The Clue of the Silver Key, Edgar Wallace [interesting books to read .TXT] 📗
- Author: Edgar Wallace
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the door had been forced. The lock itself was hanging on one screw. He
went ahead, switched on the lights, without result.
‘It’s been turned off at the fuse box. Where is it?’ She indicated the
position, and after a little fumbling there was a click, and light showed
along the short passage.
‘He fastened the door after he got in, but couldn’t fasten it when he
left.’
Smith picked up two small wooden wedges from the floor. He went out again
into the corridor, the end of which was formed by a half wood, half glass
door leading to the fire escape.
He tried this and, as he expected, found it open. A flight of iron stairs
led into the darkness below. He sent for the lift-man, who could give no
information at all. On a Saturday night most of the people who lived in
the flats, he said, were out or away for the week-end, and there had been
no strange visitors that he could remember.
Surefoot went ahead down the passage into the flat, saw a door wide open,
and entered Mary’s bedroom. It was a scene of indescribable confusion;
every drawer of every bureau had been taken out and emptied on the bed
and roughly sorted, They found the same in the dining-room, where the
little desk, which she had locked before she went out, had been broken
and its contents piled on to the table.
Mary gazed with dismay on the scene of destruction, but was agreeably
surprised when she found that a small box which had been in her desk
drawer, and which had been wrenched open, still contained the articles of
jewellery she had left there. They were valued at something over four
hundred pounds, she told the detective.
‘Then what on earth did they come for?’ she asked.
On further inspection Smith found that even the waste bin in the kitchen
had been turned bottom upward and sorted over.
One valuable clue he discovered: a small kitchen clock had evidently been
knocked off the dresser and had stopped at eleven-fifteen.
‘Less than an hour ago—phew!’ Surefoot whistled softly. ‘In a devil of a
hurry, too. Now tell me who knows this place—I mean, who’s been here
before? Forget all your girl friends, but tell me the men.’
She could enumerate them very briefly.
‘Mike Hennessey has been here, has he? Often? I’ve seen all the rooms,
haven’t I?’
‘Except the bathroom,’ she said.
He opened the door of this well-appointed little apartment, switched on
the light, and went in. The intruder had been here too; the wash-basin
was half-filled with discoloured water. ‘Hullo! What’s that?’ Smith’s
eyes narrowed. Level with the wash-basin, and a little to the right of
it, the enamelled wall of the bathroom bore a red smear. The detective
touched it; it was still moist. He looked at the tessellated floor. There
was nothing, but on the edge of the white bath the smear occurred again.
Behind the door was a clothes hook, and here also there was a trace of
red.
‘He came in here first,’ said Surefoot slowly. ‘He had to wash his hands
and as he turned on the tap, his sleeve brushed the wall. There was blood
on it but he didn’t notice. He took his coat off and threw it on the edge
of the bath. Then he changed his mind and hung it up.’
‘Blood?’ Mary stared at the gruesome stain. ‘Do you think he hurt himself
getting in?’
‘No, we should have seen it on the floor or in the passage. Besides, the
glass door of the corridor wasn’t broken—I wonder where he got it?’
Surefoot considered all the possibilities in the shortest space of time.
‘It beats me,’ he said.
Surefoot Smith went into the kitchen to re-examine the clock. He was no
believer in coincidences, had seen the stopped clock too often featured
in works of fiction to believe implicitly the story it told. But his
inspection removed all doubt; the clock had not stopped, but was still
ticking; the jolt had merely thrown the pin connecting the hands from its
gear, and no clever clue-maker could have done that.
Mary had followed him into the kitchen, and watched him silently whilst
he was making the examination. ‘Now will you tell me?’ she said quietly.
Surefoot Smith gaped at her. ‘About—?’
‘You said you would tell me what you have discovered about Mr Lyne’s
murder.’
He perched himself on the edge of the kitchen table, and briefly told her
all he knew.
To say that Dick Allenby was surprised was to put it mildly. He regarded
every Scotland Yard detective as reticence personified. Surefoot Smith
was notoriously ‘dumb’, and here he was talking freely to the girl, and,
if he showed any embarrassment at all, it was the presence of Dick
himself which provoked the inhibition.
Mary Lane sat with her hands clasped in her lap. She frowned.
‘Got anything?’ asked Surefoot anxiously.
And then he must have caught a glimpse of the astonishment in Dick
Allenby’s face, for he scowled at him.
‘You think I’m being foolish, Mr Allenby? Get the idea out of your mind;
I never am. Every woman has just the kind of mind that every detective
should have and hasn’t. No science in it—not that I mean to be
disrespectful, Miss Lane—just plain commonsense. Got it?’
He addressed the girl again. She shook her head. ‘Not quite,’ she said.
‘I know why they burgled my flat, of course.’
Surefoot Smith nodded. ‘But you can’t quite understand how they came to
think it was here?’
Dick interrupted. ‘May I be very dense,’ he asked politely, ‘and inquire
what this is all about? Didn’t know what was here?’
‘The bank statement,’ said Mary, without looking up, and again Smith
nodded, a broad grin on his face. ‘I guess that’s what they came for, but
I can’t understand how they knew.’
Surefoot chuckled. ‘I am the clever fellow that gave it away,’ he said.
‘I told Mike Hennessey this afternoon that a bank statement had been sent
to you. I didn’t tell him that it was in my pocket, and I could have
saved him a lot of time and trouble. It’s a great pity.’ He ran his hand
irritably through his hair and slid off the table. ‘Those bloodstains
now—they look bad,’ he said, and loafed out of the room with the other
two behind him into the bathroom. ‘That’s his sleeve—that’s his hand,
but too blurred to get a print. The man who came here wasn’t hurt, and
probably wasn’t aware that he was bloodstained. Look at the top of that
tap.’
He pointed; there was a distinct smear of blood on the top of one of the
taps.
Surefoot Smith took out his torch and began to examine the passageway. It
gave him nothing in the shape of clues; but when he went outside the
fireproof door and inspected the door itself, he found two new traces of
blood, one on the iron railings and one just below the glass panel of the
door.
‘I’ll use your phone,’ he said, and a few minutes later was talking
volubly to Scotland Yard. Every railway station was to be watched; all
ports and airports were to be warned. ‘Not that he’ll attempt to get out
of the country. It’s curious how seldom they do,’ he explained to the
girl.
His offer to send up a man to be on guard outside the door she refused
immediately, but he insisted, and in such a tone that she knew it would
be a waste of time on her part to press her objection.
On his way home he called at old Lyne’s house to interview Binny. That
worthy man was in bed when he knocked, and showed considerable and quite
understandable reluctance to open the door. No police had been left on
the premises; Surefoot had been content to remove all documents to
Scotland Yard for a closer scrutiny and to seal up the bedroom and the
study.
Binny led him down to the kitchen, poked together the dying remnants of
the small fire and dropped wood on it, for the night was a little chilly.
‘I wondered who it was knocking—it brought me heart up into me mouth,’
he apologized, as he ushered the visitor into the tiny room. ‘I suppose,
Mr Smith’—his voice was very anxious—‘the old gentleman didn’t leave me
anything? I heard you’d found the will—mind you, I’m not going to be
disappointed if he didn’t. He wasn’t the kind of man who worried very
much about servants; he used to say he hated having them about the place.
Still, you never know—’
‘I haven’t read the will thoroughly,’ said Surefoot, ‘but I don’t seem to
remember finding your name very prominently displayed.’
Binny sighed.
‘It’s been the dream of my life that somebody would die and leave me a
million,’ he said pathetically. ‘I was a good servant to him—cooked his
food, made his bed, did everything for him.’
The detective pushed over a carton of cheap cigarettes and, still
sighing, Binny selected one and lit it.
‘There’s one way you can help me, I think,’ said Smith. ‘Do you remember
Mr Moran coming here?’ Binny nodded. ‘Do you know what he came about?’
The man hesitated a moment. ‘I don’t know, sir. But I have an idea it had
something to do with his balance. Mr Lyne was a very curious old
gentleman; he never wanted to see anybody, and when he did he was always
a bit unpleasant to ‘em.’
‘Was he unpleasant to Mr Moran?’
Binny hesitated. ‘Well, I don’t want to tell tales out of school, Mr
Smith, but from what I heard he did snap a bit at him.’
‘You listened, eh?’
Binny smiled and shook his head. ‘You didn’t have to listen, sir.’ He
pointed to the ceiling.
‘The study’s above here. You can’t hear what people are saying, but if a
gentleman raises his voice as Mr Lyne did, you can hear him.’
‘You know Moran?’ Binny nodded, ‘Do you know him very well?’
‘Very well, sir. I worked for him—
‘I remember, yes.’ Surefoot Smith bit his lower lip thoughtfully. ‘Did he
speak to you after his interview with the old man?’
Again Binny hesitated. ‘I don’t want to get anybody into trouble—’
‘The trouble with you, Binny, is that you can’t say “yes” or “no.” Did
you see him?’
‘Yes, sir, I did.’ Binny was evidently nettled. ‘I was taking in a letter
that had come by post as lie went out. And now, Mr Smith, I’ll tell you
the truth. He said a strange thing to me—he asked me not to mention the
fact that he’d been, and slipped me a quid. Now I’ve told you all I know.
I thought it was funny—but, bless your heart, he wasn’t the first man to
ask me not to mention the fact that they’d called on Mr Lyne.’
‘I suppose not.’
On a little table near the wall was a small paper parcel, loosely
wrapped. Surefoot Smith was blessed with a keen sense of smell; he could
disentangle the most conflicting and elusive odours. But putty was not
one of them; it had a pungent and, to Surefoot Smith, an unpleasant
aroma. He pointed to the parcel.
‘Putty?’
Binny looked at him in surprise. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Have you been mending windows?’ Surefoot looked up.
‘No, sir, that was done by a glazier. I broke the
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