Tab gave way to the detective and waited whilst Carver
looked.
“There’s no sign of a weapon—but by the smell there
has been some shooting,” he said. “What is that on the
table?”
Tab peered through the ventilator.
“It looks like a key to me,” he said.
They tried the door, but it resisted their combined
weight.
“The door is much too thick and the lock too strong
for us to force,” said Carver at last. “I’ll telephone
headquarters, Tab. See what you can get out of your
friend.”
“I don’t think he’ll tell me much for some time. Come
along, Babe,” said Tab kindly, taking the other’s arm.
“Let us get out of this beastly atmosphere.”
Unresisting, Rex Lander allowed himself to be led
back to the dining-room, where he dropped into a chair.
Carver had finished his telephoning and had returned
long before Rex had recovered sufficiently to give a coherent
narrative. His face was blanched, he could not
control his quivering lips, and it was a considerable time
before he could tell his patient hearers all that he knew.
“I came to the house this afternoon by appointment,”
he said. “My uncle had written to me asking me to see
him about an application which I had made to him for
a loan. He had previously rejected my request, but as
had often happened, he relented at the last moment, for
he was not a bad man at heart. As I was pressing the
bell, the door opened and I saw Walters—Walters is my
uncle’s valet.”
The detective nodded.
“He looked terribly agitated, and he had a brown
leather bag in his hand. ‘I am just going out, Mr. Lander,’
he said—”
“Did he seem surprised to see you?”
“He seemed alarmed,” said Rex. “It struck me when
I saw him that my uncle must be ill and I asked him if
anything was the matter. He said that my uncle was
well but he had sent him on a very important errand.
The conversation did not last more than a minute, for
Walters ran down the steps and into the road before I
could recover from my amazement.”
“He wore no hat?” asked Carver.
Rex shook his head.
“I stood in the hall for a moment, knowing that my
uncle does not like people to come in upon him unless
they are properly announced. You see, Mr. Carver, the
situation was rather a delicate one for me. I had come
here in the role of a supplicant, and naturally I did not
wish to prejudice my chance of getting the fifty which
my uncle had promised me. I went to uncle’s living-room
but he was not there, but the door which I knew
led to the strong-room was open and he could not be
far away. I sat down and waited. I must have been
there ten minutes and then I began to smell something
burning, as I thought, but which was, in fact, the smell
of gunpowder or whatever they use in cartridges, and I
was so thoroughly alarmed that I went down the steps
and after a little hesitation, knowing how my uncle hated
being overlooked, I went on to the door of the vault. It
was locked and I rapped on the ventilator but had no
reply. Then I peeped through. It was horrible,” he
shuddered. “As fast as I could I ran up the stairs into
the street, intending to call a policeman and I saw you.”
“Whilst you were in the house you heard no sound
to suggest that there was anybody else present? Where
are the servants?”
“There is only the cook,” said Rex and Carver went
in search of her.
But the kitchen was closed and deserted. It was apparently
the cook’s day off.
“I’ll make a search of the house,” said Carver. “Come
along, Tab, you are in this case now and you had better
stay with it.”
The search did not take a very long time. There were
two rooms used by Mr. Trasmere, the remainder were
locked up and apparently unused. A passage-way led
to Walters’ sleeping apartment, which had originally been
designed as a guest room and was larger than servants’
quarters usually are. The room was meagrely furnished
and there was evidence that Mr. Walters had not anticipated
so hurried a flight. Some of his clothing hung on
pegs behind the door, others were found in a wardrobe,
whilst a cup filled with coffee stood on the table. Carver
dipped his little finger into the liquid. It was still warm.
A cloth had been thrown hurriedly over some bulky
object at one end of the table, and this the detective removed.
He whistled. Clamped to the edge of the table
was a small vice and scattered about were a number of
files and other tools. Carver turned the screw of the
vice and released the object in its grip. It was a small
key of peculiar shape, and the man must have been
working upon it recently, for steel filings covered the
base of the tool.
“Then friend Walters was making a key,” said Carver.
“Look at that plaster cast! That is an old dodge of his.
I suppose he got an impression of the key on soap or
wax and has been working at it ever since.” He looked
at the thing in his palm curiously. “This may save us
a great deal of trouble,” he said, “for unless I am mistaken,
this is the key of the strong-room.”
A few minutes later the house was filled with detectives,
police photographers and coroner’s officers. They
came on a useless errand, for the door remained locked.
Tab took advantage of their arrival to escort his friend
home.
Before he went, Carver drew him aside.
“We shall have to keep in touch with Mr. Lander,” he
said. “He may be able to throw a great deal of light
upon this murder. In the meantime I have sent out all
station calls to pull in Felling—who is Wellington
Brown?”
“Wellington Brown? That is the man who has been
threatening Trasmere—I told you about him at lunch.”
Carver pulled an old pair of gloves from his pocket.
“Mr. Wellington Brown was in that underground corridor,”
he said quietly, “and was sufficiently indiscreet
to leave his gloves behind—his name is written inside!”
“You will charge him with the murder?” asked Tab,
and Carver nodded.
“I think so. Either he or Walters. At any rate, we
shall hold them on suspicion, but I cannot be more definite
until we’ve got inside that vault.”
Tab escorted his friend to the flat, and leaving him,
hurried back to Mayfield, by which fanciful name Trasmere
had called his grim house.
“We’ve found no weapon of any kind,” said the detective
whom he found sitting in Trasmere’s dining-room
with a plan of the house before him. “Maybe it is in
the vault, in which event it looks like a case of suicide.
I have been on the telephone with the boss of Mortimers,
the builders. They say that there is only one key in existence
for that vault—I was speaking to Mr. Mortimer
himself and he knows. Trasmere made a special point
about the lock and had twenty or thirty manufactured
by different locksmiths. Nobody knows which one he
used, and Mortimer says that the orders were so imperative
that there should be no duplicate key, that it is unlikely—in
fact, I think, impossible—that the murderer
could have entered the vault except by the aid of Trasmere’s
own key. However, we shall soon know; I have
the best workman in town working at the unfinished key
in Felling’s room and he says it is so far advanced that
he is in no doubt he will be able to open the vault tonight.”
“Then it is useless in its present state?”
The other nodded.
“Quite useless, we have tried it and the locksmith, who
is an expert, says that it wouldn’t fit into the keyhole as
it was when we found it.”
“Then you suggest it is a case of suicide? That old
man Trasmere went into the vault, locked himself in and
then shot himself.”
Carver shook his head.
“If the revolver is found in the vault, yours would be
a very sound theory, though why Trasmere should shoot
himself is entirely beyond me.”
At a quarter to eleven that night three men stood before
the door of the Trasmere vault, and the shirt-sleeved
workman inserting the key, the lock snapped back. He
was pushing the door open when Carver caught his arm.
“Just leave it as it is,” he said and the locksmith, obviously
disappointed that he should be denied a full view
of the tragedy which he had only half glimpsed went
back to gather up his tools.
“Now,” said Carver, drawing a long breath and pulling
a pair of white gloves from his pocket, he put them on.
Tab followed him into the chamber of death.
“I’ve telephoned for the doctor. He’ll be here in a
few seconds,” said Carver, looking down at the silent
figure leaning against the table legs. He pointed to the
table. In the exact centre lay a key, but what brought
the exclamation to the detective’s lips, was the fact that
the one half was stained red. The fluid which had run
from it had soaked into the porous surface of the table.
“Blood,” whispered the detective and gingerly lifted
the flat steel.
There was no doubt about it. Though the handle was
clean, the lower wards appeared as though they had been
dipped in blood.
“This disposes of the suicide theory,” said Carver.
His first search was for the pistol which had obviously
slain the man. There was no sign of any weapon. He
passed his hand under the limp body and Tab shivered
to see the head drop wearily to the shoulder.
“Nothing there—shot through the body too. Suicides
seldom do it that way.”
His quick fingers searched the silent figure. There was
nothing of any value.
Carver straightened himself and stood, fist on hip, surveying
the dreadful sight.
“He was standing here when he was shot—he never
knew what killed him. As a faked suicide it is inartistic—part
from the absence of weapon, the old man was
shot in the back.”
If there were any doubts on the subject they were set
at rest when the doctor made his brief examination.
“He was shot at the range of about two yards,” he
said. “No, Mr. Carver, it is impossible that he should
have committed suicide, there is no burning whatever. Besides,
the bullet has entered the back, just beneath the
left shoulder and of course, death must have been instantaneous.
It is impossible that the wound can have been
self-inflicted.”
Again came the police photographers, and after they
had gone, leaving the vault thick with the mist of exploded
magnesium, the two men were left to their search.
The first boxes were, for the main part, filled with
money. There was very little gold, but a great deal of
paper of various nationalities. In one box Carver found
five million francs in thousand franc notes, another was
packed with English five pound notes, another was full
of hundred dollar bills fastened in packets of ten thousand.
Only two of these boxes were locked and only
one that they looked at that night contained anything in
the nature of documents. For the most part they were
old leases, receipts painted on thin paper in Chinese characters
and which they only knew were receipts because
somebody had written a translation on their backs. They
were bracketed neatly in folders, on each of which was
described in a fine flowing hand, the nature of its contents.
On one thick bundle fastened with rubber bands was
an old label: “Trading correspondence, 1899.”
In his search Tab, who was looking through the box,
found a folded manuscript which he brought out.
“Here is his will,” he said, and Carver took it from
him. It was written in the crabbed boyish hand which
Tab had come to know so well and it was very short.
After the conventional preamble, it went on:
“I leave my property and effects whatsoever, to my
nephew, Rex Percival Lander, the only son of my deceased
sister, Mary Catherine Lander, nee Trasmere, and
I appoint him sole executor of this my will.”
It was witnessed by Mildred Green, who described herself
as a cook, and by Arthur Green, whose description
of his profession was valet. Their addresses were
Mayfield.
“I think those are the two servants the old man discharged
for pilfering some six months ago. The will
must have been executed a few weeks before they left.”
Tab’s first feeling was one of pleasure that at last his
friend was a rich man. Poor Rex, little did he dream that
he would come into his inheritance in so tragic a fashion.
Carver put the document back into the box and continued
the examination of the door which Tab had interrupted.
“It isn’t a spring lock, you notice,” he said. “So, therefore,
it couldn’t have been slammed by a murderer who
first shot Trasmere and then made his escape. It has
to be locked either from the inside or the outside. If
there was any reasonable possibility of Trasmere having
shot himself, the solution would have been simple. But
he did not shoot himself. He was shot here, the door
was locked upon him and the key returned to the table—how?”
He took the key and tried one of the air-holes
of the ventilator. The point of the key scarcely entered.
“There must be some other entrance to the vault,” he
said.
The sun was up before they finished their examination
of the room. The walls were solid. There was neither
window nor fireplace. The floor was even more substantial
than the walls.
In a last hopeless endeavor to solve the mystery, Carver
called in an expert to inspect the ventilator. It was
made of steel, a quarter of an inch thick, and fastened
into the door itself. There were no screws with which
it could have been taken out and even if it had been removed,
only the tiniest of mortals could have crept
through.
“Still,” said Carver, “if we could suppose that the
ventilator was removable, we might have taken a leaf
from Edgar Allen Poe and thought seriously of a trained
monkey being introduced.”
“There is the theory of the duplicate key—”
“Which I dismiss,” said Carver. “I am satisfied that
no duplicate key was used. If a duplicate key had been
procurable, Felling or Walters as you call him, would
have found his way to it. He is the cleverest man in
that business and he has lived on duplicate keys all his
life. He must have known that it was impossible to
gain admission by such a method or he wouldn’t have
taken the trouble to make one. He is a specialist in that
line of business, probably the finest locksmith of the underworld.”
“Then you suggest that this key was used?” Tab
pointed to the table.
“I not only suggest it, but I would swear to it,” said
Carver quietly. “Look!” He pulled the door open so
that the light fell upon the outside keyhole. “Do you
see the little blood-spots?” he asked. “That key has not
only been used from the outside, where it has left unmistakable
markings, but the same has happened on the
inside of the door.”
He swung the door again and Tab saw the tell-tale
stains.
“That door was unlocked from the inside after the old
man was dead and locked again upon him.”
“But how did the key get back to the table?” asked
the bewildered reporter.
Mr. Carver shook his head.
“A medical student was once asked by a professor
whether Adam was ever a baby, and he replied: ‘God
knows’—that is my answer to you!” he said. “We will
leave the other boxes until tomorrow, Tab.”
Carver led the way out of the vault, locked the door
with the duplicate key and put it in his pocket.
“My brain is dead,” said Tab.
And it was then that he saw the new pin.
