“The police, I think. Three cars.”
“Stay where you are. Don’t stir. Ardatha—with me.”
I stood still, fists clenched, watching the melee below.
“Bart! Bart!” Ardatha cried my name despairingly.
“Be silent! Precede me.”
I heard them hurrying along the passage. But he had said “Don’t stir,” and I did not stir. I made no move until the opening and closing of the door told me that they were gone. Then I sprang around.
Footsteps were bounding up the stairs. I could hear excited voices—and an amazing, an all but unbelievable fact dawned upon me:
Dr Fu Manchu was trapped!
Pursuing A Shadow
“Kerrigan! Kerrigan!”
Nayland Smith was banging on the door.
I ran to open it. He sprang in, his eyes gleaming excitedly. He had removed the synthetic beard but still wore his shabby suit. Beside him was Inspector Gallaho, head bandaged beneath a soft hat which took the place of his usual tight-fitting bowler. Four or five plainclothes police came crowding up behind.
“Where is he?”
“Gone! He went at the moment that I heard you on the stair!”
“What!”
“That’s not possible,” growled Gallaho, staring at me in a questioning way. “No one passed us, that I’ll swear.”
“Lights on that upper stair!” snapped Smith. “Stay where you are, Gallaho—you men, also.”
He examined me intently.
“I know what you’re thinking. Smith,” I said, “but I am quite myself. Ardatha and Fu Manchu were here two minutes ago. He held me up with a thing which disintegrates whatever it touches.”
“Ericksen’s Ray?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Good God! But it’s a cumbersome affair!”
“No larger than a fountain pen. Smith! He has perfected it, so he says. But—where is he?”
Nayland Smith tugged at the lobe of his ear.
“You say the girl went with him?”
“Yes.”
“Who lives above?”
“A young musician, Basil Acton—but he’s abroad at present.”
“Sure?”
He began to run upstairs, crying out over his shoulder:
“Gallaho and two men! The others stand by where they are.”
We reached the top landing and paused before my neighbor’s closed door.
Gallaho rang the bell, but there was no response.
“Hello!”
Smith stooped.
I had switched on the landing light, and now I saw what had attracted his attention. Also I became aware of a queer acrid smell.
Where a Yale lock had been there was nothing but a hole, some two inches in diameter, drilled clean through the door!
“It’s bolted inside,” said Gallaho.
“But they are trapped!” I cried excitedly. “There is no other way out!”
“Unfortunately,” growled Gallaho,”there is no other way in. Down to the tool chest, somebody.”
There came a rush of footsteps on the stair, an interval during which Gallaho tried to peer through the hole in the door and Nayland Smith, ear pressed to a panel, listened but evidently heard nothing. To the high landing window which overlooked Bayswater Road rose sounds of excited voices from the street below.
“Seven black beauties roped in there,” said Gallaho grimly,”but it remains to be seen if we’ve got anything on them.”
One of the flying squad men returning with the necessary implements, it was a matter of only a few minutes to break the door down. I had been in my neighbour’s flat on one or two occasions, and when we entered I switched the lights up, for we found it in darkness.
“Is there anyone here?” called Gallaho.
There was no reply.
We entered the big, untidy apartment which, sometimes to my sorrow, I knew that Acton used as a music room. It had something of the appearance of a studio. Bundles of music were littered on chairs and settees. The grand piano was open. An atmosphere stale as that inside a pyramid told of closed windows. Knowing his careless ways, I doubted if Acton had made arrangements to have his flat cleaned or aired during his absence. There was no one there.
“How many rooms, Kerrigan?” Smith snapped.
“Four, and a kitchenette.”
“Three men stay on the landing!” shouted Gallaho.
We explored every foot of the place, and the only evidence we found to show that Dr Fu Manchu and Ardatha had entered was the hole drilled through the front door, unticlass="underline"
“What’s this?” cried one of the searchers.
We hurried into the kitchenette which bore traces of a meal prepared at some time but not cleared up. The man had opened a big cupboard in which I saw an ascending ladder.
“The cisterns are up there,” I explained. “This is an old house converted.”
“At last!” Smith’s eyes glinted. “That’s where he is hiding!”
Before I could restrain him he had darted up the ladder, shining the light of a flashlamp ahead. Gallaho followed and I came next.
We found ourselves under the sloping roof in an attic containing several large tanks, unventilated, and oppressively stuffy.
There was no one there.
“Doctor Fu Manchu is a man of genius,” said Smith, “but not a spirit. He must be somewhere in this building.”
“Not so certain, sir!” came a cry.
One of the Scotland Yard men was directing light upon lath and plaster at that side of the attic furthest from the door. It revealed a ragged hole—and now we all detected a smell of charred wood.
“What’s beyond there?” Gallaho demanded.
“The adjoining house, at the moment in the hands of renovators. It is being converted into modern flats.”
But already Smith, stooping, was making his way through the aperture—and we all followed.
We found ourselves in an attic similar to that which we had quitted. We crossed it and climbed down a ladder. At the bottom was a room smelling strongly of fresh paint, cluttered up with decorators’ materials, in fact almost impassable. We forced a way through onto the landing, to discover planks stretched across a staircase, scaffolding, buckets of whitewash . . .
Nayland Smith ran down the stairs like a man demented, and even now in memory I can recapture the thud of our hammering feet as we followed him. It drummed around that empty, echoing house; the lights of our lamps danced weirdly on stripped walls, bare boards and half-painted woodwork. We came to the lobby. Smith flung open the front door.
It opened not on Bayswater Road as in the case of the adjoining house, but upon a side street, Porchester Terrace. He raced down three steps and stood there looking to right and to left.
Dr Fu Manchu had escaped . . .
* * *
“The biggest failure of my life, Kerrigan.”
Nayland Smith was pacing up and down my study; he had even forgotten to light his pipe. His face was wan—lined.
“I don’t think I follow, Smith. It’s amazing that you arrived here in the nick of time. His escape is something no one could have anticipated. He has supernormal equipment. This disintegrating ray which he carried defeats locks, bolts and bars. How could any man have foreseen it?”
“Yet I should have foreseen it,” he snapped angrily. “My arrival in the nick of time had been planned.”
“What!”
“Oh, I didn’t know Ardatha was coming. For this I had not provided. But my visit to you earlier in the evening, my leaving here, or pretending to leave, the most vital piece of evidence on which I have ever laid my hands, was a leaf torn from Doctor Fu Manchu’s own book!”
“What do you mean?”
“I was laying a trail. I was doing what he has done so often. He knew that I had those incriminating signatures, he knew that failing their recovery, the break-up of the Council of Seven was at least in sight. You are aware of how closely I was covered, how narrowly I escaped death. What I didn’t tell you at the time was this: In spite of my disguise, I had been followed from Sloane Street right to the door of your flat.”