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?"
"Well--yes," Hewitt answered, "it is. But all those other pieces are important, too."
"But why?"
"Because there are no holes in them." He looked quizzically at my wondering face, and laughed aloud. "Come," he said, "I won"t puzzle you much longer. Here is the post-office. I"ll send my wire, and then we"ll go and dine at Luzatti"s."
He sent his telegram, and we cabbed it to Luzatti"s. Among actors, journalists, and others who know town and like a good dinner, Luzatti"s is well known. We went upstairs for the sake of quietness, and took a table standing alone in a recess just inside the door. We ordered our dinner, and then Hewitt began:
"Now tell me what _your_ conclusion is in this matter of the Ivy Cottage murder."
"Mine? I haven"t one. I"m sorry I"m so very dull, but I really haven"t."
"Come, I"ll give you a point. Here is the newspaper account (torn sacrilegiously from my sc.r.a.p-book for your benefit) of the robbery perpetrated on Harvey Challitt a few months before his forgery. Read it."
"Oh, but I remember the circ.u.mstances very well. He was carrying two packets of diamonds belonging to his firm downstairs to the office of another firm of diamond merchants on the ground-floor. It was a quiet time in the day, and half-way down he was seized on a dark landing, made insensible by chloroform, and robbed of the diamonds--five or six thousand pounds" worth altogether, of stones of various smallish individual values up to thirty pounds or so. He lay unconscious on the landing till one of the partners, noticing that he had been rather long gone, followed and found him. That"s all, I think."
"Yes, that"s all. Well, what do you make of it?"
"I"m afraid I don"t quite see the connection with this case."
"Well, then, I"ll give you another point. The telegram I"ve just sent releases information to the police, in consequence of which they will probably apprehend Harvey Challitt and his confederate, Henry Gillard, _alias_ Jones, for the murder of Gavin Kingscote. Now, then."
"Challitt! But he"s in gaol already."
"Tut, tut, consider. Five years" penal was his dose, although for the first offence, because the forgery was of an extremely dangerous sort.
You left Chelsea over three years ago yourself, and you told me that his difficulty occurred a year before. That makes four years, at least. Good conduct in prison brings a man out of a five years" sentence in that time or a little less, and, as a matter of fact, Challitt was released rather more than a week ago."
"Still, I"m afraid I don"t see what you are driving at."
"Whose story is this about the diamond robbery from Harvey Challitt?"
"His own."
"Exactly. His own. Does his subsequent record make him look like a person whose stories are to be accepted without doubt or question?"
"Why, no. I think I see--no, I don"t. You mean he stole them himself?
I"ve a sort of dim perception of your drift now, but still I can"t fix it. The whole thing"s too complicated."
"It is a little complicated for a first effort, I admit, so I will tell you. This is the story. Harvey Challitt is an artful young man, and decides on a theft of his firm"s diamonds. He first prepares a hiding-place somewhere near the stairs of his office, and when the opportunity arrives he puts the stones away, spills his chloroform, and makes a smell--possibly sniffs some, and actually goes off on the stairs, and the whole thing"s done. He is carried into the office--the diamonds are gone. He tells of the attack on the stairs, as we have heard, and he is believed. At a suitable opportunity he takes his plunder from the hiding-place, and goes home to his lodgings. What is he to do with those diamonds? He can"t sell them yet, because the robbery is publicly notorious, and all the regular jewel buyers know him.
"Being a criminal novice, he doesn"t know any regular receiver of stolen goods, and if he did would prefer to wait and get full value by an ordinary sale. There will always be a danger of detection so long as the stones are not securely hidden, so he proceeds to hide them. He knows that if any suspicion were aroused his rooms would be searched in every likely place, so he looks for an unlikely place. Of course, he thinks of taking out a panel and hiding them behind that. But the idea is so obvious that it won"t do; the police would certainly take those panels out to look behind them. Therefore he determines to hide them _in_ the panels. See here--he took the two pieces of wood with the filled hole from his tail pocket and opened his penknife--the putty near the surface is softer than that near the bottom of the hole; two different lots of putty, differently mixed, perhaps, have been used, therefore, presumably, at different times."
"But to return to Challitt. He makes holes with a centre-bit in different places on the panels, and in each hole he places a diamond, embedding it carefully in putty. He smooths the surface carefully flush with the wood, and then very carefully paints the place over, shading off the paint at the edges so as to leave no signs of a patch. He doesn"t do the whole job at once, creating a noise and a smell of paint, but keeps on steadily, a few holes at a time, till in a little while the whole wainscoting is set with hidden diamonds, and every panel is apparently sound and whole."
"But, then--there was only one such hole in the whole lot."
"Just so, and that very circ.u.mstance tells us the whole truth. Let me tell the story first--I"ll explain the clue after. The diamonds lie hidden for a few months--he grows impatient. He wants the money, and he can"t see a way of getting it. At last he determines to make a bolt and go abroad to sell his plunder. He knows he will want money for expenses, and that he may not be able to get rid of his diamonds at once. He also expects that his suddenly going abroad while the robbery is still in people"s minds will bring suspicion on him in any case, so, in for a penny in for a pound, he commits a bold forgery, which, had it been successful, would have put him in funds and enabled him to leave the country with the stones. But the forgery is detected, and he is haled to prison, leaving the diamonds in their wainscot setting.
"Now we come to Gavin Kingscote. He must have been a shrewd fellow--the sort of man that good detectives are made of. Also he must have been pretty unscrupulous. He had his suspicions about the genuineness of the diamond robbery, and kept his eyes open. What indications he had to guide him we don"t know, but living in the same house a sharp fellow on the look-out would probably see enough. At any rate, they led him to the belief that the diamonds were in the thief"s rooms, but not among his movables, or they would have been found after the arrest. Here was his chance. Challitt was out of the way for years, and there was plenty of time to take the house to pieces if it were necessary. So he changed into Challitt"s rooms.
"How long it took him to find the stones we shall never know. He probably tried many other places first, and, I expect, found the diamonds at last by p.r.i.c.king over the panels with a needle. Then came the problem of getting them out without attracting attention. He decided not to trust to the needle, which might possibly leave a stone or two undiscovered, but to split up each panel carefully into splinters so as to leave no part unexamined. Therefore he took measurements, and had a number of panels made by a joiner of the exact size and pattern of those in the room, and announced to his landlady his intention of painting her panels with a pretty design. This to account for the wet paint, and even for the fact of a panel being out of the wall, should she chance to bounce into the room at an awkward moment. All very clever, eh?"
"Very."
"Ah, he was a smart man, no doubt. Well, he went to work, taking out a panel, subst.i.tuting a new one, painting it over, and chopping up the old one on the quiet, getting rid of the splinters out of doors when the booty had been extracted. The decoration progressed and the little heap of diamonds grew. Finally, he came to the last panel, but found that he had used all his new panels and hadn"t one left for a subst.i.tute. It must have been at some time when it was difficult to get hold of the joiner--Bank Holiday, perhaps, or Sunday, and he was impatient. So he sc.r.a.ped the paint off, and went carefully over every part of the surface--experience had taught him by this that all the holes were of the same sort--and found one diamond. He took it out, refilled the hole with putty, painted the old panel and put it back. _These_ are pieces of that old panel--the only old one of the lot.
"Nine men out of ten would have got out of the house as soon as possible after the thing was done, but he was a cool hand and stayed. That made the whole thing look a deal more genuine than if he had unaccountably cleared out as soon as he had got his room nicely decorated. I expect the original capital for those Stock Exchange operations we heard of came out of those diamonds. He stayed as long as suited him, and left when he set up housekeeping with a view to his wedding. The rest of the story is pretty plain. You guess it, of course?"
"Yes," I said, "I think I can guess the rest, in a general sort of way--except as to one or two points."
"It"s all plain--perfectly. See here! Challitt, in gaol, determines to get those diamonds when he comes out. To do that without being suspected it will be necessary to hire the room. But he knows that he won"t be able to do that himself, because the landlady, of course, knows him, and won"t have an ex-convict in the house. There is no help for it; he must have a confederate, and share the spoil. So he makes the acquaintance of another convict, who seems a likely man for the job, and whose sentence expires about the same time as his own. When they come out, he arranges the matter with this confederate, who is a well-mannered (and pretty well-known) housebreaker, and the latter calls at Mrs. Lamb"s house to look for rooms. The very room itself happens to be to let, and of course it is taken, and Challitt (who is the invalid cousin) comes in at night m.u.f.fled and unrecognisable.
"The decoration on the panel does not alarm them, because, of course, they suppose it to have been done on the old panels and over the old paint. Challitt tries the spots where diamonds were left--there are none--there is no putty even. Perhaps, think they, the panels have been shifted and interchanged in the painting, so they set to work and split them all up as we have seen, getting more desperate as they go on.
Finally they realize that they are done, and clear out, leaving Mrs.