soundly. I got up and went into the next room and turned on the light and tried to read. No good. So I turned out the light and sat down by the window (it was open) and smoked a cigarette.'
This reminded him that he had the fragment of one in his hand now. After a gesture as though to toss it across at the fireplace, he seemed suddenly to remember himself; he got up with great dignity and extinguished it in an ashtray on the desk.
'There was a moon up. I think I must have dozed a bit: not sure. But then I thought I heard a sort of-what's the word I want?' he snapped his fingers. 'A sort of cracking sound.'
'Well… now,' said H.M., musingly. 'What direction did it come from, son?'
'I don't know. It wasn't very loud. I thought I might have imagined it. Then I thought of all sorts of-games. And Hogenauer. And Betty's father. And everything. Dammit. So I went and got my gun and started downstairs-'
'You went back to your bedroom?'
'No. I keep the gun in a drawer of the room I was sitting in then; sort of den. And I went downstairs. As I got to the landing, where I could look out of the landing window that looks on the back lawn, I thought I saw something like a shadow ducking across out of sight-'
'Hold on, son,' interrupted H.M. in a curious tone. 'This is business. Coming from which direction?
'That's it. I don't know. I can't even swear it was a person. Afterwards I thought it was probably a cat; there're dozens of cats in the neighbourhood, and they're fond of the place because Mrs. Charters has a female of loose morals next door. You see, I went downstairs, and turned on the lights, and looked all over the house. But nothing was disturbed and nothing missing, so far as I could see. I didn't say anything to Betty afterwards: thought it was all eyewash: you know? Why alarm her? Dammit.'
'When you came down, did you look at the sash-window in there — hey?' H.M. nodded towards the surgery again.
Something was bothering Antrim a good deal. He was pinching at his lower lip, pinching it so far down that it exposed a gum, and he seemed to be considering hard. He said:
'Eh? No. That is, I never thought of it, because Something dashed funny here! I mean'
'Uh-huh. Now hop in there for a second and take a look at it. Then tell' me whether the damage done to that window would account for the cracking noise you heard.'
None of the rest of us stirred. Antrim drew up his height, got to the surgery in three long strides, and did not take long before he returned.
'That's it,' he told us curtly. 'That's just what would have caused it. I should have thought it would have been louder than the noise I heard. But otherwise: yes. Quite. Look here, it's just occurred to me. I think that funny business with the bottles might have been-'
He had a trick of leaving off his sentences in mid air.
H.M. grunted. 'I see. Yes, we'd thought of that. You're pretty sure someone busted in here during that night, then?
'I am. But-'
'Signs o' torment. But what? Somethin's on your mind. Quick, what is it?'
'Well, it must have been a damned fool of a burglar,' said Antrim. 'Why did he get in by that window? There's a French window in the surgery, with a flimsy catch that wouldn't stand up for a second. It'd be easy — walk right in like a door. Instead, this fellow takes a sash-window rather high up from the ground, and a window that sticks, and a window that's generally inconvenient. The French window doesn't seem to have been touched. Why?'
Again we all expected H.M. to attack in the obvious fashion, and pull Antrim's moonlight intruder to pieces. And again, as in Mrs. Antrim's case, he never touched the obvious. I looked at Charters, and then at Evelyn, and none of us could understand what sort of lopsided game H.M. was playing. It was not long before its terrible purpose became clear to us. But I have later heard the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (a dignitary known to H.M. as Boko) say that the truth was never more subtly hidden under the obvious than in this case, which began as a high adventure and ended as a psychological puzzle at dawn.
At the moment H.M. sat prodding absently at the eyes of the skull with the stem of his pipe.
'Then that's all clear. Siddown, son,' he said to Antrim. 'I told you I was goin' to relieve you of responsibility. I want to take you over some quick hurdles now, and I don't want you to miss any of 'em. First, they tell me you knew Paul Hogenauer pretty well. Ever go to his house in Moreton Abbot?'
'Yes. I mean, once or twice.'
'Where'd he entertain you? What room?'
'The back parlour. His study. I know,' Antrim rapped out quickly, 'you're going to ask me about his `studies.' I didn't know. I still don't! That's what worried me still more. He'd let drop all sorts of cloudy hints. `Walking unseen.' Bah.' Antrim gave what can only be described as a heavy and genial sneer. 'If you know so much about it, I wish you'd tell me.'
'Easy, son. I wasn't goin' to ask you that. But you knew he always kept the shutters closed on that room?'
Antrim was interested. 'Oh, yes. But he had a good explanation for that. Said it wasn't at all a queer trick. He said that he sometimes did experiments in there, and he had to close the shutters for 'em. He said he didn't want the neighbours to grow curious. So, he said, if he kept the shutters closed all the time they'd get used to it and wouldn't think anything of it. Great hand at being respectable, Hogenauer was. Anxious to keep on the good side of everybody — neighbours — police — everyone. Or so it seemed.'
'Uh-huh. Now let's digress for a second. You,' said H.M, abruptly, to Sergeant Davis. The sergeant, who had been twisting his moustache like a villain in a melodrama and looking gloomily at Antrim, seemed a trifle startled; but he brought himself to attention. 'You were the feller, weren't you, who sneaked into Hogenauer's garden one night and peeped through the slit in the shutter? That was when you saw the little lights movin' round a thing like a flower pot turned upside down. Hey?'
'Yes, sir.'
'As I understand it from the description, there's two windows in that room. Hogenauer usually sat by the left-hand window as you face 'em from outside. But for this little experiment he changed the furniture round and sat by the right-hand window. Was he sittin' by the left-hand window when you looked in?'
'The left-hand window. Yes, sir.'
H.M.'s drowsy stare grew glazed again. 'Could you see anything besides the lights and what we'll call the flower-pot? For God's sake be careful, son. Think.'
Davis studied the idea. 'No, sir. Nothing else at all, except possibly what might have been the back of a chair: and not much of that.'
'D'jou look through the other window, too?'
'Yes, sir. Same result. There wasn't anything there, of course, but the size of the chinks in the shutter wasn't much different.'
H.M. turned back to Antrim, who seemed badly puzzled. 'Now that the little digression's over,' he pursued almost cheerfully, 'we can go back to horses and beans again.
There's this little question of Hogenauer's pet brand of mineral-water. Did you know he drank only that?'
‘Yes.'
'Did anybody else know it?
'We-ell yes, I should certainly think so. He was always cursing the stuff. But he had to drink it; or thought he had to.'
'Did he ever have any visitors at his house besides yourself?'
'Only Dr. Keppel. I told you about him.'
'Ever meet Keppel yourself?'
'Once.' Again Antrim was interested. 'I happened to be in Bristol, and I ran into Hogenauer there, and he took me to Keppel's hotel. Interesting chap. Good talker. Very fond of — of gadgets (you know?) like most scientific men. Hogenauer was too. I wonder why? I say, there was one gadget that would have interested you. Eighteenth-century burglar-trap. It seemed the hotel was originally the town-house of some nob who liked things like that. It's in the window. The window's up; you put your hand on the sill directly under the place where the window comes down; this presses it down like a guillotine-plank; weights and pulleys in the frame release the window — well, it's got a knife in it. Devil of a business. Of course, the knife was taken out a hundred years ago. But Keppel found traces of
