“I’ve been rather a brute—I’m awfully sorry,” said Dick frankly, “and I deserve all the roasting you give me. But it’s very natural that even a humble detective officer should wish to improve an acquaintance with one who, if I may say so without bringing a blush to your maiden cheeks, has a singularly attractive mind.”
“And now let us all be complimentary,” she said, though the colour in her face was heightened and her eyes were a little brighter. “You are the world’s best detective, and if ever I lose anything, I am sending immediately for you.”
“Then you’ll draw a blank,” said Dick triumphantly. “I’m leaving the force and becoming a respectable member of society tomorrow, Miss—?”
She did not attempt to help him.
Then suddenly he saw a look of understanding come to her face.
“You’re not the man that Mr. Havelock is sending to look for my relative, are you?”
“Your relative?” he asked in amazement. “Is Lord Selford a relative of yours?”
She nodded.
“He’s a forty-second cousin, heaven knows how many times removed. Father was his second cousin. Mother and I were dining with Mr. Havelock the other night, and he said that he was trying to get a man to run Selford to earth.”
“Have you ever met him?” asked Dick.
She shook her head.
“No, but my mother knew him when he was a small boy. I think she saw him once. His father was a horror. I suppose Mr. Havelock has told you that—I am assuming that my guess is right: you are going in search of him?”
Dick nodded.
“That was the sad news I was trying to break to you,” he said.
At that moment their tête-à-tête was interrupted by the arrival of an elderly gentleman with a vinegary voice, who, Dick guessed, was the secretary.
He went back to Scotland Yard to find Captain Sneed, who had been absent when he had called on the phone that morning. Sneed listened without comment to the extraordinary story of Lew Pheeney’s midnight occupation.
“It certainly sounds like a lie, and anything that sounds like a lie generally is a lie,” he said. “Why didn’t Pheeney stay, if he’d got this thing on his conscience? And who was chasing him? Did you see anybody?”
“Nobody,” said Dick. “But the man was afraid, and genuinely so.”
“Humph!” said Sneed, and pressed a bell.
To the clerk who answered:
“Send a man to pick up Pheeney and bring him here. I want to ask him a few questions,” he said. And then, calling the man back: “You know his address, Dick. Go along and see if you can unearth him.”
“My term of service expires at twelve today.”
“Midnight,” said Sneed laconically. “Get busy!”
Lew Pheeney lived in Great Queen Street, at a lodging he had occupied for years; but his landlady could give no information. Pheeney had left the previous afternoon somewhere about five and had not returned. A haunt of the burglar was a small club, extensively patronized by the queer class which hovers eternally on the rim of the law. Pheeney had not been there—he usually came in to breakfast and to collect his letters.
Dick saw a man who said he had had an engagement with Pheeney on the previous night, and that he had waited until twelve.
“Where am I likely to find him?”
Here, however, no information was forthcoming. Dick Martin’s profession was as well known as Mr. Pheeney’s.
He reported the result of his visits to Sneed, who for some reason took a more serious view of the whole matter than Dick had expected.
“I’m believing it now, that grave-robbing story,” said Sneed, “and certainly it’s remarkable if Lew was upset, because nothing short of an earthquake would raise a squeal with him. Maybe he’s at your flat?”
When Dick got home the flat was empty. His housekeeper had neither seen nor heard from the visitor. The detective strolled into his bedroom, pulled off his coat, intending to put on the old shooting jacket he wore when he was writing—for he had a number of reports to finish before he made his final exit from the Yard.
The coat was not hanging up where it was usually kept, and he remembered that his housekeeper had told him that she had put it in the bureau: a tall piece of mahogany furniture where his four suits were invariably hung on hangers.
Without a thought he turned the handle of the bureau door and pulled it open. As he did so, the body of a man fell against him, almost knocking him over, and dropped to the floor with an inanimate thud. It was Lew Pheeney, and he was dead.
V
The big five at Scotland Yard filled Dick Martin’s dining-room, waiting for the verdict of the medical man who had been hastily summoned. The doctor came in in a few minutes.
“So far as I can tell by a superficial examination,” he said, “he’s been dead for some hours, and was either strangled or his neck was broken.”
In spite of his self-control, Dick shivered. He had slept in the room that night, where, behind the polished door, lay that ghastly secret.
“There was no sign of a struggle, Martin?” asked one of the officers.
“None whatever,” said Dick emphatically. “I am inclined to agree with the doctor: I should think that he was struck by something heavy and killed instantly. But how they got into the flat, God knows!”
Inquiries of the girl who worked the night elevator were unsatisfactory, because she could remember nobody having come into the flat after Dick had gone out.
The six detectives made a minute examination of the premises.
“There’s only one way he could have come in,” said Sneed when the inspection was over, “and that is through the kitchenette.”
There was a door in the kitchen leading to a tiny balcony, by the side of which ran an outside service lift, used, as Dick explained, to convey tradesmen’s parcels from the courtyard below, and worked from the ground level by a small handle
