"Hardly. It strikes me it is you who are now doing what you so frequently accuse me of doing —overlooking the obvious. He had some charwoman in to do it."
"Possible, if improbable," said Pons.
He led the way back downstairs and once more made a tour of the rooms, pausing to examine each more closely. Everything was in order, save in the bedroom, where the bed still stood as Miss Carson had left it —turned carelessly back and disarranged as it would be had someone lain in it for a while, as Miss Carson had testified she had done while waiting on the appearance of her lover. Only one pillow showed any indentation, and that slight.
"I never cease to marvel at the sexual habits of my fellow men," said Pons, as he gazed at the bed. "To go to so much trouble and expense for a little casual dalliance!"
"Spoken like a true abstainer," I said. "We are not all so abstemious."
"Why not install her here permanently?" mused Pons, though it seemed to me that he was not really concerned with this question.
"Elementary!" I replied instantly. "Because d'Oro did not always meet the same woman here."
"Ah, Parker —you are wiser in this aspect of the world," said Pons, his eyes dancing.
"I will not deny it," I said.
"But let us look into the scene with more care," said Pons, then, leading the way back to the sitting-room. "It is evidently from this room that d'Oro took his departure, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Now it is patent that d'Oro was interrupted at his reading, for the Leopardi is turned face down. He could have risen to go into another room —to go outside; he could have simply lain back to rest; he could have grown tired —the possibilities, while not endless, are varied. On the other hand, he may even have become aware of some unusual sound —or smell."
At this, Pons flashed a curious glance at me. "Is there not an uncommon odour in this room? Perhaps my use of the weed has troubled my sense of smell."
"I noticed how clean the room smells," I said.
"Antiseptic?" ventured Pons.
I agreed that the room had an antiseptic odour, as if it had been thoroughly cleaned. But there was nothing to meet the eye that gave evidence of anything more than ordinary cleaning.
Pons now began to walk around the room. He made a circuit of the walls, paused at the fireplace, and came back to the chair d'Oro had left. He dropped to his knees, took his magnifying glass from the inner pocket of his coat, and began to examine the floor around the chair, crawling about in an ever widening circle. His glance darted here and there; from time to time he bore down upon a chosen spot, putting his glass to use, his keen eyes missing nothing, his face, feral in appearance when he was engaged in so intent an examination, betraying nothing.
When he came to his feet again, his face was a study in perplexity. "This room is a marvel of cleanliness," he said reflectively. "I submit that that is extraordinary indeed."
"Why should it be? D'Oro," I said, gesturing toward the Leopardi poems, and the books on the shelves crowding the fireplace wall, "is obviously a man of taste. Such a man would hardly want to receive his mistress in a setting lacking for cleanliness."
"That is surely well put, Parker," agreed Pons. "However, I submit you have forgotten something —this house was surely examined with some care by men from the Foreign Office; Bancroft inferred as much. There is everything to show that this room was thoroughly cleaned since then. I have not found so much as a grain of sand in the carpet."
"Incredible!"
"You may well say so," said Pons.
"On second thought," I put in —"wouldn't it be likely that investigators from the Foreign Office may have vacuumed the carpet in search of some clue in the dust?"
"Such matters are usually too mundane for the Foreign Office."
"Even under pressure from the Italian government?"
Pons was lost in thought; he did not answer. Having completed his examination of the floor, he was now gazing at the walls of the room. He crossed to the street side of the house and scrutinized the window-sills and frames; he did the same with the opposite wall. Neither the fireplace wall nor that opposite, which was a partition dividing the house, contained windows. Then he gave his attention to the hearth; this gave him pause.
"What do you make of this fireplace, Parker?" he said, from his position on his knees.
I crossed and bent. "It is as clean as everything else in the room," I said.
"Nothing more?"
"It must have been scrubbed with the same antiseptic thoroughness we've already noticed," I said. "The smell of it is even stronger here. And it doesn't have the look of having had much use. D'Oro apparently goes to no more than minimal trouble to satisfy the appearances."
"Other than scrupulous cleanliness," said Pons. "I put it to you that the romantic setting ought to have more than subdued lights — a fire on the hearth, music, flowers or some pleasant scent —which, I submit, ought not to be antiseptic in essence."
I laughed, I fear, with some cynicism. "For the purpose of seduction, perhaps, Pons. But once an arrangement has been made, I assure you that most ladies are as interested in getting to the heart of the matter as the men."
"Ah, I must defer to your greater experience in these matters, Parker. I am naive enough to have believed that the ladies are invariably partial to the romantic accoutrements."
He came to his feet once more. He stood for a moment examining the bookshelves. Then he began to remove the books from the shelves. "Lend me a hand, Parker," he said. "These shelves at least do not appear to have been cleaned recently."
I followed his lead in piling the books on the floor, seeing as I did so that the shelves behind the books were covered with dust and lint.
"These can hardly be d'Oro's books," I said, looking at some of the titles.
"Capital, Parker! I am always delighted at evidence of your growing inductive skill," answered Pons.
"Surely some of these books must have been the original owner's," I went on. "Medical books and case histories. And they've not been disturbed for years."
"I fancy d'Oro had no need to maintain a library here," said Pons. "Half a dozen books should have served him. These d'An- nunzios and a set of Proust are probably d'Oro's; there is some disturbance of the almost uniform dust here."
"And here," I said. "Behind two textbooks used at Guy's —which certainly cannot be of much pertinence any more, considering their date."
Pons came to my side. He stood looking thoughtfully at the shelving from which I had removed the books. I saw for the first time a neat round hole in the wall behind, as if a knot had fallen from the wood, though the knot was not in evidence. Pons gazed in silence at the dust that had so manifestly been disturbed behind the books from Guy's; then he stepped back from the shelving and surveyed the wall in its entirety, after which he returned to a spot at a point on his side of the chimney approximately uniform with my position.
He removed books from the shelves, and stood with a small sound of satisfaction to contemplate the empty shelf.
Joining him, I saw that here, too, the dust had been disturbed — he still held in his hands the compact little German books he had removed from the shelf—and here, too, another knot had come loose.
"It was folly on the part of the builder to put in knotty pine so close to a chimney," I said, as he bent to examine the shelving there.
"Was it not!" agreed Pons. "Let us return the books to their proper place."
His demeanour baffled me. He said not a word as we restored the books to the shelves. After we had finished, he returned to the enclosed stairway and went up the stairs on his hands and knees, scrutinizing the steps and the adjacent walls with the aid of his glass, making almost inaudible muttering sounds as he went along. Now and then he took from the stairs or the rough plaster walls something invisible to me, inserted it into one of the transparent envelopes he invariably carried, and went on. From the top of the stairs he backed down, still examining every stair.
Once more down the stairs
he said, "The stairs have also been carefully cleaned." He shrugged. "But I fancy we are all but finished here. It is growing light outside, and I want to have a look at the exterior of the house."
So saying, he made his way to the front entrance.
Outside, he stood back from the porch and viewed the facade looking out upon the street, where, I saw, the Foreign Office car in which we had come still waited, though the driver appeared to have fallen asleep. Pons stood but a few moments so; then he made his way rapidly around the house, myself at his heels.
On the fireplace wall of the house, he gestured in passing, "The chimney is completely inset. That is somewhat of an architectural novelty apart from our country houses, I daresay." He paused at the rear entrance and subjected it to a brief examination that had to be cursory in the absence of any but the dawn's light. Then he went on around the house, and, without pausing again, made straight for the car at the kerb.
Pons maintained a thoughtful silence all the way home. At No. 7, he asked our driver to follow us up to our quarters, and that young man, accustomed no doubt to orders, obediently trailed us up the steps to 7B, and stood just over the threshold waiting while Pons scribbled hastily on a sheet of notepaper. He folded this presently, slipped it into an envelope, which he sealed, and handed the envelope to the driver.
"Deliver this to Mr. Pons at once. He must be awakened if he is sleeping — though I fancy he is waiting to hear from us."
"Yes, sir," said the driver, and slipped out of the room.
"There is just time for a spot of tea," said Pons then, rubbing his hands together in that annoyingly self-congratulatory way of his, quite as if he had solved the puzzle of Count d'Oro's disappearance. "What do you make of it, Parker?"
"There are several possible explanations," I ventured cautiously.
"I am glad to hear it," he said. "Pray enlighten me."
"Consider first, the woman," I said.
"A classic consideration," interrupted Pons, nodding and smiling.
"A jealous lover may have preceded her to Orrington Crescent, summoned d'Oro to the door, struck him down, and carried him away."
"Leaving no footprints in the snow. A remarkable accomplishment, indeed!"
I ignored his thrust. "D'Oro may have rushed from the house for some powerful motive unknown to us."
"Powerful, certainly, to take him into the snowy night clad only in bathrobe and slippers."
I abandoned my effort and sought to divert him by pointing to a sealed manila envelope on the table. "Surely that was not here when we left."
"I saw it," said Pons. "It is the dossier on d'Oro, sent over by Bancroft. I fancy we have no need of it."
"Ah, you know where he went?"
"Say, rather, I have a grave suspicion."
More than this he would not say. Instead, he turned to his microscope. There he emptied the transparent envelopes and put what I saw now were strands of some substance on glass slides for examination. There were three such strands, and two of them did not long occupy Pons's attention. He studied the third for some time before he turned from the microscope.
"Well, what have you found?" I asked.
"Fragments of cloth. Two are almost certainly from the kind of cloth commonly found on bathrobes, and the third from a cloth with cleaning oil on it. The first two came from the wall, the last from one of the steps."
"Then d'Oro must have been on the stairs at some time that night."
"He has occupied the house for months," replied Pons, "but he or his bathrobe was certainly present on the stairway at some time during his tenancy."
We were interrupted at the tea and toast our good Mrs. Johnson had brought up to us by a ponderous step on the stair and an equally ponderous knock that followed.
"Inspector Jamison," said Pons, and opened the door to him.
"A fine thing, Pons," he grumbled, walking in. "To be routed from bed at this hour of the morning and sent over here by the Foreign Office!"
"I sent for you," said Pons. "I have decided to reward your invariable courtesy and graciousness by presenting you with what I hope is the solution to a remarkable mystery."
Lowering his portly body into a chair, Jamison settled his bowler on his knee, touched his dark moustache with an index finger, and viewed Pons through eyes narrowed in suspicion. "I will listen," he said in a voice that dripped cautious doubt.
"Though it has been kept strictly in the dark —you know the Foreign Office, Inspector —Count Ercole d'Oro, the Italian consul—has vanished from a house in which he had an assignation."
"When?"
"Three days ago."
"And now the trail's cold, they call on the Yard!" Jamison said bitterly.
"They've not called on you, Inspector. I have."
"Where's the house?"
"In Orrington Crescent."
Jamison's eyes widened with sudden interest. "Not Number 27?"
"Number 27," said Pons.
"So. Another one. That makes the fourth disappearance from those premises. So we are to be troubled by such a matter again!"
"Not for long, I trust," said Pons, as a car scraped to the kerb outside. "But here, if I am not mistaken, is the car from the Foreign Office." He crossed to the windows, and drew aside a curtain. "Are you prepared, Inspector?"
"I was ordered to come armed."
"Good. Let us go down."
He snatched up his deerstalker and ulster as he spoke, and made for the door.
The house in Orrington Crescent was to all appearances exactly as we had left it. The subdued lights were still burning, and so far as it was possible to ascertain at a casual examination, nothing and no one had disturbed the setting.
"Moore, follow us with the materials," said Pons as he left the car.
"Yes, sir."
Glancing behind us as Pons stood unlocking the door to the house, I saw that the driver was coming up the path carrying two wrapped objects; a rubber hose dangled from one of them.
Once inside, Pons moved with dispatch. "Help me clear this shelf, Parker," he asked.
We dumped books unceremoniously on the floor, and in but a few moments we had cleared the chosen shelf—that which we had last cleared. Over his shoulder, Pons said, "Now, Moore, if you please."
The driver now came forward. He had uncovered "the materials" and disclosed two metal canisters, hoses dangling from their nozzles, canisters much like oxygen cylinders, with which I was, of course, familiar. They were marked in large letters: HM War Mag W.
Pons grasped one of them, laid it on the shelf before him, pushed the hose into what I had taken for the open knothole behind the shelf, and turned the nozzle. Then he applied the second canister to the hole on the other side of the chimney and turned that nozzle also. I could hear their contents hissing into open space behind the bookshelves.
Pons took a revolver from the pocket of his ulster and pressed it upon the driver. "If by any miscalculation of mine, a stranger to you should appear in this room, hold him at bay. And do not hesitate to shoot, if you value your life, young man." With a sweep of his arm as he turned, Pons said, "Come," and hurried over to the stairs leading to the floor above.
He bounded up the steps and into the room directly above the sitting-room where Moore waited upon the canisters to empty themselves. He took his stand facing the wall behind the chimney.
"To arms, Inspector," he said crisply.
The three of us stood there in silence, waiting upon events which Pons showed by his confident expression that he expected to take place. Two minutes, three —five —while below us the canisters were emptying into the wall.
Then there rose from within the wall an urgent, scrabbling sound. And suddenly the entire wall behind the chimney began to slide noiselessly downward to recess behind the wall of the storey below, disclosing a passage leading down.
But we had only a moment in which to become aware of this, before a disheveled figure in a white surgeon's gown came struggling up the steps of the passage and
stumbled gasping into the empty room.
"Watch your nostrils," said Pons sharply, covering his face with his handkerchief.
"Stand where you are!" shouted Jamison.
But his admonition was needless, for the man who had come up out of the wall collapsed upon the floor, senseless.
"Inspector," said Pons, "let me introduce you to Dr. Roland Borstad, the author, if I am not mistaken, of the Orrington Crescent disappearances —and, I fancy, of others that have gone unrecorded and equally unsolved. Handcuff his hands and feet, Jamison, and drag him to the car as unceremoniously as he dragged his victims up the stairs after drugging them with gas through those same holes in the wall that served to turn the tables on him." He flashed a glance at me. "Not, Parker, with antiseptic, but with some form of anesthetic very probably of his own devising.
"Now, then, that gas we've sent below is a harmless but effective soporific developed by the scientists employed by the War Office. We'll give it time to settle, and then go down to learn what diabolical matters have engaged Borstad all these years. Pray that we find d'Oro still alive. Moore will give you a hand with Borstad, Jamison."
And in half an hour we descended —to find below the house fully equipped living quarters and an elaborate laboratory, on an operating table in which lay Count Ercole d'Oro, strapped down, unconscious, showing marks of torture, but alive and not in critical condition, despite Borstad's experiments.
On a desk not far away lay a thick manuscript in Borstad's hand —sickeningly annotated, detailing accounts of his experiments, not only on Clyde Lee and Howard Eliot, but on others —the hapless victims Borstad had lured out of the London night into his devilish laboratory, some of those whose names set down by Borstad Jamison recognized as among London's undiscovered missing persons. His manuscript bore the revealing title of Beyond the Threshold of Pain.
As we drove back to 7B, with the still unconscious Dr. Borstad slumped in the front seat beside Moore, and d'Oro on his way to the nearest hospital by ambulance, Pons answered Jamison's impatient questions.
"Quite apart from the fact that there was no manifest motive for d'Oro's disappearance —the Foreign Office's almost paranoid view of espionage as the inevitable explanation of all such events involving any diplomat, even one of the minor status of Count d'Oro, could be discounted at once —the matter devolved basically upon one of two alternatives: d'Oro —and his predecessors, whose bones have long since been buried when Borstad had finished exploring their reactions to pain —disappeared either from the house or within it. I chose to act upon the latter alternative, and made such examination as I could on that assumption.
August Derleth - The Solar Pons Omnibus Volume 1 Page 60