‘“Good God!” said young Jarnock again. “Good God! It’s the dagger! The thing’s been stabbed, same as Bellett!”
‘“Yes,” I replied, and saw him glance swiftly towards the entrance of the Chapel. But I will do him the justice to say that he never budged an inch.
‘“Come and see how it was done,” I said, and led the way back to the chancel-rail. From the wall to the left of the altar I took down a long, curiously ornamented, iron instrument, not unlike a short spear. The sharp end of this I inserted in a hole in the left-hand gate-post of the chancel gateway. I lifted hard, and a section of the post, from the floor upwards, bent inwards towards the altar, as though hinged at the bottom. Down it went, leaving the remaining part of the post standing. As I bent the movable portion lower there came a quick click and a section of the floor slid to one side, showing a long, shallow cavity, sufficient to enclose the post. I put my weight to the lever and hove the post down into the niche. Immediately there was a sharp clang, as some catch snicked in, and held it against the powerful operating spring.
‘I went over now to the dummy, and after a few minutes’ work managed to wrench the dagger loose out of the armour. I brought the old weapon and placed its hilt in a hole near the top of the post where it fitted loosely, the point upwards. After that I went again to the lever and gave another strong heave, and the post descended about a foot, to the bottom of the cavity, catching there with another clang. I withdrew the lever and the narrow strip of floor slid back, covering post and dagger, and looking no different from the surrounding surface.
‘Then I shut the chancel-gate, and we both stood well to one side. I took the spear-like lever, and gave the gate a little push, so that it opened. Instantly there was a loud thud, and something sang through the air, striking the bottom wall of the Chapel. It was the dagger. I showed Jarnock then that the other half of the post had sprung back into place, making the whole post as thick as the one upon the right-hand side of the gate.
‘“There!” I said, turning to the young man and tapping the divided post. “There’s the ‘invisible’ thing that used the dagger, but who the deuce is the person who sets the trap?” I looked at him keenly as I spoke.
‘“My father is the only one who has a key,” he said. “So it’s practically impossible for anyone to get in and meddle.”
‘I looked at him again, but it was obvious that he had not yet reached out to any conclusion.
‘“See here, Mr. Jarnock,” I said, perhaps rather curter than I should have done, considering what I had to say. “Are you quite sure that Sir Alfred is quite balanced—mentally?”
‘He looked at me, half frightenedly and flushing a little. I realised then how badly I put it.
‘“I—I don’t know,” he replied, after a slight pause and was then silent, except for one or two incoherent half-remarks.
‘“Tell the truth,” I said. “Haven’t you suspected something, now and again? You needn’t be afraid to tell me.”
‘“Well,” he answered slowly, “I’ll admit I’ve thought father a little—a little strange, perhaps, at times. But I’ve always tried to think I was mistaken. I’ve always hoped no one else would see it. You see, I’m very fond of the old guv-nor.”
‘I nodded.
‘“Quite right, too,” I said. “There’s not the least need to make any kind of scandal about this. We must do something, though, but in a quiet way. No fuss, you know. I should go and have a chat with your father, and tell him we’ve found out about this thing.” I touched the divided post.
‘Young Jarnock seemed very grateful for my advice and after shaking my hand pretty hard, took my key, and let himself out of the Chapel. He came back in about an hour, looking rather upset. He told me that my conclusions were perfectly correct. It was Sir Alfred Jarnock who had set the trap, both on the night that the butler was nearly killed, and on the past night. Indeed, it seemed that the old gentleman had set it every night for many years. He had learnt of its existence from an old M.S.-book in the Castle library. It had been planned and used in an earlier age as a protection for the gold vessels of the Ritual, which were, it seemed, kept in a hidden recess at the back of the altar.
‘This recess Sir Alfred Jarnock had utilised, secretly, to store his wife’s jewellery. She had died some twelve years back, and the young man told me that his father had never seemed quite himself since.
‘I mentioned to young Jarnock how puzzled I was that the trap had been set before the service, on the night that the butler was struck; for, if I understood him aright, his father had been in the habit of setting the trap late every night and unsetting it each morning before anyone entered the Chapel. He replied that his father, in a fit of temporary forgetfulness (natural enough in his neurotic condition), must have set it too early and hence what had so nearly proved a tragedy.
‘That is about all there is to tell. The old man is not (so far as I could learn), really insane in the popularly accepted sense of the word. He is extremely neurotic and has developed into a hypochondriac, the whole condition probably brought about by the shock and sorrow resultant on the death of his wife, leading to years of sad broodings and to overmuch of his own company and thoughts. Indeed, young Jarnock told me that his father would sometimes pray for hours together, alone in the Chapel.’ Carnacki made an end of speaking and leant forward for a spill.
‘But you’ve never told us just how you discovered the secret of the divided post and all that,’ I said, speaking for the four of us.
‘Oh, that!’ replied Carnacki, puffing vigorously at his pipe. ‘I found—on comparing the—photos, that the one—taken in the—daytime, showed a thicker left-hand gate-post, than the one taken at night by the flashlight. That put me on to the track. I saw at once that there might be some mechanical dodge at the back of the whole queer business and nothing at all of an abnormal nature. I examined the post and the rest was simple enough, you know.
‘By the way,’ he continued, rising and going to the mantelpiece, ‘you may be interested to have a look at the so-called “waeful dagger.” Young Jarnock was kind enough to present it to me, as a little memento of my adventure.’
He handed it round to us and whilst we examined it, stood silent before the fire, puffing meditatively at his pipe.
‘Jarnock and I made the trap so that it won’t work,’ he remarked after a few moments. ‘I’ve got the dagger, as you see, and old Bellett’s getting about again, so that the whole business can be hushed up, decently. All the same I fancy the Chapel will never lose its reputation as a dangerous place. Should be pretty safe now to keep valuables in.’
‘There’s two things you haven’t explained yet,’ I said. ‘What do you think caused the two clangey sounds when you were in the Chapel in the dark? And do you believe the soft tready sounds were real, or only a fancy, with your being so worked up and tense?’
‘Don’t know for certain about the clangs,’ replied Carnacki.
‘I’ve puzzled quite a bit about them. I can only think that the spring which worked the post must have “given” a trifle, slipped you know, in the catch. If it did, under such a tension, it would make a bit of a ringing noise. And a little sound goes a long way in the middle of the night when you’re thinking of “ghostesses.” You can understand that—eh?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘And the other sounds?’
‘Well, the same thing—I mean the extraordinary quietness—may help to explain these a bit. They may have been some usual enough sound that would never have been noticed under ordinary conditions, or they may have been only fancy. It is just impossible to say. They were disgustingly real to me. As for the slithery noise, I am pretty sure that one of the tripod legs of my camera must have slipped a few inches; if it did so, it may easily have jolted the lens-cap off the base-board, which would account for that queer little tap which I heard directly after.’
‘How do you account for the d
agger being in its place above the altar when you first examined it that night?’ I asked. ‘How could it be there, when at that very moment it was set in the trap?’
‘That was my mistake,’ replied Carnacki. ‘The dagger could not possibly have been in its sheath at the time, though I thought it was. You see, the curious cross-hilted sheath gave the appearance of the complete weapon, as you can understand. The hilt of the dagger protrudes very little above the continued portion of the sheath—a most inconvenient arrangement for drawing quickly!’ He nodded sagely at the lot of us and yawned, then glanced at the clock.
‘Out you go!’ he said, in friendly fashion, using the recognised formula. ‘I want a sleep.’
We rose, shook him by the hand, and went out presently into the night and the quiet of the Embankment, and so to our homes.
The Case of the Tragedies
in the Greek Room
Sax Rohmer
Sax Rohmer was the exotic pen-name of Birmingham-born former civil servant Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward (1883–1959), who remains best known as the creator of the master-criminal Dr. Fu Manchu. Rohmer’s youthful interest in Egyptology was the spark for his first published story, ‘The Mysterious Mummy’, in 1903, but it was his creation of the fiendish Oriental villain that made his name. The Fu Manchu stories were absurd, but hugely popular in their day, and they inspired many imitations, usually dire in quality. This phenomenon led a weary Ronald Knox to include a famous rule in his ‘Detectives’ Decalogue’: ‘No Chinaman must figure in the story’. It is occasionally suggested that there was a racist element to this jokey prohibition; in fact, Knox was objecting to crude racial stereotyping.
Rohmer’s series characters included a mystery-solving magician, Bazarada, based on his friend Harry Houdini. When compared to Conan Doyle (or, I would suggest, William Hope Hodgson), Rohmer ranks as an inferior writer, but there is compensation for the preposterous nature of his tales in his sheer story-telling gusto. In 1913–14, he created Moris Klaw, a psychic detective who solves bizarre mysteries with the aid of ‘odic photography’. Klaw was too exotically conceived to be capable of sustaining a long-running series of detective stories, but he is certainly memorable. The tales about him, collected in 1920 in The Dream Detective, included three which concern impossible crimes, and this is the best of them.
***
I
When did Moris Klaw first appear in London? It is a question which I am asked sometimes and to which I reply: To the best of my knowledge, shortly before the commencement of the strange happenings at the Menzies Museum.
What I know of him I have gathered from various sources; and in these papers, which represent an attempt to justify the methods of one frequently accused of being an insane theorist, I propose to recount all the facts which have come to my knowledge. In some few of the cases I was personally though slightly concerned; but regard me merely as the historian and on no account as the principal or even minor character in the story. My friendship with Martin Coram led, then, to my first meeting with Moris Klaw—a meeting which resulted in my becoming his biographer, inadequate though my information unfortunately remains.
It was some three months after the appointment of Coram to the curatorship of the Menzies Museum that the first of a series of singular occurrences took place there.
This occurrence befell one night in August, and the matter was brought to my ears by Coram himself on the following morning. I had, in fact, just taken my seat at the breakfast table, when he walked in unexpectedly and sank into an armchair. His dark, clean-shaven face looked more gaunt than usual and I saw, as he lighted the cigarette which I proffered, that his hand shook nervously.
‘There’s trouble at the Museum!’ he said abruptly. ‘I want you to run around.’
I looked at him for a moment without replying, and, knowing the responsibility of his position, feared that he referred to a theft from the collection.
‘Something gone?’ I asked.
‘No; worse!’ was his reply.
‘What do you mean, Coram?’
He threw the cigarette, unsmoked, into the hearth. ‘You know Conway?’ he said; ‘Conway, the night attendant. Well—he’s dead!’
I stood up from the table, my breakfast forgotten, and stared incredulously. ‘Do you mean that he died in the night?’ I inquired.
‘Yes. Done for, poor devil!’
‘What! Murdered?’
‘Without a doubt, Searles! He’s had his neck broken!’
I waited for no further explanations, but, hastily dressing, accompanied Coram to the Museum. It consists, I should mention, of four long, rectangular rooms, the windows of two overlooking South Grafton Square, those of the third giving upon the court that leads to the curator’s private entrance, and the fourth adjoining an enclosed garden attached to the building. This fourth room is on the ground floor and is entered through the hall from the Square, the other three, containing the principal and more valuable exhibits, are upon the first floor and are reached by a flight of stairs from the hall. The remainder of the building is occupied by an office and the curator’s private apartments, and is completely shut off from that portion open to the public, the only communicating door—an iron one—being kept locked.
The room described in the catalogue as the ‘Greek Room’ proved to be the scene of the tragedy. This room is one of the two overlooking the Square and contains some of the finest items of the collection. The Museum is not open to the public until ten o’clock, and I found, upon arriving there, that the only occupants of the Greek Room were the commissionaire on duty, two constables, a plain-clothes officer and an inspector—that is, if I except the body of poor Conway.
He had not been touched, but lay as he was found by Beale, the commissionaire who took charge of the upper rooms during the day, and, indeed, it was patent that he was beyond medical aid. In fact, the position of his body was so extraordinary as almost to defy description.
There are three windows in the Greek Room, with wall-cases between, and, in the gap corresponding to the east window and just by the door opening into the next room, is a chair for the attendant. Conway lay downward on the polished floor with his limbs partly under this chair and his clenched fists thrust straight out before him. His head, turned partially to one side, was doubled underneath his breast in a most dreadful manner, indisputably pointing to a broken neck, and his commissionaire’s cap lay some distance away, under a table supporting a heavy case of vases.
So much was revealed at a glance, and I immediately turned blankly to Coram.
‘What do you make of it?’ he said.
I shook my head in silence. I could scarce grasp the reality of the thing; indeed, I was still staring at the huddled figure when the doctor arrived. At his request we laid the dead man flat upon the floor, to facilitate an examination, and we then saw that he was greatly cut and bruised about the head and face, and that his features were distorted in a most extraordinary manner, almost as though he had been suffocated.
The doctor did not fail to notice this expression. ‘Made a hard fight of it!’ he said. ‘He must have been in the last stages of exhaustion when his neck was broken!’
‘My dear fellow!’ cried Coram, somewhat irritably, ‘what do you mean when you say that he made a hard fight? There could not possibly have been any one else in these rooms last night!’
‘Excuse me, sir!’ said the inspector, ‘but there certainly was something going on here. Have you seen the glass case in the next room?’
‘Glass case?’ muttered Coram, running his hand distractedly through his thick black hair. ‘No; what of a glass case?’
‘In here, sir,’ explained the inspector, leading the way into the adjoining apartment.
At his words, we all followed, and found that he referred to the glass front of a wall-case containing statuettes and images of Egyptian deities. The centre pane of this was smashed
into fragments, the broken glass strewing the floor and the shelves inside the case.
‘That looks like a struggle, sir, doesn’t it?’ said the inspector.
‘Heaven help us! What does it mean?’ groaned poor Coram. ‘Who could possibly have gained access to the building in the night, or, having done so, have quitted it again, when all the doors remained locked?’
‘That we must try and find out!’ replied the inspector. ‘Meanwhile, here are his keys. They lay on the floor in a corner of the Greek Room.’
Coram took them, mechanically. ‘Beale,’ he said to the commissionaire, ‘see if any of the cases are unlocked.’
The man proceeded to go around the rooms. He had progressed no further than the Greek Room when he made a discovery. ‘Here’s the top of this unfastened, sir!’ he suddenly cried excitedly.
We hurriedly joined him, to find that he stood before a marble pedestal surmounted by a thick glass case containing what Coram had frequently assured me was the gem of the collection—the Athenean Harp.
It was alleged to be of very ancient Greek workmanship, and was constructed of fine gold, inlaid with jewels. It represented two reclining female figures—their arms thrown above their heads, their hands meeting; and several of the strings which were still intact were of incredibly fine gold wire. The instrument was said to have belonged to a Temple of Pallas in an extremely remote age, and at the time it was brought to light, much controversy had waged concerning its claims to authenticity, several connoisseurs proclaiming it the work of a famous goldsmith of mediaeval Florence, and nothing but a clever forgery. However, Greek or Florentine, amazingly ancient or comparatively modern, it was a beautiful piece of workmanship and of very great intrinsic value, apart from its artistic worth and unique character.
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