The Melody of Death

The Melody of Death

By Edgar Wallace.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. I: The Amateur Safe Smasher
4. II: Sunstar’s Derby
5. III: Gilbert Leaves Hurriedly
6. IV: The “Melody in F”
7. V: The Man Who Desired Wealth
8. VI: The Safe Agency
9. VII: The Bank Smasher
10. VIII: The Wife Who Did Not Love
11. IX: Edith Meets the Player
12. X: The Necklace
13. XI: The Fourth Man
14. XII: The Place Where the Loot Was Stored
15. XIII: The Maker of Wills
16. XIV: The Standerton Diamonds
17. XV: The Tale the Doctor Told
18. XVI: Bradshaw
19. Colophon
20. Uncopyright

Imprint

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I

The Amateur Safe Smasher

On the night of May 27th, 1925, the office of Gilderheim, Pascoe and Company, diamond merchants, of Little Hatton Garden, presented no unusual appearance to the patrolling constable who examined the lock and tried the door in the ordinary course of his duty. Until nine o’clock in the evening the office had been occupied by Mr. Gilderheim and his head clerk, and a plainclothes officer, whose duty it was to inquire into unusual happenings had deemed that the light in the window on the first floor fell within his scope, and had gone up to discover the reason for its appearance. The 27th was a Saturday, and it is usual for the offices in Hatton Garden to be clear of clerks and their principals by three at the latest.

Mr. Gilderheim, a pleasant gentleman, had been relieved to discover that the knock which brought him to the door, gripping a revolver in his pocket in case of accidents, produced no more startling adventure than a chat with a police officer who was known to him. He explained that he had today received a parcel of diamonds from an Amsterdam house, and was classifying the stones before leaving for the night, and with a few jocular remarks on the temptation which sixty thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds offered to the unscrupulous “night of darkness,” the officer left.

At nine-forty Mr. Gilderheim locked up the jewels in his big safe, before which an electric light burnt day and night, and accompanied by his clerk, left No. 93 Little Hatton Garden and walked in the direction of Holborn.

The constable on point duty bade them good night, and the plainclothes officer, who was then at the Holborn end of the thoroughfare, exchanged a word or two.

“You will be on duty all night?” asked Mr. Gilderheim as his clerk hailed a cab.

“Yes, sir,” said the officer.

“Good!” said the merchant. “I’d like you to keep a special eye upon my place. I am rather nervous about leaving so large a sum in the safe.”

The officer smiled.

“I don’t think you need worry, sir,” he said, and after the cab containing Mr. Gilderheim had driven off he walked back to No. 93.

But in that brief space of time between the diamond merchant leaving and the return of the detective many things had happened. Scarcely had Gilderheim reached the detective than two men walked briskly along the thoroughfare from the other end. Without hesitation the first turned into No. 93, opened the door with a key, and passed in. The second man followed. There was no hesitation, nothing furtive in their movements. They might have been lifelong tenants of the house, so confident were they in every action.

Not half a minute after the second man had entered a third came from the same direction, turned into the building, unlocked the door with that calm confidence which had distinguished the action of the first comer, and went in.

Three minutes later two of the three were upstairs.

With extraordinary expedition one had produced two small iron bottles from his pockets and had deftly fixed the rubber tubes and adjusted the little blowpipe of his lamp, and the second had spread out on the floor a small kit of tools of delicate temper and beautiful finish.

Neither man spoke. They lay flat on the ground, making no attempt to extinguish the light which shone before the safe. They worked in silence for some little while, then the stouter of the two remarked, looking up at the reflector fixed at an angle to the ceiling and affording a view of the upper part of the safe to the passerby in the street below⁠—

“Even the mirrors do not give us away, I suppose?”

The second burglar was a slight, young-looking man with a shock of hair that suggested the musician.

He shook his head.

“Unless all the rules of optics have been specially reversed for the occasion,” he said with just a trace of a foreign accent, “we cannot possibly be seen.”

“I am relieved,” said the first.

He half whistled, half hummed a little tune