“I simply stood and stared. My head was full of the City and Provincial Bank. And, anyway, it’s not his own bank — the bank he uses, I mean.
“Then Mr. Bowlder turned round and saw me. The sun was behind his head and I didn’t get a good view of his face; but all of a sudden his fingers crisped up as though he were going to scratch with them. Then he got up and ran at me. I jumped outside; he slammed the door, and bolted it on the inside.”
She paused.
“Go on, Miss Dawson,” said Colonel March in a curious voice.
“It takes a long time to tell,” she went on rather blankly, “but in a second or two I put together a whole lot of things. Skipper Morgan’s gang had been arrested just outside our village; the paper said so. Morgan’s picture was in the paper, and I knew I had seen him at Greenacre the week before John had been down there to visit me. I suppose Morgan saw him there, and that’s why Morgan made such a very funny joke about John when the bank was robbed. It was all a kind of whirl in my head; but it came together as a dead certainty.
“There is a telephone in the hall just outside Mr. Bowlder’s study. I sat down and rang up the local police.”
Here she looked at them with some defiance.
“What I was afraid of was that Mr. Bowlder would come out of the room and take the money away and hide it somewhere before the police arrived. I didn’t see how I could stop him if he did. But he didn’t even come out of the study. That worried me horribly, because the room was as quiet as a grave and I wondered what he might be up to. I like people to do something.
“Then I thought: ‘Suppose he got out of a window?’ But I remembered something about that. As I told you, the woodwork of that room had been painted only a few days before. It wasn’t the best of painting jobs; and as a result both windows were so stuck that it was impossible to open them. Annie had been complaining about it the day before; they were to have been seen to that very day. So when the police arrived — I could hardly believe my good luck — Mr. Bowlder was still in that room with the money.
“It was an Inspector and a Sergeant of the local police. They were on hot bricks, because Mr. Bowlder is an important man; but the Morgan gang had been caught near there and they weren’t taking any chances. While I was trying to explain, Mr. Bowlder opened the door of the study. He was as pleasant and sad-faced as ever.
“He said, ‘Money? What money?
“I explained all over again, and I’m afraid I got a bit incoherent about it. But I told them the money was still in the study, because Mr. Bowlder hadn’t left it.
“He said — and don’t I remember it! — ‘Gentlemen, this young lady is suffering from optical illusions. At nine o’clock in the morning this is a pity. I am aware that you have no search warrant, Inspector, but you are at liberty to make as thorough a search of this room as you like. How much money was there, Miss Dawson?’
“I said thousands and thousands of pounds: it sounded wrong even as I said it. Mr. Bowler laughed.
“He said, ‘Thousands and thousands of pounds, eh? Gentlemen, if you can find any money in this room — apart from a few shillings on my person — I will donate it all to police charities. But there is no money here.’
“And there wasn’t. Enough money to fill a suitcase — and yet it wasn’t there.”
Colonel March frowned. “You mean the police didn’t find it?”
“I mean it wasn’t there to be found. It had just vanished.”
“That’s as true as gospel,” declared Chief Inspector Ames with vehemence. “I rang them up half an hour ago and talked to Inspector Daniels. Search? They had the whole place to pieces! Bowlder sat and smoked cigarettes and egged them on. They even got an architect in to make certain there were no secret panels anywhere in the room.”
“And?”
“There weren’t any. There wasn’t a hiding place for so much as a pound note, let alone a sackful of the stuff. The point is, what’s to be done? I don’t think Miss Dawson is lying, but all that money couldn’t vanish into thin air. How could it?”
Colonel March was pleased. He relighted his pipe; he rocked on his heels before the fire; then, becoming conscious of the impropriety, he coughed and tried to conceal the fact that he was pleased.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “But this is the best thing I have encountered since the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin — you recall? — went after the purloined letter. Ahem. Now let us see. We establish that there are no secret panels or other flummery. Windows?”
“Just as Miss Dawson said. The windows were so stuck that two men couldn’t move ’em. Nothing could have been taken out of the room that way.”
“Fireplace?”
“Bricked up. They don’t use it, because the room is centrally heated. Bricks solidly cemented and untouched. No possible hiding place in or round the fireplace.”
“Furniture?”
Ames consulted his notebook. “One flat-topped table, one small table, two easy chairs, one straight chair, one bookcase, one standing lamp, one standing ashtray. You can take it for granted that not one of those got away without the closest examination; and nothing was hidden in any of them. Anything to add to that, Miss Dawson?”
Marjorie shook her head. “No. And it wasn’t in the carpet or the curtains, or behind the pictures, or in the leaves of the books, or even in the bust I mentioned; not that you could put all that money there, anyway. It just wasn’t there.” She clenched her hands. “But you do believe me, don’t you?”
“Miss Dawson,” said Ames slowly, “I don’t know. You’re certain Bowlder didn’t leave the study at any time before the police arrived?”
“Positive.”
“He couldn’t have slipped out?”
“No. I was in front of the door all the time. It’s true, Inspector. What reason would I have for lying to you? It only got me the sack, and it hasn’t helped John. I’ve thought and thought about it. I thought of the trick, too, of hiding a thing by leaving it in plain sight, where nobody notices it. But you certainly couldn’t leave the City and Provincial Bank money in plain sight without anybody noticing it.”
“Well, it beats me,” admitted the Chief Inspector. “But then that’s why we’re here. It’s impossible! Daniels swears there wasn’t an inch of that room they didn’t go over with a fine-tooth comb. And yet I believe you, because I’ve got a feeling Bowlder has been too smart for us somehow. Any ideas, Colonel?”
Colonel March sniffed at his pipe.
“I was just wondering,” he muttered; and then a doubtful grin broke over his face. “I am still wondering. Look here, Miss Dawson; you are sure there was no article of furniture in that room you haven’t described to us?”
“If you mean things like small ashtrays or desk ornaments—”
“No, no. I mean quite a large article of furniture.”
“I’m certain there wasn’t. There couldn’t very well be a large article of furniture that nobody would see.”
“I wonder,” said Colonel March. “Is Mr. Bowlder still at Greenacres? Excellent! I very much want to speak to him; and I want to see his study.”
Under a sky heavy with threatening snow the police car left Scotland Yard early in the afternoon. It contained Chief Inspector Ames and the plain-clothes man who was driving in the front seat, with Marjorie Dawson and Colonel March in the rear seat. To the girl’s protests that she wished to remain in London with Parrish, Colonel March was deaf; he said there was time enough for that.
At four o’clock they drove into the grounds of an ugly but highly substantial and highly respectable country house in Victorian Gothic.
Colonel March stood up as the car stopped in the drive.
“Where,” he asked, “are the windows of the study?”