‘Those fire-irons, perhaps,’ she said, ‘and the murder and Elysee Barnes and one thing and another.’
‘Then, if it will ease your mind, you had better find this back entrance, if it exists, but please stay on the right side of the law.’
‘I don’t intend breaking and entering, if that’s what you mean.’ Laura waited for no comment upon this declaration. They took the car, and when they reached the junk shop she got out and strode rapidly away down the narrow street. As she disappeared at the right-angled turn, the milkman’s van pulled up outside the shop, the man got down, took a pint bottle from his cargo and was about to place it on the step when he changed his mind and returned it to the van.
‘I was wondering at what time the shop opens,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘Ent he open, then?’
‘It appears not. Neither was the shop open on Saturday or Monday or yesterday.’
‘Must-a-bin. He took the three bottles in all right, else they ud still be here, like, wouldn’t ’em? Nobody don’t pinch milk bottles in this town, you know.‘ He climbed back on to his van and resumed his round. Dame Beatrice went up to the shop door and hammered on it. Then she walked up the little cobbled street in Laura’s wake and met her secretary coming back.
‘We’d better let somebody know,’ said Laura. ‘I looked in through a back window and I think the chap’s dead.’
‘Did you try the back door?’
‘Yes. It’s open, but I’d said I wouldn’t go in, so—’
‘We had better both go in. There may be something I can do. In any case, the shop will be on the telephone.’ She was hurrying Laura along as she spoke. They reached the head of the narrower alley which led to the back of the shop past derelict patches which had been the gardens of houses long since pulled down, and got to the shop itself. There was no garden gate and the garden itself had been turned into a dumping ground for unsaleable merchandise or for pieces too cumbersome or too large to be taken inside the house.
The two investigators picked their way amongst this rubbish and, reaching the back door, Laura, who was in the lead, turned the handle and went in. Dame Beatrice followed. Laura led the way through a neat, clean scullery and kitchen. On the kitchen table stood three bottles of milk. Dame Beatrice noted them, but made no remark, although she saw that the kitchen, in addition to its store-cupboards, also housed a refrigerator.
Laura led the way up four linoleum-covered stairs to the room behind the shop, for the building was on the slope which led up from the sea-front. She opened a door and stood aside to let Dame Beatrice in.
The little room was furnished as an office. There was a roll-top desk, a filing cabinet, a swivel chair and, on a small table, a typewriter and a telephone. Everything was spick and span except for an almost imperceptible layer of dust on the desk and table and the untidily spread-eagled body which lay in a pool of blood on the carpet not far from the desk.
‘Stay where you are,’ said Dame Beatrice. She herself went forward and looked at the body. There was no need to touch it. The post-mortem signs of death were all too obvious. ‘I shall not telephone from here. Nothing must be touched. Go back to the hotel and telephone from your room.’
“The call will go out through the hotel switchboard.’
‘That cannot be helped and the hotel desk will only put your call through. Tell the Superintendent that I am here. He is an intelligent man and will guess that something serious has happened.’
‘Do I tell him nothing more?’
‘Nothing. And stay at the hotel until I come.’
‘Suppose he asks questions?’
‘Tell him I think we have something which bears on the Minnie case.’
Laura departed. Dame Beatrice looked out of the window, which was some way from the ground owning to the slope of the hill, and saw a broken step-ladder lying among the other rubbish in the yard. She assumed that it had formed the means by which Laura had managed to reach the window to peer into the room. Leaving the door open, she went down into the room which formed the shop. The picture was gone. In its place hung a tattered rag doll with a piece of paper pinned to its soiled and torn clothing. On the paper was a carefully executed drawing in red ink. It depicted the head of a goat, formalised and with three stars, one on either side of, and one between, its horns. Below it was a five-pointed star from which splashes of red ink appeared to denote drops of blood.
‘So?’ said Dame Beatrice to the doll. She left the shop and mounted the main staircase, being careful not to touch the banisters. The landing disclosed an open doorway. She looked in. It seemed that the chamber was a bedroom and nothing more. The bed was made, the furniture was simple and the room was clean and tidy.
Next door to it was a bathroom and then a short flight of stairs led to two more rooms, one over the shop and the other, the nearer, over the office. The door of the nearer room was open, that which was over the shop and looked out on to the street, was closed.
Dame Beatrice looked in at the open doorway and discovered that, by the removal of the party wall, the two rooms had been knocked into one. Thick black velvet curtains hung at the front and back windows, but were drawn back so that there was plenty of light in the room, despite a somewhat overcast wintry sky.
Around the two long walls and on either side of the window a frieze of life-size nude figures had been drawn in black paint. They were alternatively male and female, but there was nothing lewd or in any way remarkable about them. In fact, Dame Beatrice thought, they were the work of a quite considerable artist and although the first effect was somewhat startling, it was not repugnant.
The floor of the room presented another and a more sinister appearance. It was covered from wall to wall in black carpeting on which had been drawn a white circle contained within a square. At each corner of the square were cabbalistic designs which could be interpreted by any student of the occult. The circle itself was bare, but between it and the window was a long, heavy table, painted black and having at one end what appeared to be a headrest padded with white velvet and having embroidered on it in red a facsimile of the goat’s head which Dame Beatrice had seen downstairs on the piece of paper pinned to the doll.
Also on the table, laid out in what appeared to be ritual fashion, were a long knife, a sword, a large silver cup, a nine-thronged scourge, a glass jar containing a white substance which Dame Beatrice identified as salt (although
