'First,' she said grimly, 'I looked round for the bottle labelled bromide. It was standing over there on the mantel. That was how I happened to hit that little flashlight with my elbow, and knock it off the mantel and smash it. No, and I don't mind telling you what I was going to do, either! I was going to wash that bottle and take it away with me-'
Bowers made a noise in this throat.
'And why not?' she asked defiantly. 'I'd have done it, too, if the next awful business hadn't happened. I'd shut the door when I came in. So I picked up the bottle, and started out for the scullery to wash it. But the knob was loose, and wouldn't turn to unlatch the door. I suppose I must have been upset or frightened; anyhow, I began to yank and fiddle with it. Then the knob came off in my hand, and the rest of it, with that iron thingummyjig, fell out into the hall. If you can imagine anything more horrible happening to you, I'd like to have you tell me what it is.'
'And the best thing that could have happened to you, too,' cried Bowers accusingly. 'Accessory after the fact. If you'd pinched that bottle and run away, you'd 'a' been accessory after the fact, that's what.'
She looked at him coldly.
'That's about all, officer. I was shut up in here with that thing. Of course, I thought of getting out through one of the windows. But just look at them! Apparently poor old Hogenauer always kept the sashes up but the shutters closed. The bolts of the shutters have rusted in the sockets, and I couldn't budge them. If I got panicky, you can't blame me. I even thought of picking up a chair and trying to break the shutters open. It's all very well to be bold, bloody, and resolute; but I'm not strong enough for that sort of work, and, besides, I should have roused the whole neighbourhood. Still, I was just on the point of wanting to try it when I heard a horrible commotion out at the back somewhere, and dogs barking or men running or something. I was so jumpy that I simply reached up and unscrewed the light out of the socket, hot as it was. In a minute you came in at the back; and talked to some woman in the next house about a murderer being loose hereabouts.' She made a grimace. 'I think you know everything else, although I don't think you know how I felt being shut up in the dark with it.'
'Thank you very much,' I said with an official air, and only wished I had a notebook to make it look right. 'There's just one thing, Mrs. Antrim. When Mr. Hogenauer was at your house last night, didn't he tell you he meant to go to Bristol this evening?'
She opened her eyes. 'He certainly didn't tell me that. He may have told my husband. And, anyway, we're jolly sure he didn't go.'
'We are. But,' I said to Bowers, 'that's what he told you?' 'It is! And all the rest of the things I've told you is true, too!'
'But you didn't see him go; you didn't drive him to the station or anything like that?'
'I told you I didn't! I told you the last time I saw the governor alive was just after tea, maybe six o'clock, when he said I could go out if I liked. Then was when he said again to come in early, becos we would probably have a visitor that night.'
Here I tried to get the muddle straightened. 'He told you he intended to call on Dr. Keppel in Bristol, and that he had every reason to hope Dr. Keppel would be out. In fact, Keppel is here in Moreton Abbot somewhere, and Mr. Hogenauer believed that Keppel would come here to-night. Is that what you understood? Yes. But Hogenauer doesn't go to Bristol, and Keppel doesn't come here.'
'Maybe 'e's come,' muttered Bowers in a sinister voice, 'and gone.'
'You mean he might have had something against your employer?'
That word 'employer' struck another note of suspicion, but Bowers only looked sullen. 'How should I know? They always talked German.'
'What's Dr. Keppel like?'
'Like? I dunno. Something like the governor, little and thin, except he's got a limp in the leg and a lot of greyish hair all stuck out. Besides, whoever changed them bottles, and put the poison in place of the bromide, was back in the doctor's house in Torquay. There's where you want to look, old cock.'
'You little liar,' said Mrs. Antrim.
It seemed doubtful whether I could spin out this questioning much longer, for they were both waiting for me to do something. Yet Bowers's dark hint about Dr. Keppel permitted me to do without suspicion exactly what I had been sent here to do: search the room, and particularly the desk, under pretext of looking for something missing. Though I searched with considerable thoroughness, there was nothing
at all in the room, either suspicious or otherwise. The desk itself was almost empty. The room was very neat except for a sprawled newspaper, evidently the paper Mrs. Antrim had used in her jugglery with the key to this room, lying beside the desk.
But there was something on the blotter. I picked up the string of cuff-links and put it to one side, to see whether there might be anything under the blotting-pad; and there were a few lines of very clear letters where something had been blotted on the white surface. There were other smudges and occasional letters criss-crossing, but these seemed to stand out. They appeared to be in English.
'Hold it up to a mirror!' said Bowers excitedly. 'He was writing a letter this morning. I seen 'im at it.'
'Writing a letter to whom?'
'I dunno. He posted it himself. But he wrote a lot of letters.' Bowers pointed to the book of stamps. 'Always at it. What's more, those words weren't on that blotter yesterday: I remember, becos I looked at the blotter to see whether it wanted changing. Hold it up to a mirror!'
I picked up the whole pad and went to the mirror over the fireplace. And, in small finicky handwriting, in English, and in as flat terms as could have been used, was the following barefaced message:
fast planes. I will make the attempt to-night, and I assure Your Excellency that I have every hope of success. The envelope is in the upper right-hand pigeon-hole of Keppel's desk at the Cabot Hotel, Bristol. Perhaps it would have been wiser, in view of Keppel's doubts, to have had two reliable men hero. But if I succeed in obtaining possession of the envelope we shall be in possession of knowledge which….’
Here it crossed another trail, and became indecipherable. I looked at it, yet I could not believe it. It was too stark and simple. 'You will find the pirates' treasure buried under the old elm-tree in the archbishop's garden': it had the same sort of hissing melodrama. It was as casual as an invitation to dinner. It lay on a blotting-pad as openly as though somebody had drawn an arrow to indicate it. And, above all, it was in English.
But why not? Round the Service there has grown up a phantom legend of codes and ciphers and secret passwords and similar flummery. Its members do not in reality go about hissing at each other, nor does the cipher exist which C2 department cannot solve. I can still remember the disappointment I once felt to learn that King's Messengers are not accustomed to traveling in wigs, with a couple of forged passports: they travel in a railway compartment labelled, Reserved for the King's Messenger. When a man has something to say, he usually says it straight out. This was not wartime. There was no reason why even the Post Office, let alone the War Office, should ordinarily be curious about letters written from a neat little villa in a neat little suburb not far from the sea.
'It looks terribly official,' said Mrs. Antrim after a pause. She spoke uneasily. 'I say, you don't suppose?’
I looked at Bowers. 'You never saw the names of any of the people he wrote letters to?'
'No, I didn't. All I know is that they weren't letters to anybody in a European country.'
'How do you know that?'
'Stamps,' said Bowers instantly, and with some shrewdness. 'I collect stamps, and that's 'ow I notice sometimes. You ought to know that postage to here or to America is three-halfpence to European countries it's more, see? Every letter the governor sent out, or at least every letter I ever noticed, had a brown three-halfpenny stamp. - 'Ullo!'
He turned round. I had picked up the newspaper, and as a sort of official gesture was wrapping up the blotting-paper in it, when back came those confounded dogging footsteps in the alley behind the house. They must just have been passing the rear gate, evidently still unsuspicious, when near at hand there was the sharp crack of a window being raised. It was not difficult to identify it as the window of the house next to this, from which the irate female had addressed me a while ago. This time the female, evidently to attract the attention of the searchers in the alley, made a noise like a soda-water syphon.
'Have you got him yet?' she bawled in a hoarse stage-whisper.
There was a silence. 'Not yet, Mrs. M'Corseter,' answered the voice of the sergeant who had arrested me. 'But we'll get him: don't worry. The neighbourhood is patrolled. He can't get away.'
'You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,' said Mrs. M'Corseter fiercely, 'great big hulking fellows like you! It's
