by Molly Thynne
The snow lay as it had fallen, in an unbroken layer, and it was evident that Carew’s exit had not been made that way.
“I’m going to get into some clothes,” announced Stuart, through his chattering teeth, when he got back into the hall. “But I’m blessed if I can see what we’re going to do next.”
“I’ll hold a council of war with the doctor while you’re dressing. He’s prowling about upstairs somewhere. If the key’s gone, the beggar must have got out somehow.”
Stuart hurried up the stairs, leaving a wet trail behind him; but he was not to achieve comfort just yet.
For Constantine, it appeared, had been prowling to some purpose. He met them at the top of the first flight of stairs.
“Find anything?” he asked.
Stuart shook his head.
“He’s not there.”
“No traces of him?”
“So far as I could see, none. The windows on the balcony don’t appear to have been tampered with, and there’s certainly no sign of him on the ground below.”
Constantine glanced at his sodden slippers.
“You’ll have to get those things off, or we shall have you down with pneumonia,” he said. “But before you change, I wish you’d have another look at that balcony. I’ll get some matches.”
“I’ve got some,” admitted Stuart, with marked lack of enthusiasm, as he prepared to climb once more through the staircase window.
Lighting matches as he went, he made a second journey along the balcony. It was a loathsome job. His hands were numb and stiff with cold, and the matches, extinguished by the drifting snow, fizzled out as fast as he lighted them. But he managed to make some sort of inspection, though his own blundering progress, on his first expedition, had effectually fouled any trail there might have been. It was not till he arrived at the spot where the rope hung from Carew’s window that his suspicions were aroused. The snow here was so extensively trodden down that it seemed unlikely that all the traces could be his own. Unfortunately, owing to his foot-gear, his progress had been a series of shuffles, and it was impossible to see whether his trail had been superimposed on that of some one else.
He was on his way back, and had just struck the last of his matches, when a gleam of light shone suddenly on his face, and he realized that the curtains in Mrs. Orkney Cloude’s room had been parted, and that the window was being unlatched.
It opened, and the light disappeared as the curtains fell into place behind her.
“Who’s there?” she called sharply.
He hastened to reassure her, though her voice sounded startled rather than panic-stricken.
“It’s Angus Stuart,” he said softly. “Don’t be frightened. It was jolly plucky of you to open the window.”
“I heard you striking matches,” she whispered, “and I had to know who it was. What’s the matter?”
“It’s Carew,” he answered. “Ford locked him into his room, and he seems to have got out through the window. You’ve not heard anything of him, have you?” She gave a little shudder of disgust.
“Nothing, since he made a repulsive scene outside my door quite late this evening.”
“There’s been no disturbance of any kind in Mrs. van Dolen’s room, I suppose?”
“I’ve heard nothing.”
Then, realizing his condition—
“You’ll catch your death of cold, Mr. Stuart! Do go and get some clothes on at once, if you’re really going to look for him. You’re wet through.”
He managed to achieve a rather crooked grin, but his teeth were chattering so violently that he could hardly speak.
“I know. I thought I’d have another look at the balcony before I changed. I’m off now.”
She hesitated for a moment, then—
“You’d better come through my room, it’s quicker. Wait a minute while I tidy up things a bit.”
She shut the window again and he heard the latch click. In spite of his own miserable discomfort, he found himself smiling at her precaution. He hadn’t, somehow, credited her with so much prudishness. It seemed a long time before she reopened the window, but then, in his present condition, he was no very good judge of time.
“I’m bringing in a good deal of snow,” he apologized ruefully.
She had already produced a little spirit-lamp, and was filling a kettle.
“Nonsense! Get up to your room and change, and by that time this will be boiling. I’ve got a flask of brandy, fortunately. If you don’t have something hot you’ll be ill.”
He hesitated in the doorway.
“I say, it’s all right, really. I don’t need anything, honestly. Please don’t trouble.”
The sight of her room, in all its intimate disorder, had abashed him, and his absurd shyness had descended on him once more. He was really ridiculously young for his age, and, in this moment, he realized it and hated himself for being so easily discountenanced.
She smiled at him over her shoulder, and drew her silk dressing-gown a little closer. It dawned on him, for the first time, that she was a very understanding person “Nonsense! Come to the door as soon as you have changed and I’ll have it ready for you.”
Her tone was so entirely maternal that he felt younger than ever; but, somehow, her smile had dissipated the spasm of self-consciousness that had made him feel both loutish and inadequate.
“It might be wiser to lock your door after I’ve gone,” he suggested. “Carew may be somewhere about, and, if he’s drunk …”
She was bending over the spirit-lamp.
“I shall be all right,” she answered, almost carelessly. “Call out softly when you knock.”
As he closed the door behind him he saw Constantine and Soames standing at the foot of the little flight of steps at the end of the passage. He was about to report what had happened when Constantine stopped him with a gesture.
“Have you been along here at all this evening?” he asked. “Since you’ve been out in the snow, I mean.” Stuart shook his head.
“Some One with wet feet has been along this passage. It looks as if Carew must have made for the back stairs.”
“He hasn’t been near Mrs. Cloude,” said Stuart. “I disturbed her, and she let me in through the window. She hasn’t heard anything, and she says there’s been no noise from Mrs. van Dolen’s room. I’ve told her to keep her door locked in case Carew turns up.”
“I’m beginning to wish he would,” sighed Soames. “I’d give a good deal to go to bed.”
Constantine placed a hand on Stuart’s shoulder and propelled him gently down the passage.
“Get out of these wet things at once,” he said. “I ought not to have kept you talking here. And if you find you can’t get warm, go to bed and stay there. Soames and I can deal with this.”
Stuart grinned.
“Mrs. Cloude has taken my welfare in hand,” he announced. “She is brewing a concoction on her spirit-lamp. You needn’t worry about me.”
“I’m not,” grumbled Soames. “Some people have all the luck!”
“I’ve never known a man to travel with a spirit-lamp,” remarked Constantine thoughtfully. “And I’ve never come across a woman who travelled without one. And, over and over again, I’ve been grateful to them for it.”
It did not take Stuart long to throw off his sopping clothes, give himself a rub down with a hard towel, and get into a thick sweater and trousers.
As he was leaving his room, the door next to his opened, and Miss Amy Adderley put her head round the edge. As before, it was discreetly shrouded in wool.
“I heard you moving about,” she whispered. “Is anything the matter?”
“Nothing that you need be alarmed about,” he assured her. “But it might be as well to lock your door. The truth is, Major Carew isn’t quite himself to-night, and he seems to be wandering about the place somewhere. We’re trying to find him.”
A look of blank astonishment came over her face.
“You don’t mean to say that it was Major Carew in that mask la
st night?”
The idea was so preposterous that Stuart laughed as he hastened to reassure her; but as he made his way down the stairs to the next floor, he began to wonder why it shouldn’t have been Carew, as well as another. A middle-aged gentleman of sedentary habits who shinned down ropes on cold winter nights would be capable of anything.
He found the other two men waiting for him outside Mrs. Orkney Cloude’s door. Soames looked hideously bored by the whole business, and, but for the older man, would obviously have been back in bed by now. Constantine, on the contrary, was inclined to treat the matter seriously.
“I don’t understand it,” he said. “And I don’t like it. According to your report of the condition, of the balcony, Carew probably did get down that rope. And he must have been in a pretty queer condition even to have attempted such a thing. We’ve been all over the house, short of going into the servants’ bedrooms, and there isn’t a sign of him.”
Stuart stared at him.
“I believe we’ve been making fools of ourselves,” he cried. “We’ve been chasing all over the place looking for him, when in all probability he’s simply gone back to his room and locked himself in!”
“How did he get back?” asked Constantine.
“Up the rope, I suppose,” was Stuart’s rather lame suggestion.
“Could you get up that rope on a night like this?”
“In cold blood, I couldn’t, but goodness knows what I might do if I was screwed,” returned Stuart; but, even as he said it, he knew that the suggestion was preposterous.
Mrs. Cloude’s door opened.
“I thought I heard your voice,” she said, holding out a steaming glass. “Make him drink this, please, Dr. Constantine. He’s still shivering.”
Stuart accepted it gratefully. He was still chilled to the bone, and the immediate effect of the hot liquid made him realize how badly he needed it. While he drank it, Constantine explained to Mrs. Cloude how matters stood.
“There seems only one thing to do now,” he concluded. “We must try to rouse Carew, if he is in his room, and make sure he’s all right. Once we’ve got him to answer, I’m going to wash my hands of him and go to bed.”
She was about to answer, when the door of the room next to hers was flung open.
Mrs. van Dolen, mountainous in a wadded silk wrapper, stood on the threshold. In one hand she clutched, of all incongruous objects, a small half-eaten sponge finger.
“I don’t know why you’re all standing around there like a lot of sheep,” she exclaimed, her naturally strident voice grim with mingled scorn and indignation. “But I’d have you know that my emerald girdle has been stolen!”
CHAPTER VI
Constantine said afterwards that Mrs. Van Dolen’s attitude towards her loss was the one thing needed to add the last nightmarish touch to that fantastic night. At the moment it was unbearably aggravating.
The truth was that, for once in her life, Mrs. van Dolen was badly frightened. A woman of robust nerves, possessed of all the unreasoning obstinacy of one who, owing to her wealth, had never been crossed, she had flaunted her jewels from one hotel to another, persistently ignoring the warnings, not only of her friends, but of the police. And, until now, she could boast of having done it with impunity. So long had her immunity lasted that she had begun to trade on it, and, as time went on, had grown increasingly careless. With a curious perversity she had taken a positive pleasure in leaving her valuables lying openly about in her room, and it had even amused her to witness the distress of her maid, whose honesty she knew to be unimpeachable.
The loss of the girdle was a rude shock, though, being above all things a business woman, she had insured it to the full extent of its value; but the blow to her self-esteem, and, what touched her more nearly, her sense of security, had thrown her completely off her balance. The knowledge that some one had been in her room and had ransacked it while she slept, filled her with real terror. She had sense enough to know that, had she happened to awaken, she would possibly have paid for her obstinacy with her life, and, with the natural reaction of a strong-minded person who has been badly scared, she was now in a towering and completely unreasonable rage. Being perfectly aware that no one but herself was to blame for what had happened, it had become an actual necessity to her to find some one on whom to vent her wrath, and the discovery that, as she put it, “half the hotel” had been up and about while she was being robbed gave her her opportunity.
She literally herded the three men into her dishevelled bedroom, where, to their amused resentment, she proceeded to subject them to what was neither more nor less than a thorough scolding.
It was some time before they could get in a word edgeways, but Constantine, by dint of sheer pertinacity, did at last manage to wring from her some sort of account of what had happened.
Stuart could hardly believe his ears when she announced, quite casually, that the emeralds had been lying in their case in the top of an unlocked dispatch-box.
“What you were doing, wandering round the passages at this time of night, I don’t know,” she stormed. “But I do know that it’s impossible to get a wink of decent sleep in this hotel. Last night I was dragged out of my warm bed by that fool of a landlord. If he thought there were thieves about, why didn’t he do something about it, instead of leaving people to be robbed and murdered in their beds? And to-night, what with the talking in the passage, and the opening and shutting of doors, I might as well have been trying to sleep in a railway depot!”
“Have you any idea when you did wake?” asked Constantine suavely.
She shot him a vicious glance. Her inability to ruffle this urbane old man only served to augment her sense of grievance.
“I have not. All I know is that the noise of the door of the room next to mine, shutting, woke me.”
“That would be less than half an hour ago,” commented Constantine.
“I don’t care when it was, but I know I couldn’t get to sleep again, and at last, when I was feeling sick at my stomach from exhaustion, I got up and opened a tin of biscuits I had with me. It was then that I remembered that scare last night, and, just in case there was some reason why all you folk were astir, I thought I’d cast an eye on my emeralds. They were gone, case and all, and I’d like to know what, in the name of goodness, you people think you were doing, keeping folks out of their beds with the beastly shindy you were making, and letting the thief get away with it like that!” she finished furiously. She had thrown refinement to the winds now, and her cockney accent was plainly perceptible.
“Is the window locked?” asked Stuart.
“Shut and bolted! I looked at it first thing. But, as you’re asking, I can tell you what wasn’t locked! That’s the door. And I locked it myself when I came in here last night. When I ran out just now I tried to turn the key, and it was then that I found out that some one had unlocked it.”
Soames, who had gone in search of Girling, arrived with him at that moment. The sight of the landlord proved as infuriating as a red rag to a bull. Stuart, bored and embarrassed by the tirade that followed, slipped out into the passage, followed by Constantine. They stood and stared at one another.
“Well, she’s got what she deserved at last,” said Constantine. “I never pitied any one less. I’m sorry for Girling. We must get him out of that room as soon as we can, for more reasons than one.”
Stuart nodded.
“It puts rather a different complexion on the Carew affair, doesn’t it?” he said. “We ought to be doing something, I suppose, but I’m hanged if I know what.”
“We’ve been all over the house once,” Constantine reminded him. “There are the servants’ bedrooms, of course, but unless the thief is the woman’s own chauffeur, who, one presumes, must know her habits fairly well, it seems unlikely that we shall run any one to earth in them. It looks to me as if this were a professional job. There’s only one thing to do—get to the other end of that rope from Carew’s window.”
Stuart was assail
ed by a wild suspicion.
“You don’t suppose he’s been shamming all this time?” he exclaimed incredulously. “If he has, he’s the best actor I’ve ever met.”
Constantine shook his head.
“It would be the simplest solution, but it’s too easy. I can’t believe that, if he was planning anything of the sort, he would go out of his way to make himself so conspicuous. Anyway, if the thief is Carew, he’s locked his door and got clean away, though I fail to see where he’s gone to ground. He’s literally bottled up here until the weather changes.”
Soames appeared in the doorway.
“I’m going down to have a look at the door into the yard,” he announced. “Whoever got into this house to-night must have got out of it somehow.”
“Whoever got into Mrs. van Dolen’s bedroom came down that rope outside Carew’s room,” asserted Constantine.
“I managed to convey that to old Girling, under cover of the fat lady’s accusations, but I’m willing to bet you won’t find Carew there, unless he’s got a confederate. Girling thinks he can find another key to that door, and, as soon as he can tear himself free, he’s going to fetch it. He’s having a pretty thick time, I can tell you.”
He departed, and his back was hardly turned before Girling came out of Mrs. van Dolen’s room, closing the door carefully behind him.
“Phew!” he murmured. “This is the last time so much as a silver bracelet comes into this house! A fair caution, she is! That rope’s a funny business, sir. I’ll get my bunch of keys. There should be one that fits, if I remember rightly. And I’ll set Joe to watch that there balcony, but I’ll lay the chap’s away by now.”
He bustled off, and the two men made their way upstairs to their own floor. Outside Carew’s room they stopped and listened. There was not a sound from inside. Soames, accompanied by Geoffrey Ford, joined them almost immediately, and, while they stood waiting for Girling, the door of the next room opened and Melnotte’s head appeared cautiously round the edge. In spite of his preoccupation Stuart very nearly laughed aloud, for the dancer was wearing one of those net-work arrangements on his head that are sold to keep the hair in place during the night. At the sight of the little group in the passage he snatched it off.