The Charing Cross Mystery, J. S. Fletcher [portable ebook reader .txt] 📗

about this place, and it’s a very queer thing that though he’s known this district more than a year, he’s never seen a soul go in or out of that door, and hasn’t the least notion of what business, if it is a business, is carried on there!”

“Never seen anything or anybody!” corroborated the constable. “At any time⁠—day or night. When I first came on this beat, maybe fifteen months ago, that door had been newly set and painted, and the glass had just been stuck atop of the wall. But it’s a fact⁠—I’ve never seen anybody go in or come out!”

“I propose to go in,” said Hetherwick. “I think we’ve abundant cause, knowing what we do. It may be that the two missing ladies are there. I’ve been having a look into the yard, and we could get into it easily by going through the grocer’s shop there, on the right, and climbing the wall from his back premises. What do you say, Robmore?”

“Oh, I think so!” agreed Robmore. “Now we’re on the job, we’ll carry it through. Better let me tackle the grocer, Mr. Hetherwick⁠—I’ll see him first and then call you in.”

The other waited while Robmore entered the shop and spoke with its owner. They saw him engaged in conversation for several minutes; then he came to the door and beckoned the rest to approach.

“That’s all right,” he said in an aside to Hetherwick. “We can go through to his backyard, and he’ll lend us a stepladder to get over the wall. But he’s told me a bit⁠—he knows the two men who have this place in the next yard, and there’s no doubt at all, from his description of them, that one’s Ambrose and the other Baseverie. He says they’ve had the place almost eighteen months, and he thinks they use it as a laboratory⁠—chemicals, or something of that sort. But he says they’re rarely seen⁠—sometimes he’s never seen them for days and even weeks together. Usually they’re there of a night⁠—he’s seen lights in the place at all hours of the night. Well⁠—come on!”

The posse of investigators filed through the dark little shop to a yard at its rear, the grocer’s apprentice going in front with a stepladder, which he planted against the intervening wall at its lowest point. One by one, the uniformed constable going first, the six men climbed and dropped over. But for their own presence, the place seemed deserted and lifeless. As Hetherwick had observed from the greengrocer’s parlour the windows were obscured by thick coats of paint; nevertheless, two or three of the men approached and tried to find places from which the paint had been scratched, in an effort to see what lay inside. But the constable, bolder and more direct, went straight to the entrance.

“Door’s open!” he exclaimed. “Not even shut!” He pushed the door wide, and went into the building, the rest crowding after him. “Hullo!” he shouted. “Hullo!”

No answer came to the summons. The constable crossed the lobby in which they were all standing, and opened an inner door. And Hetherwick saw at once that the grocer’s surmise as to the purpose to which the place was put had been correct⁠—this was a chemical laboratory, well equipped, too, with modern apparatus. But there was not a sign of life in it.

“Nobody here, apparently,” murmured one of the men. “Flown!”

Robmore went forward to another door, and opening it, revealed a room furnished as an office. There was a roll-top desk in it, and papers and documents lying there; he and Hetherwick began to finger and examine them. And Hetherwick suddenly saw something that made a link between this mysterious place and the house he had called at earlier in the afternoon. There, before his eyes, lay some of the azure-tinted notepaper which Mapperley had traced with the embossed address on it of which the stationer had told.

“There’s no doubt we’ve hit on the place at last, Robmore,” he said. “I wish we’d had Matherfield here. But⁠—”

Before he could say more, a sudden shout came from Goldmark, who, while the others were investigating the lower regions, had courageously, and alone, gone up the low staircase to the upper rooms.

“Mithter!” he called. “Mithter Hetherwick! come up here⁠—come up, all of you. Here’th a man here, a-thittin’ in a chair⁠—and th’elp me if I don’t believe he’th a thtiff ’un⁠—dead!”

XXV Dead!

The rest of the searchers, hearing that startled cry from the Jew, with one accord made for the upper part of the building. Robmore and Hetherwick reached him first; he was standing at the half-opened door of a room, into which he was staring with eager eyes. They pushed by him and entered.

Hetherwick took in the general aspect and contents of that room at a glance. It had been fitted up⁠—recently, he thought, from certain small evidences⁠—as a bed-sitting-room. A camp-bed stood in one corner; there was a washstand, a dressing table, a chest of drawers, two or three pictures, a shelf of books, a small square of carpet in the centre of the floor, the outer edges of which had been roughly and newly stained. On the bed lay, open, a suitcase, already packed with clothes and linen; by it lay an overcoat, hat, gloves, umbrella; it was evident that the man to whom it belonged had completed his preparations for a departure, and had nothing to do but to close and lock the suitcase, put on his overcoat and hat, pick up the other things and go away.

But the man himself? There was a big, old-fashioned easy chair at the side of the bed⁠—a roomy, comfortable affair. A man lay, rather than sat, in it, in an attitude which suggested that he had dropped there as with a sudden weariness, laid his head back against the padded cushion, and⁠—gone to sleep. But the men knew, all of them, as they crowded into that room, that it was no sleep that they had broken