Arthur Morrison - British Mystery Classics - Arthur Morrison Edition (Illustrated)

“Of course; and Mrs Lamb’s exact address is — what?”

I gave him the address, and the conversation became disjointed. At Farringdon station, where we alighted, Hewitt called two hansoms. Preparing to enter one, he motioned me to the other, saying, “You get straight away to Mrs Lamb’s at once. She may be going to burn that splintered wood, or to set things to rights, after the manner of her kind, and you can stop her. I must make one or two small inquiries, but I shall be there half an hour after you.”

“Shall I tell her our object?”

“Only that I may be able to catch her mischievous lodgers — nothing else yet.” He jumped into the hansom and was gone.

I found Mrs Lamb still in a state of indignant perturbation over the trick served her four days before. Fortunately, she had left everything in the panelled room exactly as she had found it, with an idea of being better able to demand or enforce reparation should her lodgers return. “The room’s theirs, you see, sir,” she said, “till the end of the week, since they paid in advance, and they may come back and offer to make amends, although I doubt it. As pleasant-spoken a young chap as you might wish, he seemed, him as come to take the rooms. ‘My cousin,’ says he, ‘is rather an invalid, havin’ only just got over congestion of the lungs, and he won’t be in London till this evening late. He’s comin’ up from Birmingham,’ he ses, ‘and I hope he won’t catch a fresh cold on the way, although of course we’ve got him muffled up plenty.’ He took the rooms, sir, like a gentleman, and mentioned several gentlemen’s names I knew well, as had lodged here before; and then he put down on that there very table, sir”— Mrs Lamb indicated the exact spot with her hand, as though that made the whole thing much more wonderful —“he put down on that very table a week’s rent in advance, and ses, ‘That’s always the best sort of reference, Mrs Lamb, I think,’ as kind-mannered as anything — and never ’aggled about the amount nor nothing. He only had a little black bag, but he said his cousin had all the luggage coming in the train, and as there was so much, p’r’aps they wouldn’t get it here till next day. Then he went out and came in with his cousin at eleven that night — Sarah let ’em in her own self — and in the morning they was gone — and this!” Poor Mrs Lamb, plaintively indignant, stretched her arm towards the wrecked panels.

“If the gentleman as you say is comin’ on, sir,” she pursued, “can do anything to find ’em, I’ll prosecute ’em, that I will, if it costs me ten pound. I spoke to the constable on the beat, but he only looked like a fool, and said if I knew where they were I might charge ’em with wilful damage, or county court ’em. Of course I know I can do that if I knew where they were, but how can I find ’em? Mr Jones he said his name was; but how many Joneses is there in London, sir?”

I couldn’t imagine any answer to a question like this, but I condoled with Mrs Lamb as well as I could. She afterwards went on to express herself much as her sister had done with regard to Kingscote’s death, only as the destruction of her panels loomed larger in her mind, she dwelt primarily on that. “It might almost seem,” she said, “that somebody had a deadly spite on the pore young gentleman, and went breakin’ up his paintin’ one night, and murderin’ him the next!”

I examined the broken panels with some care, having half a notion to attempt to deduce something from them myself, if possible. But I could deduce nothing. The beading had been taken out, and the panels, which were thick in the centre but bevelled at the edges, had been removed and split up literally into thin firewood, which lay in a tumbled heap on the hearth and about the floor. Every panel in the room had been treated in the same way, and the result was a pretty large heap of sticks, with nothing whatever about them to distinguish them from other sticks, except the paint on one face, which I observed in many places had been scratched and scraped away. The rug was drawn half across the hearth, and had evidently been used to deaden the sound of chopping. But mischief — wanton and stupid mischief — was all I could deduce from it all.

Mr Jones’s cousin, it seemed, only Sarah had seen, as she admitted him in the evening, and then he was so heavily muffled that she could not distinguish his features, and would never be able to identify him. But as for the other one, Mrs Lamb was ready to swear to him anywhere.

Hewitt was long in coming, and internal symptoms of the approach of dinner-time (we had had no lunch) had made themselves felt before a sharp ring at the door-bell foretold his arrival. “I have had to wait for answers to a telegram,” he said in explanation, “but at any rate I have the information I wanted. And these are the mysterious panels, are they?”

Mrs Lamb’s true opinion of Martin Hewitt’s behaviour as it proceeded would have been amusing to know. She watched in amazement the antics of a man who purposed finding out who had been splitting sticks by dint of picking up each separate stick and staring at it. In the end he collected a small handful of sticks by themselves and handed them to me, saying. “Just put these together on the table, Brett, and see what you make of them.”

I turned the pieces painted side up, and fitted them together into a complete panel, joining up the painted design accurately. “It is an entire panel,” I said.

“Good. Now look at the sticks a little more closely, and tell me if you notice anything peculiar about them — any particular in which they? differ from all the others.”

I looked. “Two adjoining sticks,” I said, “have each a small semi-circular cavity stuffed with what seems to be putty. Put together it would mean a small circular hole, perhaps a knot-hole, half an inch or so in diameter, in the panel, filled in with putty, or whatever it is.”

“A knot-hole?” Hewitt asked, with particular emphasis.

“Well, no, not a knot-hole, of course, because that would go right through, and this doesn’t. It is probably less than half an inch deep from the front surface.”

“Anything else? Look at the whole appearance of the wood itself. Colour, for instance.”

“It is certainly darker than the rest.”

“So it is,” He took the two pieces carrying the puttied hole, threw the rest on the heap, and addressed the landlady. “The Mr Harvey Challitt who occupied this room before Mr Kingscote, and who got into trouble for forgery, was the Mr Harvey Challitt who was himself robbed of diamonds a few months before on a staircase, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, sir,” Mrs Lamb replied in some bewilderment. “He certainly was that, on his own office stairs, chloroformed.”

“Just so, and when they marched him away because of the forgery, Mr Kingscote changed into his rooms?”

“Yes, and very glad I was. It was bad enough to have the disgrace brought into the house, without the trouble of trying to get people to take his very rooms, and I thought —”

“Yes, yes, very awkward, very awkward!” Hewitt interrupted rather impatiently. “The man who took the rooms on Monday, now — you’d never seen him before, had you?”

“No, sir.”

“Then is that anything like him?” Hewitt held a cabinet photograph before her.

“Why — why — law, yes, that’s him!”

Hewitt dropped the photograph back into his breast pocket with a contented “Um,” and picked up his hat. “I think we may soon be able to find that young gentleman for you, Mrs Lamb. He is not a very respectable young gentleman, and perhaps you are well rid of him, even as it is. Come, Brett,” he added, “the day hasn’t been wasted, after all.”

We made towards the nearest telegraph office. On the way I said, “That puttied-up hole in the piece of wood seems to have influenced you. Is it an important link?”