The Man of Dangerous Secrets

by Maxwell March

  CHAPTER 27

  The Safe

  WHEN Robin opened his eyes he was conscious first of a sickening pain in his head and then of the glaring light of day forcing its way in through the grimy window. Gradually the events of the preceding night returned to his mind. He found he was very cold and stiff, and the left side of his head, which ached so intolerably, felt as though it were held in a plaster cast.

  He put up his hand and touched his forehead gingerly. There was a long groove-shaped wound across his temple, and he guessed what had happened. The bullet which had been fired at him had struck obliquely and in glancing off the frontal bone had had precisely the same effect as that of a tremendous blow. He had been, in fact, literally stunned.

  He knew himself to be amazingly lucky to be alive after such an attack, and he scrambled cautiously to his feet and stood swaying dizzily, clutching at the desk for support.

  The main office of Messrs. Rolls & Knighton looked much like any other old-fashioned solicitors’ in the chill light of morning. It was gloomy, dusty, and shabby without being poverty-stricken.

  Slowly the boy turned his head and looked down at the desk. The box was gone. He forced himself to consider the situation coldly. Of one thing he was certain: it was no ghost who had peered at him across the desk.

  Robin’s belief in the supernatural had never been very strong, and the revolver shot, to say nothing of the removal of the heavily bound box, did not aid the theory of ghostly manifestation.

  Yet the face had been the face of Rex Bourbon, and Rex Bourbon was dead.

  His mind shied away from the problem, and he began to consider the more practical questions confronting him.

  He glanced out of the window and guessed it was about an hour after dawn. The sky was still faintly rosy in the east, and as yet there was no movement in the little court.

  He turned to move towards the door, and as he did so became aware for the first time of a muffled scratching sound which had been slowly forcing itself upon his consciousness for the past two or three minutes.

  He stood listening.

  For a moment he conceived the wild idea that his enemy had returned, but as the noise increased in strength it dawned upon him that it emanated from the far corner of the room, and glancing over he saw something that in his excitement he had not noticed before.

  A big roll-top desk had been pushed aside, and a trapdoor, upon which it usually stood, was disclosed. Moreover, the door of the trap stood open, its corner just visible round the edge of the desk.

  He walked unsteadily across the room towards it. He was still very dizzy from his wound, and the room reeled about him.

  He reached the desk at last, however, and stood clutching it for support. The sight which met his gaze astonished him.

  Beneath the trap, clearly exposed and looking remarkably odd in that position, was the face of a large old pattern safe.

  The hiding place was so elementary and yet so efficient that he was lost for a moment in admiration. This, then, was the ingenious cache of which Sacret had spoken in his letter.

  It was while he stood looking down at the iron door at his feet that the scratching sound began again, and he realized with a little thrill of astonishment that there was some living thing imprisoned beneath the heavy slab of steel.

  Stooping down, a gesture which made his head swim painfully, he knocked three times on the safe.

  Three raps answered him instantly, and he straightened his back and stared about him in amazement.

  There was an intelligent entity imprisoned in the safe below him, of that he was certain. The discovery was amazing. There seemed scarcely room in the steel cupboard for anything human to be confined.

  He saw at a glance that the lock was a combination one, and he realized that it was hopeless for him to try to release the safe’s prisoner, especially in his present weak condition.

  His eye lighted upon the telephone on the top of the displaced desk, and with a sigh of relief he reached out for the instrument.

  Within five minutes he was speaking to a sleepy but interested Inspector Whybrow newly aroused from bed.

  Robin had called him at his private house and had been lucky in waking the old man without much difficulty.

  Robin told his story breathlessly.

  “I know I’m in enclosed premises,” he finished, “but there’s someone imprisoned in the safe here. It’s a very small safe and the signals are weak. I’m afraid whoever it is will suffocate. Can you do anything?”

  “Robin, that really is you, my boy? Thank God for that! I thought you were dead.”

  Robin touched his forehead thoughtfully.

  “So I am—save for a miracle,” he said. “For heaven’s sake come along, Whybrow, and bring someone to open this damned coffin.”

  Inspector Whybrow arrived from his house in Maida Vale in an incredibly short space of time, considering he had called at a Bloomsbury Square house on the way and had brought a somewhat dishevelled but excited and definitely friendly Mr. Knighton with him.

  The old lawyer hurried into the office in front of the inspector and looked about him in amazement.

  Robin, his face still covered with blood, sat white and exhausted in the chief clerk’s chair. The trapdoor and desk remained as he had found them.

  Whybrow was plainly overjoyed to see Robin. He hurried over to the boy, his hand outstretched, his kindly face a picture of concern.

  “Good heavens! What’s happened to you, Robin? H’m—a bullet graze, I see. Come, my boy, we must have the full story of this. However, as I said on the phone, thank God you’re alive. Did you see your man?”

  Robin shuddered.

  “Yes,” he said in a curiously dull voice which made the inspector look at him sharply. “Yes, I did.”

  The older man had no time to make further inquiries, for Mr. Knighton, who had been bending over the safe, straightened his back suddenly and pulled up the heavy iron door.

  The next moment a shrill ejaculation escaped him, and both Robin and the inspector leant forward. Whybrow bent down and began to haul up a limp human figure which had been wedged in between two of the great steel shelves.

  He dragged the man out into the light, and the morning sun fell upon a face blue and distorted, but still recognizable and startlingly familiar.

  “Sacret!”

  Robin breathed the name, and Whybrow glanced at him sharply.

  “The convict? Good God, this thing becomes more complicated every moment!”

  “Is he dead?”

  It was Mr. Knighton who spoke, his pale face grey with alarm, his tongue moistening and remoistening his parched lips.

  Whybrow was tugging at the man’s collar.

  “No, he’s all right. We came only just in time, though. Get the window open, will you? What he wants is air.”

  Robin moved over to obey the old man, but the effort of raising the sash proved to be the last straw and he lurched forward and collapsed upon the floor again, the mists closing over him.

  He did not recover consciousness until he was in the taxi speeding on its way towards the Yard. The inspector had rendered first aid and had decided that a visit to hospital was unnecessary for either of his two charges.

  Mr. Knighton, flushed and excited by this strange adventure which was disturbing the slow, even tenor of his uneventful life, supported the drooping figure of Sacret, who was too weak to put up any show of resistance even had he desired to do so.

  Robin’s lips moved.

  “Jennifer,” he said weakly. “Someone must get to Jennifer.”

  Whybrow laid a hand upon his arm soothingly.

  “All right, my boy, all right. You save your energy. We’ve got a tremendous morning ahead of us. You’ll want all your strength.”

  Robin’s eyes closed again, but he could not get the girl out of his mind.

  On the other side of the cab Sacret was staring at him dully, his eyes smouldering, a strange reproachful expression lurking in their depths.


  Mr. Knighton was pouring out his troubles, his thin dry voice cracking in his agitation.

  “But, Inspector, the box has gone. There’s been a burglary. You don’t seem to be taking this seriously. Morton Blount’s box, a relic which I may say was left to us in the nature of a sacred trust, has been stolen. It’s got to be found, I tell you. It’s got to be found.”

  Inspector Whybrow regarded him wearily.

  “All in good time, my dear sir,” he said. “All in good time. Surely,” he added plaintively as he indicated the two wounded men in the cab, “surely we’ve got enough to go on with? For one morning, at any rate.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Jigsaw Pieces

  “DON’T worry yourself, my boy. Take it gently. It’s an astounding story, but thank heaven I think we’re getting to the bottom of it at last. There’s nothing to get worried about as long as you don’t make yourself ill. We need you, Robin, if we’re to get our man.”

  Inspector Whybrow spoke with genuine concern as he stood on the hearthrug confronting the boy who sat in the armchair, his head swathed in bandages.

  The morning sun was streaming through the window of the inspector’s bare little office in Scotland Yard. The room was not quite so speckless as usual, the cleaners having been disturbed at their work, but there were an air of suppressed excitement and a foretaste of coming victory occasioned by the story which Robin had just told, a story more strange than even that room of strange secrets had ever heard before.

  Inspector Mowbray, hastily summoned from his home, sat at Whybrow’s desk, a pad and pencil under his hand. The three men were alone. Mr. Knighton and Sacret had been accommodated in different parts of the building.

  Robin, looking very white beneath his bandages but still resolute and very much alive, glanced up at the inspector gratefully.

  “Thank you, Jack,” he said. “I think I’ve made a clean breast of everything now. You see why I couldn’t come to you before.”

  Whybrow glanced at Mowbray, and there was a twinkle in his eyes.

  “It seems to me, Bill, that we’ve got a very good case against this lad for assisting an escaped convict to elude the emissaries of justice,” he said.

  Inspector Mowbray grunted. “Let’s get on with the job. We must keep our eyes on that nursing home down on the east coast, although now we’ve got hold of the big fish I think the little fellows will automatically slip into the net.”

  Robin glanced from one to the other of the two men searchingly.

  “Sir Henry?” he questioned.

  Mowbray nodded, and a grin of satisfaction passed over his face.

  “It’s certain, I think. The fellow’s probably insane, of course, but I don’t think there’s much doubt that he’s at the bottom of things. At any rate we shall know soon, for certain.”

  Robin opened his mouth to speak. There was a curious expression in his eyes. But his observation was never uttered, for at that moment the phone rang and Mowbray took off the receiver.

  He listened for a few moments, consternation and irritation on his face.

  “All right,” he said at last. “All right. No, you can’t do anything.”

  He rang off without another word and, rising to his feet, went over to the door, beckoning Whybrow to follow him.

  The two inspectors were gone for some moments and, left to himself, Robin’s mind went back immediately to the one subject which worried him more than any other. He wanted to get a word through to Jennifer. Mrs. Phipps’s daughter’s house was not on the telephone, and he did not want to send a messenger. He was convinced that the fewer people who knew of the girl’s hiding place the better.

  Moreover, his head was aching intolerably, and he was finding clear thought increasingly difficult.

  The two inspectors returned almost immediately. Whybrow’s good-natured heavy face had clouded visibly, and there were deep lines of worry across his forehead.

  Mowbray looked frankly angry, and Robin caught the muttered words “damned incompetence” as the two men came in. It was evident that something had occurred to check the inspectors’ triumphant progress towards the end of the case, but as they quite obviously did not intend to take him into their confidence Robin did not press them.

  Whybrow shrugged his shoulders.

  “Oh, well,” he said. “We shall have to leave that to Mayhew, that’s all. We must get straight here first.”

  He turned to Robin.

  “I’ve sent for Sacret,” he said. “We’ve taken a deposition from him already, of course, but this is to be in the nature of an informal chat.”

  Robin nodded gloomily. Things had not panned out as he would have wished.

  “I’d stake my oath that that man was innocent on the charge on which he was imprisoned,” he said.

  “Would you, now?” said Inspector Mowbray cheerfully but without malice.

  Sacret was brought in almost immediately. He was now very much recovered from the effects of his imprisonment in the safe, but there was a sullen expression in his eyes, and he did not look at Robin.

  The uniformed man who had accompanied him laid a sheaf of typewritten pages upon his superior’s desk. Whybrow nodded to him.

  “Thank you, Robinson. You’ll wait just outside the door, please.”

  “Yes, sir.” The man saluted and went out, and Whybrow turned the full force of his bland, kindly smile upon the newcomer.

  “Sacret,” he said, “I just want you to sit down over there. There are one or two points I want to go over with you.”

  The convict took the chair the inspector indicated and sat down. He was very quiet and seemed to be resigned to the situation.

  “I realize I’ve made a tremendous mistake, Inspector,” he said. “By breaking into the lawyer’s last night I’ve ruined my chances of ever proving myself innocent of the charge for which I served part of my sentence. I realize there’s not much to be said. I’ll answer anything you want to know.”

  Whybrow shot him a sharp, approving glance from under his bushy brows. Ever quick to recognize intelligence when he saw it, the inspector was inclined to approve of Wendon Sacret. He made no comment, however, but merely nodded and turned over the pages of the deposition.

  “I see here,” he began, “that you say that you entered Messrs. Rolls & Knighton’s office about a quarter to eleven last night in order to obtain an iron-bound box which you believed to contain evidence that would prove your innocence of the eleven-year-old charge on which you were convicted. You entered by a lower window, I understand? And yet Mr. Grey here, who followed you in at a quarter past eleven, found the door on the latch. You’re sure about the window?”

  “Yes, sir. I climbed over the area railings and pushed up one of the ground-floor windows which was unlatched. I went straight up to Messrs. Rolls & Knighton’s office on the second floor. I pushed back the roll-top desk and disclosed the safe hidden beneath the trapdoor, and I got it open.”

  The inspector raised his eyebrows.

  “That was very extraordinary, wasn’t it?” he said. “It was a combination lock, I understand.”

  Sacret smiled grimly.

  “I was extremely fortunate—or unlucky, whichever way you like to look at it. I remembered years ago that the same friend who showed me the hidden safe told me that the combination word was always the first in the firm’s name. The safe was so well hidden, you see, that it was really not necessary at all for there to be a lock of any sort upon it.

  “I remembered that the firm was so old that it was notorious for its adherence to the traditions of the founder, and I tried the word ‘Rolls’ therefore. My success was immediate.”

  “I see.” Inspector Whybrow nodded. “Did you find what you were seeking?”

  “Yes. Almost at once.” The convict’s voice trembled. “It was a large square box, infernally heavy, made, I think, of tin or some other metal and bound with iron. The name ‘Morton Blount’ was painted across it in white letters.”

  “What d
id you do then?”

  The man shivered, and it was apparent by his expression that the full recollection of his experience still lingered with him.

  “I put the box on the floor beside me and bent down to close the lid of the safe. As I did so I suddenly realized that I was not alone.”

  His voice sank to a whisper.

  “I can’t tell you how ghastly it was. The place was very quiet, there was hardly any light at all, but I suddenly became aware that there was something or someone standing just behind me. I looked up. I didn’t see a face, but two hands seized me by the throat and I was forced downwards. Whoever my assailant was,” he added grimly, “he had the strength of an ox. I was forced down into the safe and the iron door closed upon me. The rest of the story you know.”

  The inspector nodded. There was silence in the room for a few moments, and Sacret suddenly bent forward.

  “I suppose you’re going to hand me over to the prison authorities?”

  Whybrow looked him squarely in the face.

  “I’ve already informed them, naturally,” he said. “But,” he added after a pause, as with a gesture of helpless resignation the man sank back into his chair, “since this is an entirely unofficial conversation, and since you have brought us certain information concerning this box of Morton Blount’s, I think it’s only fair to tell you that in our investigations into the death of a Mr. Caithby Fisher new evidence has come to light which will justify a new trial for you. I can’t say any more than that at present, and I only mention it now because we are extremely grateful to you for the help you’ve given us.”

  Sacret darted to his feet, a light of hope in his eyes, which died out, as a new thought occurred to him.

  “But the attempted burglary?” he began.

  Inspector Whybrow glanced at Mowbray, who was studiously ignoring what he frankly considered was his old friend’s very unprofessional behaviour.

  “I rather fancy, Sacret,” he said, “that that incident might come under the head of ‘work for and on behalf of Mr. Robin Grey,’ who is, after all, attached to the staff. However,” he went on, “I shall have to send you back to the waiting room for the moment, although we may need you again later.”