The Marathon Mystery/Part 4/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
The Key to the Mystery
THOMAS led the way through the hall and up the stair.
“Which room will you look at first, sir?” he asked.
“Let us see Mr. Tremaine’s room first.”
“Very well, sir,” said Thomas, and opened a door and stood aside to let us pass.
There was nothing at all extraordinary about the room. It was large, well-lighted, well-ventilated, well-furnished—just the sort of bedroom one would naturally expect to find in a luxurious country-house.
Godfrey cast a glance about it, then he went to one of the windows, opened it, and stepped out upon the balcony. He walked along the balcony to the end where the heavy creepers were, took a look at them, and finally came back to the window.
“That’s all,” he said, as he stepped through into the room. “Of course, I didn’t expect to find anything here—our friend is much too clever to be caught napping that way. Thomas, I suppose this table is just where it was when Mr. Tremaine had the room?”
“Yes, sir.”
Godfrey sat down at it, measuring the distance from it to the window.
“Lester,” he said, “I wish you’d go out and come up the walk and see if you can see me sitting here.”
I ran down the stairs and did as he directed, but could catch not a glimpse of him.
“Well?” he called down, coming to the open window.
“I can’t see you at all,” I said.
“I thought so. Come up again.”
He was sitting again at the table when I opened the door.
“Now, take a look at it, Lester,” he said. “You’ll see that the table is so far away from the window that it’s quite impossible for anyone on the ground outside to see the person sitting at it. Yet Drysdale stated distinctly that he saw Tremaine sitting at the table writing when he came back from that mysterious walk. What would you argue from that?”
“That Tremaine had moved the table nearer to the window.”
“And why should he do that?”
“To get a better light, perhaps,” I ventured.
“He might have done it, in the daytime, to get a better light, but at night he would get a much worse one over there by the window than here. The lights, you’ll observe, hang from the centre of the ceiling.”
“Then he did it,” I said, “in order that he might be seen from outside.”
“That’s it; not only that he might be seen, but that Drysdale might see him. I wonder if this is the kind of paper he wrote on?”
“We keep a supply of it in all th’ guest rooms, sir,” volunteered Thomas.
Godfrey took it up and looked at it. It was a plain white linen of good quality, with the word “Edgemere” embossed in blue at the top. There were also on the table pens, an inkstand, and two or three blotters. He turned the blotters over, but only one of them showed any sign of having been used, and the marks on it were very faint—yet they seemed to interest Godfrey. He bent over them with puzzled face; then he got out a little magnifying glass and studied them again.
“Lester,” he said, at last, “I wish you’d take a look at this,” and he pushed the blotter and glass toward me. “What do you make of it?”
I gazed through the glass at the marks, but for a moment could make nothing of them. Then they resolved themselves into a string of letters marching backward, fairly distinct at one end but fading away to nothingness at the other, thus—
“Somebody seems to have been scribbling a lot of disconnected letters on a piece of paper,” I said, at last. “I can’t make out any words. The letters seem to be mostly B’s and G’s—yes, and here’s an I.”
“Thomas,” said Godfrey, “will you go down and ask Mr. Delroy if he has a sample of Mr. Tremaine’s handwriting, and, if so, if he will let us see it for a moment?”
Thomas went out instantly and I looked at Godfrey in surprise.
“You think those marks have some value?” I asked.
Godfrey drummed absently on the table and stared out of the window.
“I don’t know,” he answered; “but in an investigation of this kind, no point is too small to be important. We’ve got to examine everything, weigh everything, pile up every little atom of evidence, if we expect to tip the scale in our direction. It’s very probable that Tremaine never made these marks at all; even if he did, they probably have no significance. But, in any event, it won’t do any harm to make sure; and, besides, I’d like to see a sample of his handwriting, just for its own sake—the handwriting of a man like that ought to be interesting. Ah, here is Thomas.”
“Here’s a letter, sir,” said Thomas.
Godfrey opened it and glanced at the contents.
“He’s a good penman,” he said; “see, Lester,” and he handed me the sheet; “but it’s quite a different hand from the one on the blotter—much broader and more masculine—just such a hand as one would naturally expect a man like Tremaine to write.”
He examined it again for a moment, then folded it up, and handed it back to Thomas.
“Perhaps Mr. Delroy will want it again,” he said. “Now, let us see Mr. Drysdale’s room.”
As he got up from the table, I noticed that he still held the blotter in his hand, and I saw him place it carefully in an inner pocket. After all, then, he did attach some importance to it.
The room which had been occupied by Drysdale was the counterpart of Tremaine’s, but it was in great disorder. An open trunk stood in the middle of the floor, with clothing strewn about it; the bed had not been made…
“We was ordered not t’ do anything toward settin’ this room to rights,” explained Thomas apologetically, “till the coroner sent us word we might. He ain’t sent no word yet.”
It was evident that Drysdale had been packing very hastily when he was interrupted by the arrival of the officers. The clothing which was in the trunk had been crammed in carelessly—though, of course, that might have been done by the coroner, after searching it.
“Drysdale evidently didn’t spend much time in bed that night,” observed Godfrey, and indicated a pile of cigarette stubs heaped high on an ash-tray on the table. “He must have had some knotty problem to wrestle with to need so many.”
He walked slowly about the room, looking at everything keenly, but touching nothing; he stood gazing at the bed for a long time. Then he turned again to the table.
“Here’s the diary,” he said, picking up a little book which lay there. “So Heffelbower didn’t get it. Well, I guess I’d better see that he doesn’t have another chance.”
He weighed it in his hand, and I could see how it tempted him—perhaps here lay the very key which he had been seeking in vain! But in a moment he slipped it unopened into his pocket.
“A man is a fool to make promises,” he observed, with a wry smile, and sat down at the table. “Hello, what’s this?” he added suddenly, and, stooping, he fished from the waste-basket beside him the fragments of a cane.
It was a cane certainly of at least ordinary strength, and yet it had been broken into half a dozen pieces, and hurled into the basket.
Whistling softly to himself, Godfrey surveyed it for a moment; then he bent over the basket and examined the remainder of its contents, piece by piece. There were scraps of letters, a torn envelope, a crumpled sheet of paper…
He sprang to his feet with a cry of triumph and waved it in the air.
“I’ve found it!” he cried, his face beaming. “I’ve found it, Lester!”
“Found what?” I questioned, more and more astonished, for Godfrey was usually master of his emotions.
“Ah, Lester,” he continued more calmly, as he smoothed it out carefully on the table, “this takes a lot of conceit out of me. Had I been really clever, I’d have deduced the existence of this message long before I entered the room. As it is, it’s luck—pure luck! I’m glad to win on any terms, but I’d rather win by scientific deduction. C. Auguste Dupin would have come straight upstairs, walked straight to that basket, and selected unerringly this sheet of paper—he would have known that it was there; while I—well, one can only do one’s best, and this point was a little too fine for me. Take a look at it.”
It was a sheet of the ordinary Edgemere note paper. Across it, two lines were written:
Be at the pergola at nine.
If I am late, wait for me.
“Well,” I faltered; “well”
“Oh, don’t you see, Lester, it’s the key to the whole problem. It’s the light we’ve been looking for—with our eyes shut! And to think that instead of coming straight here for it, I should have stumbled about in the dark for so long. It’s the only possible explanation, and yet I didn’t think of it. It was inevitable from the first, and yet I couldn’t see it. It disgusts me with myself—it’s what I get for being so cocked up over finding that bottle down there. Even after I saw that blotter, I didn’t guess it!”
He had taken out a card, and as he spoke he wrote a rapid sentence on it,
“Here,” he said to Thomas, “take this to Miss Croydon at once, please.”