“And very wise of Mr. Daver. By the way, which is his room?”
She walked through the doorway and pointed along the corridor.
“Oh, yes, I remember, he told me. A charming situation. I saw you coming out this evening.”
“You have made a mistake—I never go into his room,” said the woman sharply. “You may have seen—” She stopped, and added—“somebody else. Are you going to work late, sir?”
Mr. Reeder repeated in detail his plans for the evening.
“I should be glad if you would tell Mr. Daver that I do not wish to be interrupted. I am a very slow thinker, and the slightest disturbance to my train of thought is fatal to my—er—power of composition,” he said, as he closed the door upon her, and, waiting until she had time to get down the stairs, locked it and pushed home the one bolt.
He drew the heavy curtains across the open windows, pushed the writing table against the curtains so that they could not blow back, and, opening the two exercise books, so placed them that they formed a shade that prevented the light from falling upon the bed. This done, he changed quickly into a lounge suit, and, lying on the bed, pulled the coverlet over him and was asleep in five minutes.
Margaret Belman had it in her mind to send up to his room after eleven, before she herself retired, to discover whether there was anything he wanted, but fortunately she changed her mind—fortunately, because Mr. Reeder had planned to snatch five solid hours’ sleep before he began his unofficial inspection of the house, or alternatively before the period arrived when it would be necessary that he should be wide-awake.
At two o’clock to the second he woke and sat up on the edge of the bed, blinking at the light. Opening one of his trunks, he took out a small wooden box from which he drew a spirit stove and the paraphernalia of tea-making. He lit the little lamp, and while the tiny tin kettle was boiling, he went to the bathroom, undressed, and lowered his shivering body into a cold bath. He returned fully dressed to find the kettle boiling.
Mr. Reeder was a very methodical man; he was, moreover, a careful man. All his life he had had a suspicion of milk. He used to wander round the suburban streets in the early hours of the morning, watch the cans hanging on the knockers, the bottles deposited in corners of doorsteps, and ruminate upon the enormous possibilities for wholesale murder that this lighthearted custom of milk delivery presented to the criminally minded. He had calculated that a nimble homicide, working on systematic lines, could decimate London in a month.
He drank his tea without milk, munched a biscuit, and then, methodically clearing away the spirit stove and kettle, he took from his grip a pair of thick-soled felt slippers and drew them on his feet. In his trunk he found a short length of stiff rubber, which, in the hands of a skillful man, was as deadly a weapon as a knife. This he put in the inside pocket of his jacket. He put his hand into the trunk again and brought out something that looked like a thin rubber sponge bag, except that it was fitted with two squares of mica and a small metal nozzle. He hesitated about this, turning it over and over in his hand, and eventually this went back into the trunk. The stubby Browning pistol, which was his next find, Mr. Reeder regarded with disfavour, for the value of firearms, except in the most desperate circumstances, had always seemed to him to be problematical.
The last thing to be extracted was a hollow bamboo, which contained another, and was in truth the fishing rod for which he had once expressed a desire. At the end of the thinner one was a spring loop, and after he had screwed the two lengths together, he fitted upon this loop a small electric hand lamp and carefully threaded the thin wires through the eyelets of the rod, connecting them up with a tiny switch at the handle, near where the average fisherman has his grip. He tested the switch, found it satisfactory, and when this was done he gave a final look round the room before extinguishing the table lamp.
In the broad light of day he would have presented a somewhat comic figure, sitting cross-legged on his bed, his long fishing rod reaching out to the middle of the room and resting on the footboard; but at the moment Mr. J. G. Reeder had no sense of the ridiculous, and, moreover, there were no witnesses.
From time to time he swayed the rod left and right, like an angler making a fresh cast. He was very wide-awake, his ears tuned to differentiate between the normal noises of the night—the rustle of trees, the soft purr of the wind—and the sounds which could only come from human activity.
He sat for more than half an hour, his fishing rod moving to and fro, and then he was suddenly conscious of a cold draught blowing from the door. He had heard no sound—not so much as the clink of a lock; but he knew that the door was wide open.
Noiselessly he drew in the rod till it was clear of the posts of the bed, brought it round toward the door, paying out until it was a couple of yards from where he sat—with one foot on the floor now, ready to leap or drop, as events dictated.
The end of the rod met with no obstruction. Reeder held his breath—listening. The corridor outside was heavily carpeted. He expected no sound of footsteps. But people must breathe, thought Mr. Reeder, and it is difficult to breathe noiselessly in a silent corridor in the dead of night. Conscious that he himself was a little too silent for a supposedly sleeping man, he emitted a
