Mr. Reeder shook his head sadly.
“Alas! how few modern women spend their time in a kitchen!” he said, and made an impatient clucking noise, but whether this was a protest against the falling off of woman’s domestic qualities, or whether he “tchk’d” for some other reason, it was difficult to say, for he was a very preoccupied man.
He swung the lamp back to the door.
“I thought so,” he said, with a note of relief in his voice. “There are two walking sticks in the hall stand. Will you get one of them, constable?”
Wondering, the officer obeyed, and came back, handing a long cherry-wood stick with a crooked handle to Mr. Reeder, who examined it in the light of his lamp.
“Dust-covered and left by the previous owner. The spike in place of the ferrule shows that it was purchased in Switzerland. Probably you are not interested in detective stories and have never read of the gentleman whose method I am plagiarizing?”
“No, sir,” said the mystified officer.
Mr. Reeder examined the stick again.
“It is a thousand pities that it is not a fishing rod,” he said. “Will you stay here, and don’t move.”
And then he began to crawl up the stairs on his knees, waving his stick in front of him in the most eccentric manner. He held it up, lifting the full length of his arm, and as he crawled upward he struck at imaginary obstacles. Higher and higher he went, silhouetted against the reflected light of the lamp he carried, and Police Constable Dyer watched him open-mouthed.
“Don’t you think I’d better—”
He got as far as this when the thing happened. There was an explosion that deafened him; the air was suddenly filled with flying clouds of smoke and dust; he heard the crackle of wood and the pungent scent of something burning. Dazed and stupefied, he stood stock still, gaping up at Mr. Reeder, who was sitting on a stair, picking little splinters of wood from his coat.
“I think you may come up in perfect safety,” said Mr. Reeder, with great calmness.
“What—what was it?” asked the officer.
The enemy of criminals was dusting his hat tenderly, though this the officer could not see.
“You may come up.”
Police Constable Dyer ran up the stairs and followed the other along the broad landing till he stopped and focused in the light of his lamp a queer-looking and obviously homemade spring gun, the muzzle of which was trained through the banisters so that it covered the stairs up which he had ascended.
“There was,” said Mr. Reeder carefully, “a piece of black thread stretched across the stairs, so that any person who bulged or broke that thread was certain to fire the gun.”
“But—but the lady?”
Mr. Reeder coughed.
“I do not think she is in the house,” he said, ever so gently. “I rather imagine that she went through the back. There is a back entrance to the mews, is there not? And that by this time she is a long way from the house. I sympathize with her—this little incident has occurred too late for the morning newspapers and she will have to wait for the sporting editions before she learns that I am still alive.”
The police officer drew a long breath.
“I think I’d better report this, sir.”
“I think you had,” sighed Mr. Reeder. “And will you ring up Inspector Simpson and tell him that, if he comes this way, I should like to see him?”
Again the policeman hesitated.
“Don’t you think we’d better search the house? They may have done away with this woman.”
Mr. Reeder shook his head.
“They have not done away with any woman,” he said decisively. “The only thing they have done away with is one of Mr. Simpson’s pet theories.”
“But, Mr. Reeder, why did this lady come to the door?”
Mr. Reeder patted him benignantly on the arm, as a mother might pat a child who asks a foolish question.
“The lady had been standing at the door for half an hour,” he said gently; “on and off for half an hour, constable, hoping against hope, one imagines, that she would attract my attention. But I was looking at her from a room that was not—er—illuminated. I did not show myself because I—er—have a very keen desire to live!”
On this baffling note Mr. Reeder went into his house.
V
Mr. Reeder sat at his ease, wearing a pair of grotesquely painted velvet slippers, a cigarette hanging from his lips, and explained to the detective inspector who had called in the early hours of the morning his reason for adopting a certain conclusion.
“I do not imagine for one moment that it was my friend Ravini. He is less subtle, in addition to which he has little or no intelligence. You will find that this coup has been planned for months, though it has only been put into execution today. No. 4 Bennett Street is the property of an old gentleman who spends most of his time in Italy. He has been in the habit of letting the house furnished for years; in fact, it was only vacated a month ago.”
“You think, then,” said the puzzled Simpson, “That the people, whoever they were, rented the house—”
Mr. Reeder shook his head.
“Even that I doubt,” he said. “They have probably an order in view, and in some way got rid of the caretaker. They knew I would be at home last night, because I am always at home—um—on most nights since—” Mr. Reeder coughed in his embarrassment. “A young friend of mine has recently left London—I do not like going out alone.”
And to Simpson’s horror, a pinkish flush suffused the sober countenance of Mr. Reeder.
“A few weeks ago,” he went on, with a pitiable attempt at airiness, “I used to dine out, attend a concert or one of those exquisite melodramas which have such an appeal to me.”
“Whom do you suspect?” interrupted Simpson, who had not been called from his bed in the middle of the night to discuss the virtue
