer I am if I can’t smoke when I’m trying to think. I say—nip out, will you, and get me a packet? There!”—scribbling something on a leaf from his notebook and pushing it into the superintendent’shand—“that’s the brand I like. It’s no use bringing me any other. Look ’em up for me, will you? There’s a good friend.”

Narkom made no reply, but merely left the room with the paper crumpled in his shut hand and went downstairs as fast as he could travel. What he did in the interval is a matter for further consideration. At present it need only be said that had any one looked across the short passage some eight or ten minutes after his departure Narkom might have been seen standing in the background of the room at whose window Mrs. Sherman and her daughter still sat sewing.

Meanwhile Cleek appeared to have forgotten all about the matter which was the prime reason for his presence in the place and to have become absorbingly interested in the business of tableau making, for he plied the old Italian with endless questions relative to the one he was engaged in constructing.

“Jip! You don’t mean to tell me that you make the whole blessed thing yourself, do you—model the figures, group ’em, paint the blessed background, and all?” said he, with yokel-like amazement. “Youdo? My hat! but you’re a wonder! That background’s one of the best I’ve ever clapped eyes on. And the figures! I could swear that that fellow bursting in with a sword in his hand was alive if I didn’t know better; and as for this dead johnnie here in the foreground that you’re working on, he’s a marvel. What do you stuff the blessed things with? Or don’t you stuff ’em at all?”

“Oh, yes, signor, they are stuffed, all of them. There is a wicker framework covered with canvas; and inside cotton waste, old paper, straw.”

“You don’t mean it! Well, I’m blest! Nothing but waste stuff and straw? Why, that fellow over there—the Sepoy chap with the gun in his hands——Oh, good Lord!just my blessed luck! I hope to heaven I haven’t spoilt anything!” For, in leaning over to indicate the figure alluded to, he had blundered against the edge of the low platform, lost his balance, and sprawled over so awkwardly and abruptly that, but for the fact that the figure of the dead soldier was there for his hand to fall upon in time to check it, he must have pitched headlong into the very heart of the tableau, and done no end of damage. Fortunately, however, not a figure had been thrown down, and even the “dead soldier” had stood the shock uncommonly well, not even a dent showing, though Cleek had come down rather heavily and his palm had struck smack on the figure’s chest.

“Tut! tut! tut! tut!” exclaimed the Italian with angry impatience. “Oh, do have a little care, signor! The bull in a china-shop is alone like this.” And he turned his back upon this stupid blunderer, even though Cleek was profuse in his apologies, and looked as sorry as he declared. After a time, however, he went off on another tack, for his quick-travelling glance had shown him Mr. Narkom in the house across the passage, and he turned on his heel and walked away rapidly.

“Tell you what it is: it’s this blessed glare of light that’s accountable,” he said. “A body’s likely to stumble over anything with the light streaming into the place in this fashion. What you want in here is a bit of shade—like this.”

Here he crossed the room hastily and, reaching up, pulled down the long window blind with a sudden jerk. But before either Trent or the Italian could offer any objection to this interference with the conditions under which the waxworker chose to conduct his labours, he seemed, himself, to realize that the proceeding did not mend matters, and, releasing his hold upon the blind, let the spring of the roller carry it up again to its original position. As he did this he said with a peculiarly asinine air:

“That’s a bit worse than the other, by Jip! Makes the blessed place too dashed dark altogether; so it’s not the light that’s to blame after all.”

“I should have thought even a fool might have known that!” gave back the waxworker, almost savagely. “The light is poor enough as it is. Look for yourself. It is only the afterglow—and even that is already declining.Pouffe!” And here, as if in disgust too great for words, he blew the breath from his lips with a sharp, short gust, and facing about again went back to his work on the tableau.

Cleek made no response; nor yet did Trent. By this time even he had begun to think that accident more than brains must have been at the bottom of the man’s many successes; that he was, in reality, nothing more than a blundering muddler; and, after another ten minutes of putting up with his crazy methods, had just made up his mind to appeal to Narkom for the aid of another detective, when the end which was all along being prepared came with such a rush that it fairly made his head swim.

All that he was ever able clearly to recall of it was that there came a sudden sound of clattering footsteps rushing pell-mell up the staircase; that the partition door was flung open abruptly to admit Mr. Maverick Narkom, with three or four of the firm’s employees pressing close upon his heels; that the superintendent had but just cried out excitedly, “Yes, man,yes!” when there arose a wild clatter of falling figures, a snarl, a scuffle, a cry, and that, when he faced round in the direction of it, there was the Lucknow tableau piled up in a heap of fallen scenery and smashed waxworks, and in the middle of the ruin there was the “signor” lying on his back with a band of steel upon each wrist, and over him Cleek, with a knee on the man’s chest and the look of a fury in his eyes, crying aloud: “Come out of it! Come out of it, you brute-beast! Your little dodge has failed!”

And hard on the heels of that shock Mr. Trent receivedanother. For of a sudden he saw Cleek pluck a wig from the man’s head and leave a white line showing above the place where the joining paste once had met the grease paint with which the fellow’s face was coloured, and heard him say as he tossed that wig toward him and rose, “Out of your own stage properties, Mr. Trent—borrowed to be returned like this.”

“Heaven above, man,” said Trent in utter bewilderment, “what’s the meaning of it all? Who is that man, then, since it’s clear he’s not Loti?”

“A very excellent actor in his day, Mr. Trent; his name is James Colliver,” replied Cleek. “I came to this place fully convinced that Loti had murdered him; I now know that he murdered Loti, and that to that crime he has added a yet more abominable one by killing his own son!”

“It’s a lie! It’s a lie! I didn’t! I didn’t! I never saw the boy!” screeched out Colliver in a very panic of terror. “I’ve never killed any one. Loti sold out to me! Loti went back to France. I pawned the jewels to get the money to pay him to go.”

“Oh, no, you didn’t, my friend,” said Cleek. “You performed that operation to shut Felix Murchison’s mouth—the one man who could swear, and did swear, that James Colliver never left this building on the day of his disappearance, and who probably would have said more if you hadn’t made it worth his while to shut his mouth and to disappear. You and I know, my friend, that Loti was the last man on this earth with whom you could come to terms upon anything. He had publicly declared that he would have your life, and he’d have kept his word if you hadn’t turned the tables and killed him. You stole his wife, and you were never even man enough to marry her even though she had borne you a son and clung to you to the end, poor wretch! You killed Loti, and you killed your own son. No doubt he is better off, poor little chap, to be dead and gone rather thanto live with the shadow of illegitimacy upon him; and no doubt, either, that when he came up here yesterday to meet Giuseppe Loti, he saw what I saw to-day, and knew you as I knew you then—the scar on the wrist, which was one of the marks of identification given me at the time I was sent to hunt you up! And you killed him to shut his mouth.”

“I didn’t! I didn’t!” he protested wildly. “I never saw him. He wasn’t here. The women in the house across the way will swear that they saw the empty room.”

“Not now!” declared Cleek, with emphasis. “I’ve convinced them to the contrary. Mr. Trent, let a couple of your men come over here and take charge of this fellow, please, and I will convince you as well. That’s right, my lads. Lay hold of the beggar and don’t let him get a chance to make a dash for the stairs. Got him fast, have you? Good! Now then, Mr. James Colliver,thisis what those deluded women saw—this little dodge, which is going to help Jack Ketch to come into his own.”

Speaking, he walked rapidly across to the long blind, pulled it down to its full length, then with a wrench tore it wholly from the roller and whirled it over, so that they who were within could now see the outer side.

It bore, painted upon it, a perfect representation of the interior of the glass-room, even to the little spindle-legged table with a vase of pink roses upon it whichnowstood at that room’s far end.

“A clever idea, Colliver, and a good piece of painting,” he said. “It took me in once—last August—just as it took in Mrs. Sherman and her daughter yesterday. The mistiness of the lace curtains falling over it lent just the effect of ‘distance’ that was required to perfect the illusion and to prevent anybody from detecting the paint. As for the boy——Gently, lads, gently! Don’t let the beggar in his struggles make you step on that ‘dead soldier.’ Under the thick coating of wax a human body lies—the boy’s!Hullo! Gone off his balance, eh, at the knowledge that the game is entirely up?” This as Colliver, with a terrible cry, collapsed suddenly and fell to the floor shrieking and grovelling. “They are a cowardly lot these brute-beast men when it comes to the wall and the final corner. Mr. Trent, break this to Miss Larue as gently as you can. She has suffered a great deal, poor girl, and it is bound to be a shock. She doesn’t know that the woman he called his wife never really was his wife; she doesn’t know about Loti or his threat. If she had she’d have told me, and I might have got on the trail in the first case instead of waiting to pick it up like this.”

He paused and held up his hand. Through all this Colliver had not once ceased grovelling and screaming; but it was not his cries that had drawn that gesture from Cleek. It was the sound of some one racing at top speed up the outer stairs, and with it the jar of many excited voices mingled in a babble of utter confusion.

The door of the glass-room swung inward abruptly, and the head bookkeeper looked in, with a crowd of clerks behind him.

“Mr. Trent, sir, whatever is the matter? Is anybody hurt? I never heard such screams. The whole place is ringing with them and there’s a crowd gathering about the door.”

Cleek left the junior partner to explain the situation, stepped to the side of the glass-room, looked down, saw that the statement was quite true, and—stepped sharply back again.

“We shall have to defer removing our prisoner until it gets dark, I fancy, Mr. Narkom,” he said, serenely. “And with Mr. Trent’s permission we will make use of the door leading into the alley at the back when that time comes. Bookkeeper!”

“Yes, sir?”

“You might explain to the constable on duty in the neighbourhood—if he comes to inquire, that is—the cause of the disturbance, and that Scotland Yard is in charge and Superintendent Narkom already on the premises. That’s all, thank you. You may close the door and take your colleagues below. Hullo! our prisoner seems to be subsiding into something akin to gibbering idiocy, Mr. Trent. Fright has turned his brain, apparently. Let us make use of the respite from his shrieks. You will, of course, wish to hear how I got on the track of the man, and what were the clues which led up to the solving of the affair. Well, you shall. Sit down, and while we are waiting for the darkness to come I’ll give you the complete explanation.”

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