"I am inclined to believe you And it may be that you have been more of a dupe than anything else, though there is little excuse for you. You have been engaged in a foul and inhuman trade and must take the consequences."
"I do not understand, Pons," I began, when my friend silenced me with a gesture.
"Realise, Colonel Gandey," he went on. "I can promise nothing, though my recommendation to the police authorities might carry some weight if I were able to present them with a watertight case."
We were interrupted at that moment by a loud rapping at the door.
"Are you all right, Colonel? Do you wish me to call the police, sir?"
"Certainly not!"
The Colonel's voice was a strangled squawk and Solar Pons gave me a thin smile as the Colonel hurried over toward the door. I noticed he remained close behind him while I kept my pistol trained upon the second man before me. There was a muffled colloquy at the door and then Gantley was back.
"I will tell you everything. I hardly know where to begin, Mr Pons."
"Let me tell you what I have learned, Colonel. Then you can fill in the missing pieces."
"Very well, sir."
Solar Pons went over to stand at a point midway between the two men. He made a subtle gesture to me with the thin fingers of his left hand and so I continued to cover the dark man, Belding. The chauffeur, Chang, sat silent and impassive, nursing his wound, his face white despite his yellow pigmentation. His eyes burned vindictively into mine.
Solar Pons faced me in a contemplative mood and began to speak to me as though we were alone at 7B Praed Street.
"There were two baffling mysteries about this case, Parker. The murder of Romaine Schneider in a sealed room and the lack of motive. You now know how the murderer gained access."
"But I still do not know why, Pons."
"Precisely, Parker. I shall proceed to tell you if I am allowed freedom from interruption. The puzzle in the sealed room was the method of entry and exit. There had to be one because the murderer could not just vanish into thin air. He had also to be a huge man, as I had already demonstrated because Romaine Schneider was about six feet tall and had been hit squarely upon the crown of the head with shattering force. As the skylight, the obviously solid walls and the main door were ruled out for the reasons we have already discussed, there remained only the flooring.
"I had already noticed from the building below that it would have been impossible for anyone to have gained entry from the garage as it had a solid cement ceiling. That left only the store-room and a number of interesting possibilities emerged. There were various buttresses and pillars which, to my mind, ruled out a staircase in that portion of the building. It had to be a staircase or ladder because of the height of the studio from the ground. There was only one possible place and I immediately saw that it corresponded with the position of the raised platform in the studio above."
Solar Pons paused and looked at the crushed form of Colonel Gantley with glittering eyes. The man Belding held himself coiled tightly like a spring but I held the revolver ready and the expression on my face evidently deterred him.
"You may recall that I paid particular attention to the studio flooring, Parker. And that I found traces of the murderer which petered out near the foot of the shallow stairs leading to the platform. That merely reinforced my suspicions and I soon saw that though the floor was apparently solid, there were faint cracks between the pine planking at various points, instead of the tongue and groove joints which obtained elsewhere. I was convinced that an entrance would be found there and so it proved. We then had the problem of why the staircase existed and who had used it.
"I had only to see Godfrey Horrabin and Sir Hercules Kronfeld to eliminate them from my inquiries. Though both physically fitted the requirements it was obvious, from the frank and open way in which he answered my questions and my reading of his character, that Horrabin would not have destroyed his own livelihood as the dead man's secretary. Similarly, Kronfeld was genuinely moved at his old enemy's death; as I observed, there was a similar love-hate relationship between Gilbert and
Sullivan. Sir Hercules had been a personal friend until the two men quarrelled; in my opinion the feud between the two men, real or supposed, added salt to life for both.
"Two vital pieces of information emerged from my examination of Schneider's study, both of which had been overlooked by Jamison. Or rather, no proper conclusions had been drawn from them. The existence of the staircase which led only to the store-room and garage was far more plausible when it became clear that the dead sculptor was a notorious womaniser. Discretion was assured when a woman had only to drive her car into the garage, using a key supplied by Schneider, and gain access to the studio secretly and privately by using the staircase.
"Though we have not had time to find it, there is obviously a button or some mechanism down below which operates the thing from the store-room. The motive for the crime was supplied by my finding among Schneider's papers that Colonel Gantley here was paying the incredible sum of £100 a week for the privilege of renting Cheneys. It would have to be a profitable antique business indeed which could support such an outlay."
Colonel Gantley gave another groan and turned a haggard face toward Pons.
"Shall I tell you why Colonel Gantley paid Schneider one hundred pounds a week, Parker?"
I nodded.
"Because so much money was being made by the Colonel and his associates that money was no object. There were certain pressures on them and they had to get a respectable address with storage facilities immediately."
Colonel Gantley nodded.
"The police had just raided our headquarters in Lime-house, Mr Pons. I had instructions from above to evacuate all our supplies from Deptford. I brought them here just in time."
Solar Pons nodded, tapping tobacco into the bowl of is pipe.
"I suspected something of the sort. I remembered the newspaper reports a short while ago. And my suspicions became aroused when I saw the crates which had come from such places as Hong Kong and other cities in the far East."
"I wish I knew what you were talking about, Pons," protested.
"Tut, Parker, it was a simple deduction," said Solar Pons, lighting his pipe. "Following the murder some of the crates had been hastily moved and part of the contents spilled. You may remember I tasted some white powder which was on the floor. As a doctor, Parker, he implications should have been obvious."
"Drugs, Pons!"
"Of course, my dear fellow. Cocaine and opium, mainly, I should imagine. Hong Kong is one of the great Tearing houses for the trade in the Far East. Furthermore, all the crates we saw were marked with red stars. felt certain in my mind that these would be sure to contain genuine antiques or souvenirs. Colonel Gantley sere was only a tool, part of a large ring. I have a shrewd suspicion who was at the centre of the web."
"I beg of you, Mr Pons," said Gantley, in a shaking voice. He looked quickly at Belding, bit his lip and turned away again.
"But what has all this to do with the murder, Pons?" "Everything, Parker. Let me just reconstruct the mater. Romaine Schneider was in financial difficulties, we already know. He decided to let his house and rent a less expensive one. He was naturally delighted when colonel Gantley turned up at the estate agents and made us extravagant offer. But may we not conjecture that her some weeks of tenancy, his curiosity got the better of him? Why was an antique dealer like Colonel Gantley, a man with a relatively modest income, so keen to pay one hundred pounds a week?
"Why did he store so many things from the Far East inside the rooms below the studio? And why did he employ Chinese almost exclusively among his outside staff. That was so, was it not, Colonel Gantley?"