CHAPTER XIN ROOM NUMBER EIGHTEEN
Onthe second landing I rapped at the door of room Number 18, feeling considerable pleasure at the thought of giving my whilom friend an unwelcome surprise.
There was no reply, but I fancied I heard a movement inside. I listened eagerly.
I knocked again. Yes. I felt sure someone was within, but my knock met with no response.
A third time I knocked and more loudly, but to no avail. I tried the door—it was locked.
Five times I hammered with my fist, but there being no answer I descended the stairs and found Mr. Seton.
“But he must be up there if his door is locked,” he said. “He never takes his key but always leaves it on the peg here,” and he indicated a board on the wall in a little box-like room off the hall where visitors left their keys. To each key was attached a bulky ball of wood, in order that the key should not be carried away accidentally in the pocket.
With the landlord I reascended the stairs andSeton knocked at the door, calling his guest by name. But there was still no response.
“Do you know, I believe I heard somebody inside when I first knocked,” I remarked.
Seton bent and peered through the keyhole.
“At any rate the door is locked on the inside,” he said.
Then he thundered at the door, after which we both listened. There was no sound, but I thought I detected the smell of burning paper.
All the other guests were apparently out at the time, for the noise we made attracted only the servants.
“Baker!” Seton cried to a man who was in his shirtsleeves and wore an apron of green baize, “we must force this door. There’s a crow-bar down in the cellar. Go and get it.”
As the man addressed ran downstairs, the ex-butler turned to me with a scared expression upon his face, saying——
“This is very peculiar, sir. Why has he locked himself in like this? Did you really hear a noise?”
“Yes. I am sure I did, yet with the roar of the traffic out in the road, I really couldn’t quite swear to it,” was my reply.
“What I heard was like a man bustling about hurriedly, and yet trying to make no noise.”
“Surely he can’t have fainted--or--or committed suicide!” Seton remarked.
For a few minutes we stood outside the door utterly mystified, until the porter brought us a rusty bar of iron about three feet long, curved and flattened at the end—a very serviceable crow-bar.
This, Seton inserted between the door and the jamb, close to the lock, and then drew it back slowly. The woodwork groaned, creaked and cracked and with a sudden jerk the wood round the mortice lock tore away and the door flew open.
We stood amazed. The room was empty.
In a few seconds we had searched the big old-fashioned wardrobe and had looked beneath the bed and behind the curtains. But nobody was there. And, moreover, while the key was still in the door on the inside the window was closed and latched!
The fireplace was a small one with a flue through which not even a small boy could pass. In the grate were smoldering ashes of something, apparently a coat that had been hastily burned. There was an odor of consumed petrol, and it occurred to me at once that some clothing had been hurriedly saturated from a bottle of motor-spirit and set fire to—for the room was still heavy with smoke.
Seton crossed to the window and saw at once that it had not been opened. I glanced out and down. From the narrow window-sill there was asheer drop to the paved basement forty or fifty feet below with not even a stackpipe by which an active man might have escaped.
“Well, this is extraordinary,” cried Seton. “How could Mr. Graydon possibly get out of the room and leave it still locked on the inside?”
Seton bent suddenly over the fireplace. “Well, we may as well see what he was burning,” he said as he picked up a half charred piece of paper that had apparently been crumpled up hastily and thrown into the grate. He smoothed it out and looked at it in amazement.
It was a portion of a fifty-pound Bank of England note! It was partly burned but quite enough was left to identify it without any possibility of a mistake.
“Well,” I exclaimed, “burning fifty-pound notes is certainly a new kind of pastime. What on earth can it mean?”
“I can’t imagine,” replied Seton. “And how can Mr. Graydon have gone? Certainly not through the door or the window.”
“And before he went,” I added, “he burnt a coat or something of the kind and a fifty-pound note!”
In front of the window was a small early Victorian escritoire. Upon it were several loose sheets of paper from a new writing-pad, an ink-stained envelope, and a couple of bills from a local chemist.
Seton opened two or three of the drawers and from one of them drew a folded wad of papers. “More notes!” he ejaculated, as he felt with his fingers the crisp familiar crackle.
There were three notes for fifty pounds each, obviously quite new. Clearly Graydon, in his hurry, had forgotten that they were there.
“It seems to me,” I said to Seton, “that Graydon must have been frightened by something and had to get away quickly.”
“Frightened, but of what?” Seton asked. “I saw him only half-an-hour before you came, and he seemed all right then.”
“Do you think my visit might have frightened him?” I asked.
“Well, sir, I don’t know. But why did he burn a fifty-pound note and how did he get out? That’s what puzzles me. I could have understood it if he had locked his door on the outside.”
“It beats me, anyhow,” I said, looking round the room. I noticed Graydon’s two suitcases stood open and some of his clothes were hanging in the wardrobe. Why, and above all how had he vanished so suddenly? But for the fact that he had actually called to see me—showing that he certainly was not afraid of meeting me—I might well have thought that he would be alarmed on recognizingmy voice. But he had evidently not done so and must have thought I was someone else whom he urgently desired to avoid.
Those fifty-pound notes puzzled Lord Kenhythe’s ex-butler as completely as they did myself. Men do not usually go about burning fifty-pound notes. We knew that the young fellow who, in Switzerland, had posed as a hard-working electrical engineer welcoming the prospect of a “rise,” was on the contrary, a rich young man. But that he should burn bank-notes of such value or leave them discarded as he had done, was simply inexplicable on any hypothesis we could frame.
I was deeply chagrined. I had come within an ace of capturing the truant bridegroom and yet he had eluded me. Could it really, I asked myself, have been the same man? Again I carefully described to Seton the man I had known as Stanley Audley. He was emphatic in his assertion that it was Philip Graydon, the man who had been in that very room barely half-an-hour before. And as if to make assurance doubly sure, I found on one of his suitcases a label of the Kürhaus Hotel at Mürren and another put on at Mürren station, registering this case through to Victoria.
There could not be the slightest doubt as to the mystery man’s identity as Thelma’s husband.
“Look here!” said Seton, suddenly, as he held up a towel he had taken from the rail. It was stained with blood. The hand basin was half full of water deeply tinged with blood.
“Evidently he had cut himself badly,” was Seton’s comment.
“Perhaps,” I said, “but is this his own blood or someone else’s?”
“Surely, sir, you don’t suspect he has been guilty of a crime?” gasped Seton.
I pointed to the charred fragments of the coat. “It might be so,” I rejoined.
A few moments later, however, on making a closer search of the room we found in the waste-paper basket a broken medicine bottle and on the edge of a piece of glass was a blood stain. It told its own tale—he had cut his hand upon the glass. Further, close beside the dressing-table were three or four dark spots. I touched one, and found it to be blood.
“I wonder why he destroyed his coat?” Seton remarked. “He’s gone away leaving everything behind.”
“But how did he get out?” I persisted. “The door and window were both fastened and there is no fanlight.”
We again carefully examined the lock. It wasintact, it had been locked from the inside and the key was still there.
Together we went carefully through the fugitive’s belongings, but found nothing of interest. They were merely clothes of good quality or the wardrobe of a fashionable young man. From the pocket of the suitcase that bore the label “B. O. B.”—or Bernese Oberland Bahn—I took out three one-pound Treasury notes. But we found not a scrap of writing of any sort. There was some burnt paper in the fireplace, suggesting that with the coat he had destroyed all documents that might give a clue to his identity. The broken bottle smelt of petrol and apparently he had kept the spirit ready for use if he wanted quickly to destroy anything.
Our search concluded, Seton had all the things removed to an unoccupied room and locked the door.
“The Bank will pay the halfnote,” said Seton. “I shall pay the lot in and hold the money until Mr. Graydon turns up again. He has plenty of money, of course, and may not have missed it. There is no doubt some explanation. I cannot believe, knowing Mr. Graydon as I did, that there can be anything very seriously wrong.”
“But why should the note be burned?” I queried.
“It might have been accidentally among the other papers he destroyed, sir. Don’t you think so?”
This, of course, was possible. For a long timewe sat in Seton’s room discussing the strange affair. At first Seton thought he ought to tell the police, but I urged him not to do so. It would get into the papers, I argued, and that was the last thing desirable for a high-class private hotel such as his. I did not want a public scandal that must involve Thelma in most unpleasant publicity.
“I wonder whether he had an inkling that you’d called, sir?” suggested Seton. “Perhaps he saw you from one of the front windows and then rushed up and prepared to bolt.”
“But why should he? I have acted towards him only as a friend and I see no reason why he should take such extreme steps to avoid me. Besides, he actually called at my flat.”
“Yes, I had forgotten that,” Seton admitted. “But still, I think something must have frightened him—and frightened him badly, too. He wouldn’t have cut his hand in opening the bottle of petrol, burned his clothes and papers, and got away so swiftly if there wasn’t some very strong motive for doing so. What’s your opinion?”
“The same as yours, Seton,” I answered. “But the affair is full of remarkable circumstances. How did he get out of that locked room? He was certainly in there when I first knocked.”
“My own belief,” said Seton, “is that he musthave started to destroy his things as soon as you knocked. He was certainly in a great hurry for he smashed the neck of the petrol bottle when he found he could not get the cork out—it’s still in the neck of the broken bottle—and cut his hand in doing so.”
“But there wouldn’t have been time,” I said, impatiently.
“I think so,” said Seton. “The coat was a light one and saturated with petrol, it would burn very quickly. You stood at the door probably for ten minutes before you called me and it was certainly another quarter of an hour, or even more, before I forced the door. That coat would burn in that time.”
“Yes, perhaps, but that doesn’t explain how he got away from the locked room, or where he went to.”
Lord Kenhythe’s ex-butler shrugged his broad shoulders and with a mystified look upon his clean-shaven face, replied—
“How he got out, sir, and where he has gone to, is to me a complete mystery. But I feel sure he’ll come back, or he’ll write and tell me about it. Besides, he’s not a gentleman to leave without settling his bill.”
“Well,” I said, laughing, “you won’t lose much. He’s left you two hundred odd pounds.”
I left, promising to call again on the following afternoon. This I did, eager to know whether he had any further news of his missing guest.
As I entered the room, I saw that the man’s face was graver and more puzzled than before.
“Well, Mr. Seton?” I asked. “What’s happened?”
“Happened, sir. Those bank-notes. When I took them to the bank this morning the manager called me into his room and questioned me very closely. They’re forgeries!”
“Forged notes!” I gasped, staring at him.
“Yes, sir. The manager told me that all banks here and abroad had been warned about six months ago that a quantity of spurious five and fifty-pound Bank of England notes were in circulation. They’ve been printed in Argentina. The police made a raid on the factory, seized the printing press and plates and six men were arrested. All of them have been sent to prison for long terms, but at the trial it came out that they were in league with certain confederates in Paris, Madrid and London who were engaged in circulating them—mostly the five-pound ones.”
“And what did you say?” I asked.
“Well, sir, I told the whole story. The manager took the notes, and I believe he’s sent them to the Bank of England.”
“Then the police will start inquiries!” I cried, dismayed, for the situation was becoming daily more complicated.
“Yes, sir,” he replied. “I understood from the manager that they will!”