“When I turned towards the fireplace, I tripped over something I knew hadn’t been there when I arrived at the end of the room. I had not time to investigate, the smoke might begin to thin at any moment. I reached the panel — and it was fastened. This was an unexpected crisis, but my props allowed for it. I removed the beard and wig, wiped the makeup from my face, turned my coat inside out so that it became different in both style and colour, and edged my way along the side of the room through smoke, exchanging comments with any guests I encountered. Just outside the salon a maid was standing near the second panel. I sent her into the room to help fan the smoke through windows that by that time had been opened, and the moment she was gone, I slipped through the panel and secured it. My shoes were still smoking a little bit, not badly. I reached my bedroom safely — I had my own servants to worry about as well as Uppington’s — returned my props to their hiding place, and went to bed. I thought my prank had come off perfectly, and I congratulated myself on a superb performance. Even when the police woke me to find out whether I could identify that body, I failed to connect it with the object I had stumbled over, but I did so the first thing this morning when my housekeeper got a full report from one of Uppington’s maids.
“And that, I swear, is the whole story. I never saw the dead man before.”
“Did anyone else know about these ghostly adventures of yours?” Lady Sara asked.
“I’m sure no one did. I never mentioned them to a soul.”
“Their history covers a considerable time span — from those earlier instances fifteen to twenty years ago to the present. This is extremely important. Are you quite certain that in all those years you never mentioned them to anyone?”
“I’m positive. I’m a self-sufficient kind of person, and I don’t need to brag to others about my exploits.”
When we rose to leave, Lady Sara warned him, “I may have more questions. The police certainly will. This case appears to be much too complicated for them.”
We drove to the City to the office of Radcliffe’s estate agent. Lady Sara left me in the carriage while she called on him.
“You’ll be an unnecessary distraction,” she said. “I know the man, and he may consider it a violation of trust to give me the information I want. I’ll have to exercise my feminine wiles.”
Her visit was a long one, but she emerged smiling. “Now we can go to work,” she said.
On our return home, she called a conference with her two footmen, Rick Alward and Charles Tupper — both of them highly competent investigators — and me. She first described the case.
“This may seem like a random shot at a venture,” she said, “but if we wait for the victim to be identified, it may be weeks before anyone misses him. We can proceed without knowing who he is because of one fact we know for certain about the murderer. He had to be familiar with Cecil Radcliffe’s secret panels and his ghostly hobby. Radcliffe swears he has never told anyone about them, but he could have forgotten, or someone could have come across the information some other way. I think our most likely suspect is a former tenant because no one else could have had access to the house for the leisurely examination such a discovery would require. I have here a list of nine former tenants going back more than twenty years. I’ll give each of you three names. At this stage of the investigation, I want to know only one thing: Where was each one last night? When I have answers for all nine, we will be able to proceed.”
The majority of the tenants had continued to use the same estate agent after they left Maxton Place, and the agent had been able to supply one or sometimes several subsequent addresses for them. I was able to deal easily with the first two names on my list. One was an elderly gentleman who had the previous year moved to a warmer climate because of his health. The woman who sublet his house informed me that he now lived at Torquay, in the southwest of England, and she kindly let me copy his address from a calling card he had sent to her.
The second former tenant was exceptionally well qualified for participation in a ghostly prank, since he was dead, but both Lady Sara and the Chief Inspector would have questioned his eligibility as a suspect.
The third posed problems. His name was Langley Halstead, and he was a solicitor residing at 24 Larkly Road. One glance at the house revealed that he was not a successful solicitor. It was in a row of houses of the type referred to as a terrace, but it was a mean neighbourhood, and they were mean houses. After being driven past the address several times in a four-wheeler, I decided that this particular gambit required special preparation.
I called on an elderly woman shopkeeper for whom I had done favours in the past and took some of her stock on consignment. She offered a startling variety of knickknacks and cheap jewellery, and she helped me to make a selection. I was about to become a peddler, a humble but respectable calling, and for the remainder of the day, my milieu would centre on the back doors and, hopefully, kitchens, of the row of houses on Larkly Road where Langley Halstead resided.
I dressed for the part in clothing that was shabby but not actually disreputable. Otherwise, my props were a wicker tray with a lid and cheap baize lining, the stock of trinkets and knickknacks my friend had lent to me, a limp that I had perfected through long practice, a cap that had seen much wear, and a barely visible smudge on my face.
I had a considerable advantage over most peddlers: Money was of no concern to me. I could offer spectacular bargains that were likely to put the customer in a cheerful mood and encourage talk and confidence.
Back I went to Larkly Road, and this time I inspected the back gardens and doors of residences. There were two well-cultivated gardens, but most of the rear vistas were even more unattractive than the front ones had been. The men residing in houses of this sort usually were something not too important in the City; their energies were sapped by their long day’s work and the turmoil of the twice-daily commuter trains. The wives exhausted themselves practicing gentility. There was no place in the budget for a gardener.
I called at the Halstead rear door after visiting several houses on either side, where I disposed of two necklaces, a ring, and eight brooches, and collected a full measure of gossip about Langley Halstead.
Residents of Larkly Road rarely had more than two servants, a maid and a plain cook, with one of them doubling as housekeeper, but most of these homes made do with only one. According to the servants employed by Halstead’s neighbours, he was a bachelor with a shoddy reputation. He never paid his bills. Since he was a solicitor, he had to be earning some money, but he certainly never spent any, not locally. And he did with only one servant, name of Effie, whom all of the neighbours’ servants felt sorry for.
Despite his miserly ways on Larkly Road, he had plenty of money for frolicking elsewhere. He frequently went out in the evening, dressed fit to kill and riding in a cab. I asked whether he had gone out the previous evening. No one had noticed.
My knock on the Halstead rear door was answered by Effie herself, a tall, thin, homely young woman of about twenty-five. She was entranced by my display of baubles, and after trying unsuccessfully to make up her mind, she invited me in for tea so she could take some time to decide.