out of the Governor's Room afterwards. He didn't try to make a fifty-foot jump from the window, either. Oh, we shall find the door open, right enough.'
'It's confoundedly dark in here,' said Sir Benjamin. Craning his long neck, he pointed to a door at the right. 'Is that where you carried young Starberth last night?'
Rampole nodded, and the chief constable pushed a rotting oak door a little way open to peer inside.
'Not much in there,' he announced. 'Ugh! Damn the cobwebs. Stone floor, grated window, fireplace, what I can see of it. Not much light.' He slapped at some invisible bugs before his face.
'That was the turnkeys' waiting-room, and the prison office beyond it,' Dr. Fell amplified. 'There was where the governor interviewed his guests and recorded 'em before they were assigned their quarters.,
'It's full of rats, anyway,' Rampole said, so suddenly that they all glanced at him.
The earthy, cellary smell of the place still seemed to be about him as it had been last night. 'It's full of rats,' he repeated.
'Oh, ah-undoubtedly,' said the rector. 'Well, gentlemen?'
They pushed forward along the passage. These walls were uneven with ragged stones, and dark green moss patched the cracks; a rare place, Rampole thought, for typhoid fever. Now scarcely anything could be seen, and they blundered forward by holding to one another's shoulders.
'We should have brought a flashlight,' growled Sir Benjamin. 'There's an obstruction?'
Something struck the weedy stone floor with a dull crash, and they jumped involuntarily.
'Manacles,' said Dr. Fell from the gloom ahead. 'Leg irons and such. They're still hanging from the wall along here. That means we're entering the wards. Look sharp for the door.'
It was impossible, Rampole thought, to straighten out the tangle of passages; though some small light filtered in once they had passed the first of the inner doors. At one point a heavily grated window, sunk in the five- foot thickness of the wall, looked out upon a dank, shaded yard., It had once been paved, but it was now choked in weeds and nettles. Along one side a line of broken cell-doors hung like decayed teeth. Weirdly, just in the centre of this desolate yard grew a large apple tree in white bloom.
'The condemned ward,' said Dr. Fell.
Nobody spoke after that. They did not explore, nor did they ask their conductor to explain the meaning of certain things they saw. But, in one airless room just before they came to the staircase for the second floor, they saw the Iron Maiden by the light of matches; and they saw the furnaces for certain charcoal fires. The Iron Maiden's face wore a drowsy, glutted smile, and spiders swung in webs from her mouth. There were bats flopping around in that room also, so that they did not linger.
Rampole kept his hands clenched tightly; he did not mind anything but the things that flicked against his face, briefly, or the feeling that something was crawling up the back of his neck. And you could hear the rats. When they stopped at last before a great door, bound in iron, along a gallery on the second floor, he felt that he was out of it; he felt as though he had just plunged into clear cool water after sitting on an anthill.
'Is it — is it open?' asked the rector, his voice startlingly loud.
The door rasped and squealed as Dr. Fell pushed it back, the chief constable lending him a hand; it was warped, and difficult to jar backwards along the stone floor. A sifting of dust shook round them.
Then they stood on the threshold of the Governor's Room, looking round.
'I dare say we shouldn't be going in here,' Sir Benjamin muttered, after a silence. 'All the same! — Any of you ever seen the room before?… No? I didn't expect so. H'm. They can't have changed the furniture much, can they?'
'Most of the furniture was old Anthony's,' said Dr. Fell. 'The rest of it belonged to his son Martin, who was governor here until he — well, died — in 1837. They both gave instructions that the room wasn't to be altered.'
It was a comparatively large room, though with rather a low ceiling. Directly opposite the door in which they stood was the window. That side of the prison was in shadow, and, the ivy twined round the window's heavy grating did not admit much light; puddles of rain water still lay under it on the uneven stone floor. Some six feet to the left of the window was the door giving on the balcony. It was open, standing out almost at right-angles to the wall; and trailing strands of vine, ripped apart when the door had been opened, drooped across the entrance; so that it allowed but little more light than the window.
There had evidently been an effort, once upon a time, to lend a semblance of comfort to this gloomy place. Black-walnut panelling, now rotting away, had been superimposed on the stone walls. In the wall towards the left of the watchers, just between a tall wardrobe and a. bookcase full of big discoloured volumes in calfskin, was a stone chimney-piece with a couple of empty candlesticks on its ledge. A mildewed wing-chair had been drawn up before the fireplace. There (Rampole remembered) would be where old Anthony sat in his nightcap before the blaze, when he heard a knocking at the balcony door and a whispered invitation to come out and join dead men….
In the centre of the room was an old flat desk, thick with dust and debris, and a straight wooden chair drawn up beside it. Rampole stared. Yes, in the dust he could see a narrow rectangular space where the bicycle-lamp had stood last night; there, in that wooden chair facing the right-hand wall, was where Martin Starberth had sat with the ray of. his lamp directed towards…
So — In the middle of the right-hand wall, set flush with it, was the door to the vault or the safe or whatever it was called. A plain iron door, six feet high and half as wide, now dull with rust. Just under its iron handle was a curious arrangement like a flattened box, with a large keyhole in one end, and in the other what resembled a metal flap above a small knob.
'The reports were correct, then,' Dr. Fell said, abruptly. 'I thought so. Otherwise it would have been too easy.'
'What?' asked the chief constable, rather irritably.
The doctor pointed with his cane. 'Suppose a burglar wanted to key into that thing. Why, with only a keyhole in plain sight, he might get an impression of the lock and have a skeleton key made; though it would be an infernally big key…. But with this arrangement, he couldn't have got in short of blowing the whole wall out with dynamite.'
'With what arrangement?'
'A letter combination. I'd heard there was one. It isn't a new idea, you know. Metternich had one; and Talleyrand speaks of, `Ma porte qu'on peut ouvrir avec un mot, comme les quarante voleurs de Scheherazade.' You see that knob, with the sliding metal thing above it? The metal piece covers a dial, like a modern safe, except that there are the twenty-six letters of the alphabet instead of numbers. You must turn that knob and spell a word — the word arranged on — before the door can be opened; without that word, a mere key is useless.'
'Provided anybody wanted to open the dashed thing,' said Sir Benjamin.
They were silent again, all uncomfortable. The rector was mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, a sure sign, and regarding a large canopied bed against the right-hand wall. It was still laid with moth-eaten, decaying clothes and bolster; and fragments of the curtains hung on black brass rings about the tester. There was a night table beside it, with a candlestick. Rampole found himself thinking of lines out of Anthony's manuscript: 'I had trimmed my bedside candle, put on my nightcap, and prepared to read in bed, when I saw a movement among the bedclothes….'
The American removed his eyes quickly. Well, one more person had lived and died in this room since Anthony. Over beyond the safe there was a desk-secretary with glass doors; on top of it he could see a bust of Minerva and a huge Bible. None of them, with the exception of Dr. Fell, could quite shake off a sense that they were in a dangerous place where they must walk lightly and not touch. The chief constable shook himself.
'Well,' Sir Benjamin began, grimly, 'we're here. I'm hanged if 'I see what we do now. There's where the poor chap sat. There's where he put his lamp. No sign of a struggle — nothing broken — '
'By the way,' interposed Dr. Fell, thoughtfully, 'I wonder if the safe is still open.'
Rampole felt a constriction in his throat.
'My dear Doctor,' said Saunders, 'do you think the Starberths would quite approve…. Oh, I say!'
Dr. Fell was already lumbering past him, the ferrules of his canes ringing on the floor. Turning sharply to Saunders, Sir Benjamin drew himself up.
'This is murder, you know. We've got to see. But wait! — Wait a minute, Doctor!' He strode over, earnest and horsy, with his long head poked forward. In a lower voice he added, 'Do you think it's wise?'
