Part 13

“Yes,” assented his friend, “that is the story, and, upon my soul, in the circumstances--well, you shall hear it. It comes partly from the newspapers of many years ago, but only partly, for the circumstances were successfully hushed up in a large measure and it required the stimulated memories of ancient scandalmongers to fill in the details. Oh yes, it was a scandal, Max, and would have been a great sensation too, I do not doubt, only they had no proper pictorial press in those days, poor beggars. It was very soon after Massingham Mansions had been erected--they were called Enderby House in those days, by the way, for the name was changed on account of this very business. The household at No. 11 consisted of a comfortable, middle-aged married couple and one servant, a quiet and attractive young creature, one is led to understand. As a matter of fact, I think they were the first tenants of that flat.”

“The first occupants give the soul to a new house,” remarked the blind man gravely. “That is why empty houses have their different characters.”

“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” assented Mr Carlyle in his incisive way, “but none of our authorities on this case made any reference to the fact. They did say, however, that the man held a good and responsible position--a position for which high personal character and strict morality were essential. He was also well known and regarded in quiet but substantial local circles where serious views prevailed. He was, in short, a man of notorious ‘respectability.’

“The first chapter of the tragedy opened with the painful death of the prepossessing handmaiden--suicide, poor creature. She didn’t appear one morning and the flat was full of the reek of gas. With great promptitude the master threw all the windows open and called up the porter. They burst open the door of the little bedroom at the end of the passage, and there was the thing as clear as daylight for any coroner’s jury to see. The door was locked on the inside and the extinguished gas was turned full on. It was only a tiny room, with no fireplace, and the ventilation of a closed well-fitting door and window was negligible in the circumstances. At all events the girl was proved to have been dead for several hours when they reached her, and the doctor who conducted the autopsy crowned the convincing fabric of circumstances when he mentioned as delicately as possible that the girl had a very pressing reason for dreading an inevitable misfortune that would shortly overtake her. The jury returned the obvious verdict.

“There have been a great many undiscovered crimes in the history of mankind, Max, but it is by no means every ingenious plot that carries. After the inquest, at which our gentleman doubtless cut a very proper and impressive figure, the barbed whisper began to insinuate and to grow in freedom. It is sheerly impossible to judge how these things start, but we know that when once they have been begun they gather material like an avalanche. It was remembered by someone at the flat underneath that late on the fatal night a window in the principal bedroom above had been heard to open, top and bottom, very quietly. Certain other sounds of movement in the night did not tally with the tale of sleep-wrapped innocence. Sceptical busybodies were anxious to demonstrate practically to those who differed from them on this question that it was quite easy to extinguish a gas-jet in one room by blowing down the gas-pipe in another; and in this connection there was evidence that the lady of the flat had spoken to her friends more than once of her sentimental young servant’s extravagant habit of reading herself to sleep occasionally with the light full on. Why was nothing heard at the inquest, they demanded, of the curious fact that an open novelette lay on the counterpane when the room was broken into? A hundred trifling circumstances were adduced--arrangements that the girl had been making for the future down to the last evening of her life--interpretable hints that she had dropped to her acquaintances--her views on suicide and the best means to that end: a favourite topic, it would seem, among her class--her possession of certain comparatively expensive trinkets on a salary of a very few shillings a week, and so on. Finally, some rather more definite and important piece of evidence must have been conveyed to the authorities, for we know now that one fine day a warrant was issued. Somehow rumour preceded its execution. The eminently respectable gentleman with whom it was concerned did not wait to argue out the merits of the case. He locked himself in the bathroom, and when the police arrived they found that instead of an arrest they had to arrange the details for another inquest.”

“A very convincing episode,” conceded Carrados in response to his friend’s expectant air. “And now her spirit passes the long winter evenings turning the gas on and off, and the one amusement of his consists in doing the same with the bath-water--or the other way, the other way about, Louis. Truly, one half the world knows not how the other half lives!”

“All your cheap humour won’t induce Trigget to spend another night in that flat, Max,” retorted Mr Carlyle. “Nor, I am afraid, will it help me through this business in any other way.”

“Then I’ll give you a hint that may,” said Carrados. “Try your respectable gentleman’s way of settling difficulties.”

“What is that?” demanded his friend.

“Blow down the pipes, Louis.”

“Blow down the pipes?” repeated Carlyle.

“At all events try it. I infer that Mr Trigget has not experimented in that direction.”

“But what will it do, Max?”

“Possibly it will demonstrate where the other end goes to.”

“But the other end goes to the meter.”

“I suggest not--not without some interference with its progress. I have already met your Mr Trigget, you know, Louis. An excellent and reliable man within his limits, but he is at his best posted outside the door of a hotel waiting to see the co-respondent go in. He hasn’t enough imagination for this case--not enough to carry him away from what would be his own obvious method of doing it to what is someone else’s equally obvious but quite different method. Unless I am doing him an injustice, he will have spent most of his time trying to catch someone getting into the flat to turn the gas and water on and off, whereas I conjecture that no one does go into the flat because it is perfectly simple--ingenious but simple--to produce these phenomena without. Then when Mr Trigget has satisfied himself that it is physically impossible for anyone to be going in and out, and when, on the top of it, he comes across this romantic tragedy--a tale that might psychologically explain the ghost, simply because the ghost is moulded on the tragedy--then, of course, Mr Trigget’s mental process is swept away from its moorings and his feet begin to get cold.”

“This is very curious and suggestive,” said Mr Carlyle. “I certainly assumed----But shall we have Trigget up and question him on the point? I think he ought to be here now--if he isn’t detained at the Bull.”

Carrados assented, and in a few minutes Mr Trigget presented himself at the door of the private office. He was a melancholy-looking middle-aged little man, with an ineradicable air of being exactly what he was, and the searcher for deeper or subtler indications of character would only be rewarded by a latent pessimism grounded on the depressing probability that he would never be anything else.

“Come in, Trigget,” called out Mr Carlyle when his employee diffidently appeared. “Come in. Mr Carrados would like to hear some of the details of the Massingham Mansions case.”

“Not the first time I have availed myself of the benefit of your inquiries, Mr Trigget,” nodded the blind man. “Good-afternoon.”

“Good-afternoon, sir,” replied Trigget with gloomy deference. “It’s very handsome of you to put it in that way, Mr Carrados, sir. But this isn’t another Tarporley-Templeton case, if I may say so, sir. That was as plain as a pikestaff after all, sir.”

“When we saw the pikestaff, Mr Trigget; yes, it was,” admitted Carrados, with a smile. “But this is insoluble? Ah, well. When I was a boy I used to be extraordinarily fond of ghost stories, I remember, but even while reading them I always had an uneasy suspicion that when it came to the necessary detail of explaining the mystery I should be defrauded with some subterfuge as ‘by an ingenious arrangement of hidden wires the artful Muggles had contrived,’ etc., or ‘an optical illusion effected by means of concealed mirrors revealed the _modus operandi_ of the apparition.’ I thought that I had been swindled. I think so still. I hope there are no ingenious wires or concealed mirrors here, Mr Trigget?”

Mr Trigget looked mildly sagacious but hopelessly puzzled. It was his misfortune that in him the necessities of his business and the proclivities of his nature were at variance, so that he ordinarily presented the curious anomaly of looking equally alert and tired.

“Wires, sir?” he began, with faint amusement.

“Not only wires, but anything that might account for what is going on,” interposed Mr Carlyle. “Mr Carrados means this, Trigget: you have reported that it is impossible for anyone to be concealed in the flat or to have secret access to it----”

“I have tested every inch of space in all the rooms, Mr Carrados, sir,” protested the hurt Trigget. “I have examined every board and, you may say, every nail in the floor, the skirting-boards, the window frames and in fact wherever a board or a nail exists. There are no secret ways in or out. Then I have taken the most elaborate precautions against the doors and windows being used for surreptitious ingress and egress. They have not been used, sir. For the past week I am the only person who has been in and out of the flat, Mr Carrados, and yet night after night the gas that is cut off at the meter is lit and turned out again, and the water that is cut off at the cistern splashes about in the bath up to the second I let myself in. Then it’s as quiet as the grave and everything is exactly as I left it. It isn’t human, Mr Carrados, sir, and flesh and blood can’t stand it--not in the middle of the night, that is to say.”

“You see nothing further, Mr Trigget?”

“I don’t indeed, Mr Carrados. I would suggest doing away with the gas in that room altogether. As a box-room it wouldn’t need one.”

“And the bathroom?”

“That might be turned into a small bedroom and all the water fittings removed. Then to provide a bathroom----”

“Yes, yes,” interrupted Mr Carlyle impatiently, “but we are retained to discover who is causing this annoyance and to detect the means, not to suggest structural alterations in the flat, Trigget. The fact is that after having put in a week on this job you have failed to bring us an inch nearer its solution. Now Mr Carrados has suggested”--Mr Carlyle was not usually detained among the finer shades of humour, but some appreciation of the grotesqueness of the advice required him to control his voice as he put the matter in its baldest form--“Mr Carrados has suggested that instead of spending the time measuring the chimneys and listening to the wall-paper, if you had simply blown down the gas-pipe----”

Carrados was inclined to laugh, although he thought it rather too bad of Louis.

“Not quite in those terms, Mr Trigget,” he interposed.

“Blow down the gas-pipe, sir?” repeated the amazed man. “What for?”

“To ascertain where the other end comes out,” replied Carlyle.

“But don’t you see, sir, that that is a detail until you ascertain how it is being done? The pipe may be tapped between the bath and the cistern. Naturally, I considered that. As a matter of fact, the water-pipe isn’t tapped. It goes straight up from the bath to the cistern in the attic above, a distance of only a few feet, and I have examined it. The gas-pipe, it is true, passes through a number of flats, and without pulling up all the floors it isn’t practicable to trace it. But how does that help us, Mr Carrados? The gas-tap has to be turned on and off; you can’t do that with these hidden wires. It has to be lit. I’ve never heard of lighting gas by optical illusions, sir. Somebody must get in and out of the flat or else it isn’t human. I’ve spent a week, a very trying week, sir, in endeavouring to ascertain how it could be done. I haven’t shirked cold and wet and solitude, sir, in the discharge of my duty. I’ve freely placed my poor gifts of observation and intelligence, such as they are, at the service----”

“Not ‘freely,’ Trigget,” interposed his employer with decision.

“I am speaking under a deep sense of injury, Mr Carlyle,” retorted Mr Trigget, who, having had time to think it over, had now come to the conclusion that he was not appreciated. “I am alluding to a moral attitude such as we all possess. I am very grieved by what has been suggested. I didn’t expect it of you, Mr Carlyle, sir; indeed I did not. For a week I have done everything that it has been possible to do, everything that a long experience could suggest, and now, as I understand it, sir, you complain that I didn’t blow down the gas-pipe, sir. It’s hard, sir; it’s very hard.”

“Oh, well, for heaven’s sake don’t cry about it, Trigget,” exclaimed Mr Carlyle. “You’re always sobbing about the place over something or other. We know you did your best--God help you!” he added aside.

“I did, Mr Carlyle; indeed I did, sir. And I thank you for that appreciative tribute to my services. I value it highly, very highly indeed, sir.” A tremulous note in the rather impassioned delivery made it increasingly plain that Mr Trigget’s regimen had not been confined entirely to solid food that day. His wrongs were forgotten and he approached Mr Carrados with an engaging air of secrecy.

“What is this tip about blowing down the gas-pipe, sir?” he whispered confidentially. “The old dog’s always willing to learn something new.”

“Max,” said Mr Carlyle curtly, “is there anything more that we need detain Trigget for?”

“Just this,” replied Carrados after a moment’s thought. “The gas-bracket--it has a mantle attachment on?”

“Oh no, Mr Carrados,” confided the old dog with the affectation of imparting rather valuable information, “not a mantle on. Oh, certainly no mantle. Indeed--indeed, not a mantle at all.”

Mr Carlyle looked at his friend curiously. It was half evident that something might have miscarried. Furthermore, it was obvious that the warmth of the room and the stress of emotion were beginning to have a disastrous effect on the level of Mr Trigget’s ideas and speech.

“A globe?” suggested Carrados.

“A globe? No, sir, not even a globe, in the strict sense of the word. No globe, that is to say, Mr Carrados. In fact nothing like a globe.”

“What is there, then?” demanded the blind man without any break in his unruffled patience. “There may be another way--but surely--surely there must be some attachment?”

“No,” said Mr Trigget with precision, “no attachment at all; nothing at all; nothing whatsoever. Just the ordinary or common or penny plain gas-jet, and above it the whayoumaycallit thingamabob.”

“The shade--gas consumer--of course!” exclaimed Carrados. “That is it.”

“The tin thingamabob,” insisted Mr Trigget with slow dignity. “Call it what you will. Its purpose is self-evident. It acts as a dispirator--a distributor, that is to say----”

“Louis,” struck in Carrados joyously, “are you good for settling it to-night?”

“Certainly, my dear fellow, if you can really give the time.”

“Good; it’s years since I last tackled a ghost. What about----?” His look indicated the other member of the council.

“Would he be of any assistance?”

“Perhaps--then.”

“What time?”

“Say eleven-thirty.”

“Trigget,” rapped out his employer sharply, “meet us at the corner of Middlewood and Enderby Roads at half-past eleven sharp to-night. If you can’t manage it I shall not require your services again.”

“Certainly, sir; I shall not fail to be punctual,” replied Trigget without a tremor. The appearance of an almost incredible sobriety had possessed him in the face of warning, and both in speech and manner he was again exactly the man as he had entered the room. “I regard it as a great honour, Mr Carrados, to be associated with you in this business, sir.”

“In the meanwhile,” remarked Carrados, “if you find the time hang heavy on your hands you might look up the subject of ‘platinum black.’ It may be the new tip you want.”

“Certainly, sir. But do you mind giving me a hint as to what ‘platinum black’ is?”

“It is a chemical that has the remarkable property of igniting hydrogen or coal gas by mere contact,” replied Carrados. “Think how useful that may be if you haven’t got a match!”

To mark the happy occasion Mr Carlyle had insisted on taking his friend off to witness a popular musical comedy. Carrados had a few preparations to make, a few accessories to procure for the night’s work, but the whole business had come within the compass of an hour and the theatre spanned the interval between dinner at the Palm Tree and the time when they left the car at the appointed meeting-place. Mr Trigget was already there, in an irreproachable state of normal dejection. Parkinson accompanied the party, bringing with him the baggage of the expedition.

“Anything going on, Trigget?” inquired Mr Carlyle.

“I’ve made a turn round the place, sir, and the light was on,” was the reply. “I didn’t go up for fear of disturbing the conditions before you saw them. That was about ten minutes ago. Are you going into the yard to look again? I have all the keys, of course.”

“Do we, Max?” queried Mr Carlyle.

“Mr Trigget might. We need not all go. He can catch us up again.”

He caught them up again before they had reached the outer door.

“It’s still on, sir,” he reported.

“Do we use any special caution, Max?” asked Carlyle.

“Oh no. Just as though we were friends of the ghost, calling in the ordinary way.”

Trigget, who retained the keys, preceded the party up the stairs till the top was reached. He stood a moment at the door of No. 11 examining, by the light of the electric lamp he carried, his private marks there and pointing out to the others in a whisper that they had not been tampered with. All at once a most dismal wail, lingering, piercing, and ending in something like a sob that died away because the life that gave it utterance had died with it, drawled forebodingly through the echoing emptiness of the deserted flat. Trigget had just snapped off his light and in the darkness a startled exclamation sprang from Mr Carlyle’s lips.

“It’s all right, sir,” said the little man, with a private satisfaction that he had the diplomacy to conceal. “Bit creepy, isn’t it? especially when you hear it by yourself up here for the first time. It’s only the end of the bath-water running out.”

He had opened the door and was conducting them to the room at the end of the passage. A faint aurora had been visible from that direction when they first entered the hall, but it was cut off before they could identify its source.

“That’s what happens,” muttered Trigget.

He threw open the bedroom door without waiting to examine his marks there and they crowded into the tiny chamber. Under the beams of the lamps they carried it was brilliantly though erratically illuminated. All turned towards the central object of their quest, a tarnished gas-bracket of the plainest description. A few inches above it hung the metal disc that Trigget had alluded to, for the ceiling was low and at that point it was brought even nearer to the gas by corresponding with the slant of the roof outside.

With the prescience so habitual with him that it had ceased to cause remark among his associates Carrados walked straight to the gas-bracket and touched the burner.

“Still warm,” he remarked. “And so are we getting now. A thoroughly material ghost, you perceive, Louis.”

“But still turned off, don’t you see, Mr Carrados, sir,” put in Trigget eagerly. “And yet no one’s passed out.”

“Still turned off--and still turned on,” commented the blind man.

“What do you mean, Max?”

“The small screwdriver, Parkinson,” requested Carrados.

“Well, upon my word!” dropped Mr Carlyle expressively. For in no longer time than it takes to record the fact Max Carrados had removed a screw and then knocked out the tap. He held it up towards them and they all at once saw that so much of the metal had been filed away that the gas passed through no matter how the tap stood. “How on earth did you know of that?”

“Because it wasn’t practicable to do the thing in any other way. Now unhook the shade, Parkinson--carefully.”

The warning was not altogether unnecessary, for the man had to stand on tiptoes before he could comply. Carrados received the dingy metal cone and lightly touched its inner surface.

“Ah, here, at the apex, to be sure,” he remarked. “The gas is bound to get there. And there, Louis, you have an ever-lit and yet a truly ‘safety’ match--so far as gas is concerned. You can buy the thing for a shilling, I believe.”

Mr Carlyle was examining the tiny apparatus with interest. So small that it might have passed for the mummy of a midget hanging from a cobweb, it appeared to consist of an insignificant black pellet and an inch of the finest wire.

“Um, I’ve never heard of it. And this will really light the gas?”

“As often as you like. That is the whole bag of tricks.”

Mr Carlyle turned a censorious eye upon his lieutenant, but Trigget was equal to the occasion and met it without embarrassment.

“I hadn’t heard of it either, sir,” he remarked conversationally. “Gracious, what won’t they be getting out next, Mr Carlyle!”

“Now for the mystery of the water.” Carrados was finding his way to the bathroom and they followed him down the passage and across the hall. “In its way I think that this is really more ingenious than the gas, for, as Mr Trigget has proved for us, the water does not come from the cistern. The taps, you perceive, are absolutely dry.”

“It is forced up?” suggested Mr Carlyle, nodding towards the outlet.

“That is the obvious alternative. We will test it presently.” The blind man was down on his hands and knees following the lines of the different pipes. “Two degrees more cold are not conclusive, because in any case the water has gone out that way. Mr Trigget, you know the ropes, will you be so obliging as to go up to the cistern and turn the water on.”

“I shall need a ladder, sir.”

“Parkinson.”

“We have a folding ladder out here,” said Parkinson, touching Mr Trigget’s arm.

“One moment,” interposed Carrados, rising from his investigation among the pipes; “this requires some care. I want you to do it without making a sound or showing a light, if that is possible. Parkinson will help you. Wait until you hear us raising a diversion at the other end of the flat. Come, Louis.”

The diversion took the form of tapping the wall and skirting-board in the other haunted room. When Trigget presented himself to report that the water was now on Carrados put him to continue the singular exercise with Mr Carlyle while he himself slipped back to the bathroom.

“The pump, Parkinson,” he commanded in a brisk whisper to his man, who was waiting in the hall.

The appliance was not unlike a powerful tyre pump with some modifications. One tube from it was quickly fitted to the outlet pipe of the bath, another trailed a loose end into the bath itself, ready to take up the water. There were a few other details, the work of moments. Then Carrados turned on the tap, silencing the inflow by the attachment of a short length of rubber tube. When the water had risen a few inches he slipped off to the other room, told his rather mystified confederates there that he wanted a little more noise and bustle put into their performance, and was back again in the bathroom.

“Now, Parkinson,” he directed, and turned off the tap. There was about a foot of water in the bath.