Trent Intervenes

by E. C. Bentley

  ‘How did Rudmore get hold of your name, I wonder?’ mused the inspector. ‘He only got away from Dartmoor yesterday.’

  ‘That wouldn’t have been difficult for his sort of man,’ Trent replied. ‘Very likely he got it out of the housemaid who opened the door, before sending up the message.’

  The captain cursed the absent malefactor feebly and took another drink from his tumbler. ‘I confess I was rather touched. Of course, I’ve usually done a man a good turn when it lay in my power, but I couldn’t remember having played Providence to an American at any time. So I asked what his name was. She said their name was Smith. Well, you know, I must have run across about fifty Smiths, and I told her so. Then she said she had a photograph of him with her. She took it out of her bag. It was a picture of a good-looking, youngish chap, with the name of a Philadelphia firm on the mount.’

  ‘Van Sommeren’s photograph,’ murmured Trent. ‘She carried it about with her. You didn’t tell me they were on their honeymoon, Inspector.’

  ‘I felt sure I’d never seen the man,’ continued Captain Ainger, ‘but I took it to the window to have a good look. And the moment my back was turned she leaped on me and garotted me. There wasn’t a chance for me. She was as strong as a tiger, and I’m pretty shaky from a long illness. When I was about at my last gasp she gagged me with that infernal thing, then dragged me into the bedroom and tied me up with my own cord. When I was trussed properly she went through my pockets and took my latch-key, then she carried me back to the bedroom door. She said she was so sorry to be giving me all this trouble and that she always wished women were not so dependent upon men for everything. She put her veil up a little way and helped herself to a whisky and soda and lighted one of my cigars. After that she took a screwdriver out of her bag and went to work at something behind me. I don’t know in the least what she was doing; I couldn’t move. It took about five minutes, I should say. Then she skipped to the window with something that looked like a wad of cotton wool in her fingers and began gloating over something I couldn’t see. She stood there a long time, smoking and looking out, and then all at once she gave a start and stared down into the street. Just after that I heard the front doorbell ring. And then she—well, she went.’ The captain’s bronzed face went slowly scarlet to the roots of his hair.

  ‘She said good-bye, surely,’ murmured Trent, looking at him attentively.

  ‘If you must know,’ burst out the captain with his first show of fierceness, ‘she said she didn’t know how to thank me, and that I was a dear, and might she give me a kiss? So she—she did it.’ Here his narrative dissolved into unchivalrous expressions. ‘And then she went out and shut the door. That’s all I can tell you.’ He wearily resorted to his tumbler again.

  Trent and the inspector, who had prudently avoided catching each other’s eyes during the last part of the story, now conquered their feelings. ‘What I want to know now,’ the detective said, ‘is where the stuff was hidden here. Can you go straight to the place, Mr Trent, or should we have to search?’

  Trent took the convict’s letter from his pocket. ‘Let me tell you how I got at it first,’ he said. ‘You will be interested, Captain, you read it.’ He handed the document to the soldier and gave him a brief account of the circumstances regarding it.

  The captain, now highly interested, read it through carefully twice, then handed it to Trent again. ‘I don’t believe I should make anything out of it in a thousand years,’ he said. ‘It seems straight enough to me. I should call it an interesting letter, that’s all.’

  ‘This letter,’ said Trent, regarding it with a look of unstinted appreciation, ‘is the most interesting, by a long way, that I have ever read. It tells us, not, I think, where the pendant was hidden, but where the diamonds of the pendant were hidden by Jim Rudmore before his arrest. What Jim did with the setting I don’t know, nor does it matter much. But the diamonds were concealed here; and they are now again, I am afraid, in the possession of Jim.’

  Inspector Muirhead made an impatient movement. ‘Come to the point, Mr Trent,’ he urged. ‘What did you pick up from that letter? Where was the stuff hidden?’

  ‘I will tell you first the things I picked up, and how. The first time I read the letter—in your presence, inspector—I checked at the statement that “the country looks and smells like the Gelderland country around Apeldjik”. When one reads that, it naturally occurs to one’s mind that Dartmoor is practically a mountain district, whereas Gelderland is a part of Holland, most of which country is actually below the sea level.’

  ‘It didn’t occur to my mind,’ observed Captain Ainger.

  ‘Therefore,’ pursued Trent, unconscious of him, ‘any similarity of look or smell would be rather curious, don’t you think? Possibly that was what struck the governor of the prison and aroused his suspicions of the letter. Well, the next thing that pulled me up was the Shakespearean reference. I knew I’d read it in Shakespeare, and yet I felt it was wrong somehow. There were some words missing, I thought. Besides, it didn’t look like a prose passage; yet it didn’t fit into the decasyllabic form, or any other metre … The only other notion that occurred to me at first glance was that it was an odd thing to quote a German phrase where an English one would have been just as good.

  ‘Then I took the letter to the British Museum library and sat down to the problem in earnest. I said to myself that if there was any cipher in it, it was probably impossible to get at it. But I thought it more likely that the message, if any, was conveyed in the words as they stood. So I asked myself what were the signals that it hung out to a man who would be trying to read some inner meaning into it. What things in it were, by ever so little, out of the common, so that the reader would say to himself, “This may be a pointer”? And I had to remember that both the Rudmores were said to be clever and cultivated men, who understood each other well.

  ‘Now, to begin with, I thought that “the idol, whose name I forget, on your mantelshelf”, was the sort of thing Rudmore père would have pondered over. Of course we’ve all seen those little images of the Hindu goddess with ten arms. Jim Rudmore, who had lived in India for years, said he had forgotten her name. That might possibly be meant to draw attention to the name.’

  ‘It’s Parvati—heard it thousands of times,’ the captain interjected.

  ‘Yes, I found that name when I looked up the Hindu mythology. But there’s another, by which she is known in Bengal, where the Rudmores had had their experience of India. There, my book told me, the people call her Doorga. So I noted down both names … Very well; now the next passage that seemed out of the ordinary was that about “the Gelderland country round Apeldjik”. The first thing I did was to look up Apeldjik in the gazeteer. It mentioned no such place; the nearest thing to it was a town called Apeldoorn, which was in Gelderland sure enough. Then I got a big map and went through Gelderland from end to end. As I expected, it was as flat as a board, and there was no sign of Apeldjik. But I found several towns in Holland ending in “djik”, which shows you what a conscientious artist Jim is. Now if he had really been ill at Apeldoorn, as I expect he had been, his father would have got a hint at once. I wrote down Apeldoorn, and then I began to see light.’

  Mr Muirhead rubbed his nose with a puzzled air. ‘I don’t see—’ he began.

  ‘You will very soon. Next I turned to the odd-looking quotation from Shakespeare. On looking up “joints” in the Cowden-Clarke Concordance, I found the passage. It’s in Henry IV, where Northumberland says:

  ‘And as the wretch, whose fever-weaken’d joints,

  Like strengthless hinges, buckle under life …

  ‘What do you think of that?’

  The inspector shook his head.

  ‘Well, then, look at the German phrase. Sie würden das nicht so hingehen lassen means “They would not allow that”, or “They would not pass that over”, or something of that sort. Now suppose a man looking for a suggestion or hint in each of those German words.’

  Mr Muirhead took th
e letter and conned the words carefully. ‘I’m no German scholar,’ he began, and then his eyes brightened. ‘Those missing words—’ he said.

  ‘Like strengthless hinges,’ Trent reminded him.

  ‘Well, and here’—the inspector tapped excitedly upon the word hingehen—‘you’ve got “hinge” and “hen” in English.’

  ‘You’re there! Never mind the hen; she’s not there on business. Lastly, I’ll tell you a thing you probably don’t know. Schraube is the German word for “screw”.’

  Mr Muirhead gave his knee a violent blow with his fist.

  ‘Now then!’ Trent tore a leaf from his notebook. ‘I’ll put down the words we’ve got at that were hidden.’ He wrote quickly and handed the paper to the inspector. Both he and Captain Ainger read the following:

  Doorga.

  Doorn.

  Hinges.

  Hinge.

  Screw.

  ‘Also,’ Trent added, ‘the word “door” occurs twice openly in the body of the letter, and the word “hinge” once. That was to show old Rudmore he was on the right track, if he succeeded in digging out those words. “Good!” says he to himself. “The loot is hidden under a screw in a hinge on a door somewhere. Then where?” He turns to the letter again and finds the only address mentioned in it is “the old rooms in Jermyn Street”. And there you are!’

  Trent took his screwdriver from his pocket and went to the open door leading into the captain’s bedroom. ‘Naturally it wouldn’t be the outer door, as to get at the hinges one would have to have it standing open.’ He glanced at the hinges of the bedroom door. ‘These screws’—he pointed to those on the door-post half of the upper hinge—‘have had their paint scratched a little.’

  In a minute or two he had removed all three screws. The open door sank forward slightly on the lower hinge and the upper one came away from its place on the door-post. Beneath it was a little cavity roughly hollowed out in the wood. Silently the inspector probed it with a penknife.

  ‘The stones are gone, of course,’ he announced gloomily.

  ‘Certainly, gone,’ Trent agreed. ‘The stones were in that little piece of cotton wool the captain saw him handling.’

  Mr Muirhead rose to his feet. ‘Well, I don’t think they’ll go far.’ As he took up his hat there was a knock at the door and Hudson entered panting, a sharp curiosity in his eyes.

  ‘A messenger boy just brought this for you, Inspector,’ he wheezed, handing a small package to the detective. It was directed in a delicate, sloping handwriting to ‘Inspector C. M. Muirhead, C.I.D., care of Captain R. Ainger, 230 Jermyn Street.’

  Hastily the inspector tore it open. It contained a small black suède glove, faintly perfumed. With this was a scrap of paper, bearing these words in the same writing:

  ‘Wear this for my sake.—J.R.’

  VI

  TRENT AND THE FOOL-PROOF LIFT

  ONE of the commonest forms of fatal accident in the life of the town is falling down a lift shaft. Every coroner of large urban experience has dealt with cases by the score, whether due to short sight, negligence, faulty construction, or defective safety mechanism. And there is another possibility.

  One perfect day in June M. Armand Binet-Gailly, who held an important agency in the wine trade, left his office in Jermyn Street rather earlier than usual, and strolled homewards through the Parks to his bachelor flat at 42 Rigby Street. This was a tall old house, ‘converted’ from the errors of its pre-Victorian youth. There were five flats, and M. Binet-Gailly’s was the second above the ground level. About 5:30—so went his statement to the police—he entered by the front door, which always stood open during the daytime, and went to the lift at the end of the hall. The lift was not at the ground floor, as he could see through the lattice gate; and he pressed the button which should bring it down. But nothing happened.

  M. Binet-Gailly was very much annoyed. A portly man, he did not relish the prospect of climbing two flights of stairs on a warm day when he had paid for lift service. He aimlessly seized and shook the handle of the lattice gate. To his amazement, the gate slid aside as if the lift were in place. It should, of course, have been impossible to move it unless the lift were there. The whole system was out of order, he thought. He put his head into the shaft and looked upwards. There was the lift; so far as he could judge, at the top floor. Then, as he drew back his head, his eye was caught by something at the bottom of the shallow well in which the lift shaft ended. There was a strong electric ceiling lamp always alight at this dark end of the hall; and it showed M. Binet-Gailly quite enough.

  Like most of his countrymen, he had served in arms, and things of this kind did not upset him. Plump though he was, he began to clamber down into the well; then he bethought himself. Certainly there could be no life in that crumpled bundle of humanity. The thing to do was to leave it untouched until the arrival of the police. M. Binet-Gailly went to the door communicating with the basement, and bellowed downstairs for Pimblett, the caretaker. Forty-two Rigby Street, though distant by little more than the breadth of Oxford Street from the elegance of Mayfair, did not rise to the luxury of a uniformed porter, and neither Pimblett nor his wife was usually to be seen after the morning job of cleaning the hall and staircase was done.

  Pimblett, who also had served in arms, and had seen more dirty work than had M. Binet-Gailly, took in the situation at a glance. Wasting no words, he strode to the hall telephone and rang up the police station. Both men then mounted the stairs to find which gate it was through which the unknown—for the face of the corpse could not be seen—had plunged to his death. On the floor immediately above M. Binet-Gailly’s they found the gate drawn back. On this floor was the flat occupied by Mr Anthony Villiers Maxwell—a young man of sporting tastes—and his valet. M. Binet-Gailly proposed ringing the bell of the flat to make inquiries; but Pimblett remarked that the police would prefer to have all that left to them.

  An hour later M. Binet-Gailly, sipping a glass of Campari in his own rooms, discussed with his own servant, by name Aristide, what he had just learnt of this mysterious affair. The dead man had turned out to be his own landlord, Mr Stephen Havelock Hermon, who had bought the house a few years before, and had installed his nephew, Anthony Maxwell, in the flat above-stairs on its falling vacant soon afterwards. There had been some slight lack of sympathy between M. Binet-Gailly and Mr Hermon, owing to the fact that Mr Hermon had among his eccentricities a passionate hatred of liquor in every form, and when he purchased the place had not concealed his chagrin on finding that one of the sitting tenants was engaged in the wine trade, which Mr Hermon preferred to call the drink-traffic.

  No one in the building had seen Mr Hermon enter it that afternoon. No one had seen him at all before the finding of his body. No one had known of his intention to come to the house. Mr Clayton Haggett, the famous surgeon, who had the top flat, had not been at home; his housekeeper had heard no ring. Anthony Maxwell also had been out, and his valet had had the afternoon off. Aristide could vouch for it, as he had already informed the police that no one had called at M. Binet-Gailly’s. Mr Lucian Corderoy, the eminent dress designer, and his wife had both been at his shop in Malyon Street, and their ‘daily’ servant was never in the place after twelve noon. As for Sir George Stower, the Keeper of Phœnician Antiquities at the British Museum, he was enjoying a hard-earned holiday at Margate, and his flat on the ground floor had been shut up for some days past.

  ‘But naturally,’ remarked Aristide, fingering a swarthy chin, ‘the old gentleman wished to call upon his nephew.’

  ‘It is very probable,’ M. Binet-Gailly agreed. ‘He was devoted to that young animal, and they say he had no other relative living. The nephew will be his heir, no doubt, and he will make the money roll a little faster than the uncle ever did.’

  ‘Ah! When one is young,’ observed Aristide sentimentally.

  ‘And when one is a waster by nature,’ M. Binet-Gailly added. ‘Well, Aristide, it is time for me to dress.’

  Phili
p Trent, in his first outline of the case for the readers of the Record, had given these facts about the other tenants of the building. ‘It is naturally assumed (he wrote) that Mr Hermon had called, as he often did, to see his nephew, to whom he is said to have been much attached. His ringing at the door had been resultless, and he had turned away to go down by the way he had come. He had opened the gate, believing the lift to be in position there—and stepped out into emptiness. He was known to be extremely short-sighted. His neck, so says the police surgeon, was broken, and there were other injuries that must have been immediately fatal. When his body was found, he had been dead not more than an hour.

  ‘This is very simple; but it leaves all the important questions unanswered.

  ‘Why was not the lift where he expected it to be? He had only just left it; and according to the information gathered by the police there had been no one leaving or entering any of the flats since the early afternoon, when Mr Clayton Haggett and Mr Maxwell went out.

  ‘Why was it at the top floor?

  ‘How was it that he had been able to open the gate, which should have been locked automatically the moment the lift moved from that floor?

  ‘Why was the gate on the ground floor unlocked? Why indeed? Conceivably the mechanism of the upstairs gate had gone wrong, so that Mr Hermon could open it; but the gate at the bottom could not be opened by a dead man.