'Now I ask you,' said Bowers in a cooler tone.
'Here! You think your governor — or Keppel — was up to some funny business?'
The other evidently saw that he had gone too far. 'Not my governor,' he declared with quiet earnestness. 'That I'll swear to. You know that: anybody at your police station knows that. He was much too anxious to keep on the good side of the slops. He's a foreigner, d'jersee? He's registered at the police station, but he's always been in a stew and sweat for fear they'll make him leave the country at the end of six months or nine months or whatever it is. Not him! Why, I could tell you-'
'You could tell me what?'
I became aware that I had either altered my voice or overstressed by curiosity as a policeman. There was a subtle change in the atmosphere of the hall. Though he tried to seem casual, Bowers was studying me with his head a little on one side, and in his small quick eyes there was a dawning of what might be suspicion.
'See here, mister,' said my little cock-sparrow, and took a step forward, 'just 'oo are you, anyhow? Sometimes you talk like a copper, and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you act like a copper, and sometimes you act like-'
Before his mind could jump any farther along that line of thought, something had to be done. 'I'll tell you what I am,' said the aggressive Law. 'I'm a man who means to get on in the world, that's what I am. I mean to be a sergeant before I'm many years older. Understand that, cocky? And, if you want to know it, that's why I've been watching this house for some time.'
'Go on!' he said, and fell back.
'We know that there are things in this house that want explaining. We know that three nights out of a week your boss locks himself up in the back parlour, with shutters on the windows. But we've seen an odd kind of light through that window — I've seen it myself. We know he's working on an invention or an experiment of some kind. What is it? It's not only what we want to know; it's what Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office want to know.'
'Come off it,' said Bowers with pale scepticism, after a pause. But his eyes remained fixed. 'Why, I'll tell you straight,' he added quietly, 'there's nothing in that room. Don't I know it? I tidy up there every day. And there's nothing at all except a lot of books. He don't even keep anything locked; not even his desk. I've looked. If he wants to shut himself up there in the evenings, that's his business, but he don't work at any experiments there. You want to see? I can show you right now.'
He was pointing towards the door of the room, on the left-hand side as you faced the rear of the hall. Then he looked at it, and moved a step closer, and his voice went up a note or two.
'The key's in it on the outside,' he said, 'and where the hell's the knob?'
'What's wrong;'
He was jabbing his finger at a small octagonal hole from which the knob on its spindle should have protruded. Both knob and spindle were missing. But the key was in the lock, hanging almost loosely enough to fall out. Bowers opened his mouth, hesitated, and then went down like a terrier to search on the floor. It was bare floor except for a thinshanked chair not far from the door: but under the chair he
found what he was looking for. He found a knob of bright brown terracotta, loosely fitted on the spindle. But there was no knob on the other end of it.
Then Bowers found his voice.
'There's somebody in there,' he said. 'Dontcher see what happened? The knob inside's been loose for a long time; the governor asked me to mend it for him. Somebody went in there, and shut the door. Then somebody tried to come out. But the knob was loose and wouldn't turn the rod, and he fooled with it, and pulled it in and out, and then this came away and fell on the floor. And now he's in there and can't open the door. The door ain't locked, but the latch is caught and it's as good as a lock becos he can't turn it. And now he's in there, with the other knob in his hand…'
'Hogenauer?'
'I shouldn't think it was very likely, should you?' said Bowers simply. 'No. Not the governor. But there's that burglar loose that you coppers are chasing-'
I took the knob and spindle out of his hand. At the same moment we both heard a noise, a sort of rushing noise, on the other side of the door. Without any warning, with no change of expression, Bowers started to make for the front-door to get out into the street. I lunged and got hold of his arm, or in a few seconds more we should have had the place invaded by my friends from the police station at Bowers's call. With some fumbling I got the spindle into place, holding Bowers's arm with my other hand; then I turned the knob and pushed the door open.
It was dead black inside. There were no sounds now. Bowers was quietly shaking in my grip, pressing up against the wall to get out of the line of the door, and he spoke with fierce calmness. 'Are you loopy? Blow your whistle, you fool. There's a dangerous..'
I groped along the wall for a light-switch. There was a switch, but when I clicked it no response came. I still had the lantern hanging at my belt. Its broad beam swept across the room towards a wall of books; then it turned to the right and stopped. Along the right-hand wall were the two shuttered windows. Across the room, some feet out from the farther window was a broad claw-footed table; behind that table, and sideways to the door, stood a low padded armchair; and in the armchair a man sat grinning at me.
It was a pretty nasty sight. 'Grinning' is the proper word, though it hardly completes the description of a face pulled all out of shape like rubber or putty. The neck was hunched a backwards in an arch, the face partly turned in the direction of the door, and the man's little thin body was arched forwards as though he would propel himself out of the chair, although his feet seemed to have become entangled with the legs of the chair. His face — which seemed all teeth and eyes — I might not immediately have recognized as that of Paul Hogenauer if it had not been for the pointed lobe of his ear. The white eyeball glittered under the light, and did not blink. It required no medical knowledge at all to know that Hogenauer was dead, and very little more knowledge to be aware that he had died of strychnine poisoning.
But there was something else, which lent a festive air to his appearance. He wore one of those smoking- jackets fashionable thirty years ago, of heavy dark cloth faced with faded and dingy red lapels. And on his high bald skull he wore an adornment fashionable many years before that 'a smoking-cap' shaped like a Turkish fez. It had a tassel hanging down beside his ear. It was faded to a grimy reddish-orange. It looked like a flower-pot turned upside down. And under it the dead man sat with his head against his shoulder and grinned.
But Paul Hogenauer had not made those rushing, rustling noises I had several times heard in here. Bowers was right. There was someone in the room, someone alive, and waiting. I slowly moved the light around. The parlour was an ordinary enough library-workroom, some fifteen feet by eighteen, with light brown paper on the walls and a dark brown patterned carpet on the floor. In the left-hand wall there was a cupboard: the only place where anyone could conceivably hide. Bookcases stood along the wall facing the door. The mantelpiece was in the wall to the right, between the shuttered windows, with alien, curiously childlike touches in the cuckoo-clock up over it and the long china-bowled pipes banging in tassels from the mantelshelf. In the middle of the room stood a round table on which were a few magazines, an empty glass, and a bottle of mineral-water two-thirds full. But your gaze always went back to the flat-topped desk behind which Hogenauer sat grinning in his red fez. Over the desk hung an electric flex with an unshaded socket at the end of it. Though the socket was empty, a large bulb lay on the desk at the opposite side from the dead man.
I took one step into the room-and thought I saw the cupboard door move. But I was not concerned so much about the person hiding in the cupboard as about Bowers, and what Bowers might do when he saw that thing in the chair.
There are pleasanter positions than finding a dead body, in the company of a nervous man already growing suspicious of you, at the same time the police were nosing round the house. Nevertheless, there was good in this. It would give me a legitimate excuse to get to the telephone, as I had been wanting to do from the first. Under the pretence of calling the police station, I could ring up H.M. to find out what in the unholy blazes they meant by having me arrested as a thief, and to get Charters to call off his hounds before they had me again. So I spoke reassuringly to Bowers.
'Come on in. It's all right. It's dead. It can't hurt us.'
Strangely enough, he straightened up a little at that. He risked a look round the door post, and, though he went a trifle limp when he saw it, he bad himself under control.
'Mr. Hogenauer's been poisoned,' I said. 'It's either suicide or murder. In any case, I must 'phone the station.
