Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

The ghost of Wood House did his work in a business-like manner!

Of gold coins there were none. Even the most prudent ghost might venture to put these to use without delay, when a sharp and practised eye had found them not to be marked suspiciously.

“What a haul it has been,” Christopher said to himself. His valuables did not appear to have been added to the collection, but he shrewdly suspected that they would be put into place that night. He had only to wait and see who came to put them there; or should he go farther in this adventure first?

Behind the row of wooden boxes was a square hole, black as the heart of night. Christopher’s lantern showed him that from the top of this opening descended a narrow staircase, winding round upon itself like a corkscrew. He set his foot on the first step, and it squeaked. Then he knew what it was that had waked him every night – a foot treading upon that stair – perhaps other stairs below.

“I’ll see what’s at the bottom,” thought Christopher; and was in the act of stepping over the low barrier of boxes when he heard a distant sound.

It was faint, yet it made Christopher pause. He withdrew his foot from the top step of the stairway, and, covering the light, lay on his side behind the boxes which would, until a person advancing had risen to a level higher than the wooden lids, form a screen to hide him.

The sound continued, growing gradually more distinct. Someone was tip-toeing towards the stairs. Someone was on the stairs. Someone was coming up. There was a wavering glimmer of light, a little light, like that of a candle.

Christopher lay very still. He hardly even breathed.

The light was moving up the dark wall, and throwing a strange black shadow, which might be the shadow of a head. A stair creaked. Another stair. That clock must have been slow, or else the ghost was before its time. Now there was a long-drawn, tired breath, like a sigh, and in the advancing light gleamed something white and small. For a moment it hung in the midst of shadow, then it descended on the lid of the middle box. It was a woman’s hand.

Quick as thought Christopher seized and held it tightly, at the same instant rising up and flashing his lantern.

There was a stifled gasp; the hand struggled vainly; he pulled it towards him, though its owner stumbled and nearly fell, and Christopher found himself face to face with Mrs Morley Chester.

“Let me go!” she panted. “Oh, I implore you!”

“I’ll not let you go,” said Christopher, in a voice as low as hers, but mercilessly determined. “This game is up. You shall tell me everything, or I swear I’ll alarm the house, send for the police, and have you arrested, you and your husband.”

“Not my husband!” faltered the “dear little cousin,” the pretty, timid creature who had always seemed to Christopher pathetic in her gentle self-effacement, her desire to help Cousin Sidney. “He – he has nothing to do with this. I-”

“Oh, yes, he has; everything to do with it,” insisted Christopher, brutally, meaning to frighten her. “You couldn’t have managed this yourself. I’m not an ordinary guest. I’m here as a detective, and I’ve been working up the case for a fortnight. Now, I want your confession. Be quick, please, or you’ll regret it.”

“How cruel you are!” sobbed the woman.

Christopher laughed. “How cruel you have both been to those who trusted you – and to others likely to be suspected in your stead.”

“I would do anything for Morley,” said Morley’s wife.

Still holding her wrist, he pulled her gently, but firmly, up to the top of the steps, and did not loosen his grasp until he stood between her and the stairway.

“If you wish to save him you know what to do,” the young man said.

“You won’t send us to prison if I tell you the whole story?”

“I’ll do my best for you, if you make a clean breast of it; but the contents of these boxes must be restored to their owners, for your cousin’s sake if nothing else. I promise to shut my eyes to your escaping with your husband, before any public revelation is made, provided I’m satisfied that you tell me the whole truth now.”

“I will, oh, I will! You know, Morley would have had this place if common justice had been done – if the entail hadn’t been broken.”

“Ah, he is the heir of whom Miss Chester spoke!”

“Of course, who else could be? He’s the only one left in the male line. And think what it was for him to find out through an expert, whose word he couldn’t doubt, that there’s coal enough under the park to make him an immensely rich man, if only he hadn’t been robbed of his rights.”

“He didn’t tell Miss Chester of this discovery?”

“Naturally not. If she or her mother gave up living here the estate would come to him after all. He hoped for that. And when he heard of her plan to open a kind of hotel he helped her get a licence and offered to manage the business. That was because he had an idea, which he hoped he could work. His father, who died when Morley was a boy, was a professor of chemistry, and made some clever inventions and discoveries, but they never brought in money. There was one thing he found after spending a year in Persia for his health. He discovered that out of a plant there – a plant no one had ever thought of importance before – an extract could be produced which would make people unconscious, at the same time causing their muscles to remain so rigid that if they were standing they would remain on their feet, or would not drop what they might be holding in their hands. When they came to themselves again they would not feel ill, would not even know they had lost consciousness for a moment.

“Morley’s father was much excited about this preparation and hoped it would be as important as curare, if not chloroform. He named the stuff arenoform, as nearly as possible after the plant, and published his discovery to the medical profession. But then came a dreadful blow. After many experiments to change and improve it, nothing could be done to prolong unconsciousness enough to make arenoform really useful to doctors and surgeons. The effect wouldn’t last longer than five or six minutes, and the patients were terribly exhausted next day, so that the stuff would not do even for dentists in extracting teeth, as it was more depressing than gas. One of the most wonderful things about it was that a lot of people could be made unconscious at once, even in a big room, by a spray of arenoform floating in the air. But though that was curious and interesting, it was not of practical use, so arenoform was a failure.

“The disappointment was so great that Morley’s father was never the same again. He always hoped that some experiment would make the thing a success, and, instead of gaining the fortune he’d expected, he spent more money than he could spare from his family in importing quantities of the plant from Persia, and manufacturing the extract in his own laboratory. Then he died, and there were hundreds and hundreds of the bottles in the house, of no use to anybody; but Morley had promised his dying father not to let them be destroyed. Everyone forgot the discovery of arenoform, for you see Dr Chester has been dead twenty years. Only Morley didn’t forget; and it was the existence of that quantity of arenoform in the house left him by his father which put the idea of coming here into his head. He experimented with the stuff on a dog, and found it was as powerful as on the day it was made. Then he told me, and I promised to help in any way I could.

“Next to the dining-hall on one side, and separating it from the two rooms used as private sitting-rooms for guests, is a long, rather ugly room which Morley asked Sidney to give him as a private office. Night after night he worked there before the house was opened to the public, and afterwards too, perfecting his scheme. He perforated the walls, so that, by means of a little movable machine which I could work, a spray of arenoform could be showered through the oak wainscoting either into the dining-hall on one side or the two sitting-rooms on the other. Then he had the tables ranged along the wall; and as one peculiarity of arenoform is that it smells like wood – wonderfully like old oak – no detective could have suspected anything by coming to sniff about the place afterwards. Besides, the perforations in the wainscoting are so small that they seem no different from the worm-holes which are slowly spoiling the old oak.