“I’m not coming with you,” said Rollison. “Follow that Chrysler, and let me know where it goes. Don’t fall down on the job, Perky.”
“What, me?” said Perky. “You be careful, Mr. Ar!” He grinned and drove off.
Rollison remembered that cheery grin and the warning, an echo of Jolly’s. And he was about to take a risk which nothing could fully justify. He went back to the mews, where the garage remained deserted, and walked boldly to number 7. He did not know which flat the couple had come from; he did not even know whether anyone else was in the flats. So he rang the bell at number L There was no answer. He tried again without getting a response, then went upstairs. He opened the letter-box and listened, but heard nothing.
He put on the gloves and then took a knife from his pocket.
It was, in many ways, a remarkable knife, and he had taken it from a remarkable young man who, over a period of years, had cracked crib after crib and remained free of the police. The young man had eventually slipped up and was now languishing on the Isle of Wight, in a prison in a forest. His knife had better fortune. Among its blades there was a long one of flexible steel. Rollison pushed the blade between the door and the lock. The steel, coming up against the barrel of the lock, crept slowly round it and, when the pressure was as strong beyond the barrel as it was on Rollison’s side, the lock clicked back. It moved easily, as if it had been recently oiled.
Rollison pushed open the door.
He entered an L-shaped passage, off which five doors led. Two were ajar, three closed. He closed the front door and stood quite still, listening for the slightest sound. It was usually possible to tell whether a room or a flat was occupied—something one sensed without seeing or hearing anything clearly. Nothing suggested that anyone was here. He looked into the rooms where the doors were ajar and found that one was a bath-room and the other the kitchen. On the draining-board were some cups and saucers, plates and dirty knives and forks.
He tried the nearest of the closed doors. This led into a small, luxuriously furnished bedroom with a colour-scheme of primrose and green; a woman’s room. The furniture was of bleached oak, and everything had a touch of opulence, contrasting oddly with the dingy exterior of the house.
There were some modern pictures on the walls, and he glanced at the nearest—and widened his eyes when Rollison saw the unmistakable art and signature of Picasso; the owner was a man who spent prodigiously on art. He left the room and tried the next, made sure that no one was in there, and looked into the third. This was the largest of them all, and ran the whole length of the house. There were windows at each end, and the room itself was a drawing-room which would have graced many a country house. The touch of luxury was very evident here; also the thick pile of the beige and red carpet, the soft silken cushions of the same colour, the Bergfere suite, the walnut grand piano. The pictures here were water-colours—not particularly modern. There was a Birket Foster, a Wimperis and several others by artists of repute.
On a small table between two chairs were liqueur glasses and on an ash-tray near them, several cigarette-ends. Two were plain, two were red-tipped. -So the man—presumably Oliver Merino—and the girl, had sat here. Rollison touched one of the ends, which was quite cold although damp, but another, burned right down after it had been put into the tray, was slightly warm, and there was a faint smell of tobacco smoke.
They had been here not many minutes ago.
“Sorry, Jolly,” said Rollison aloud, and walked across to a fine walnut escritoire, with beautifully carved legs and edges. He pulled at the drawers; every one was locked. He took out the knife again, selected a “blade” which was in fact a skeleton key, and very soon the drawers were open. Each drawer was neat and tidy; in one were account-books, in another, files of letters, in a third, pens, pencils and stationery. He looked through the account-books which told him little except that there were few accounts noted there, but the few were all large ones. They were curiously kept, too. Instead of having the name and address of the “customer”, each page was headed by letters and numerals. A—A-l—A-2 and so on. Some of the totals of the accounts ran into five figures, none was less than four figures.
He glanced through the letters.
All were addressed to Merino—except a few, which began: “Dear Oliver” The signatures were usually full, not just Christian names. Most of the letters came from abroad—there were several from Paris and New York, some were from Johannesburg, two came from Buenos Aires, one from Lahore, another from Rangoon. The Rangoon letter particularly interested Rollison, simply because it came from Burma. It was brief and to the point:
“Dear Mr. Oliver,
The goods have been despatched by air mail and should reach you about the same time as this. I have no further information about the other matter—I do not think you will get further information from here, they have moved to London all right.
Yours sincerely,
Maurice Fenton.”
And in a circle drawn at the corner of the letter was the cipher: B-2.
Rollison looked at the page in the account-book under that heading—and his lips rounded in an “O” of astonishment. It was the largest account he had yet seen, and ran into the three hundred thousands. There were thirteen entries, the lowest a total of £11,350. Here and there a single word, such as “rubies” or “pearls”, suggested that some of the merchandise was jewels.
He replaced the letters and the books and then, with the help of his skeleton key, re-locked the drawers. That done, he looked about the room, wondering where the safe was kept. A wall-safe? Or one let into the floor? Certainly there was no piece of furniture which looked as if it concealed a safe.
He moved the pictures aside, one after the other and when he looked behind the Birket Foster, he found what he sought Here was a wall-safe, an ordinary combination type with a small knob in the middle of the circular piece of shiny steel. He touched the knob gingerly with his finger—and snatched it away as pain shot through his hand. The safe was electrically controlled—and alive. He rubbed his finger and waked until the stinging sensation had gone, then turned away. If Merino thought the safe worth such protection, it probably contained something very valuable—perhaps the explanation of the big figures in the account-books.
He thought much about Blane and his talk of diamonds. He went into the kitchen and searched under the sink and in the larder for the electric meter and main switch; he found none. Nor were they in the hall or in the bath-room. He went into the dining-room and bedroom, and could not find what he wanted. He had seen nothing which might conceal a meter in the drawing-room either, but there must be a meter. It might be somewhere outside. There was no back entrance.
He did not find what he wanted on the narrow landing or anywhere on the stairs.
He returned to Merino’s flat, and as he closed the door, he murmured aloud:
“That’s very odd—eh, Jolly?” He smiled when he thought of Jolly’s reaction to such an impasse as this, then put the thought out of his mind. In the drawing-room, he thought he heard a slight sound and stood still, looking at the windows, seeing garage doors and the drab cobblestones in the roadway. The sound wasn’t repeated, it had probably come from outside. He went to the safe again, then tried to trace the electric wiring from that—it might be connected to the mains hidden in the wall; whoever owned this flat would not like to see the untidy contraptions of meter and fuse box in the open. But the wiring was chased, the channel was plastered and painted over.
Then something crashed behind him, and he swung round.
“Seen enough, mister?” asked a man.