Читать книгу The Red Room - Le Queux William - Страница 4

For a full hour we remained there in the presence of the dead.

Before that huddled figure I stood a dozen times trying to form some feasible theory as to what had actually occurred within that room.

The problem, however, was quite inexplicable. Who had killed Professor Greer?

There, upon the end of the unfortunate man’s watch-chain, were the two keys which he always carried, keys which held the secrets of his experiments away from the prying eyes of persons who were undesirable. Many of his discoveries had been worth to him thousands of pounds, and to public companies which exploited and worked them hundreds of thousands of pounds more. There, in that very room in which I stood, had the Greer process of hardening steel been perfected, a process now used in hardening the armour-plates of our newest Dreadnoughts. Yet the master brain which had thought out those various combinations, and by years of patience had perfected the result, was now before me, inactive and dead.

I shuddered at sight of that disfigured face, hideous in its limp inertness and horrible to the gaze. But Kershaw Kirk, his eyes narrower and his face more aquiline, continued his minute investigation of every object in the room. I watched him with increasing interest, noticing the negative result of all his labours.

“I shall return again to-morrow when it is light,” at last he said; “artificial light is of little use to me in this matter. Perhaps you’ll come with me again – eh?”

“I’ll try,” I said, though, to be candid, I was not very keen upon a second visit to the presence of the disfigured body of the Professor. I could not see why Kirk was so anxious to avoid the police and to keep the affair out of the papers.

“The body must be buried before long,” I remarked. “How will you obtain a medical certificate and get it buried by an undertaker?”

“Mr Holford,” he said, turning to me with an expression of slight annoyance upon his face, “I beg of you not to anticipate difficulty. It is the worst attitude a man can take up – especially in trying to solve a problem such as this. The future kindly leave entirely with me.”

At that moment I was fingering a small test-tube containing some thick grey-coloured liquid, and as I turned I accidentally dropped it upon the tiles with which the Professor had had the place paved. In an instant there was a bright flash, almost like a magnesium light, so brilliant that for a second we were both blinded.

“I wonder what that was?” he remarked, startled by the result. “One must be careful in handling what the dead man has left behind.”

“Evidently,” I said; “we cannot tell what these various experimental apparatus and tubes contain. Therefore we should handle them delicately.”

And I bent to the table to examine another tube containing some bright red crystals held over an extinguished spirit-lamp by a brass holder, an action which my companion, I noticed, watched with a curious expression.

Was it suspicion of myself?

“Well, my dear friend,” he exclaimed suddenly as he stood beside the table, “the problem is, as you see, rendered the more difficult of solution by the inexplicable fate which has overtaken the Professor’s daughter. Here is a man against whom, as far as we know, nobody in the world had a grudge, who receives a telegram which he is careful to destroy, makes a preconcerted signal at his drawing-room window, and goes upon a journey to Edinburgh. We know that he went, for the conductor recollects asking if he would take an early cup of tea. Again, he received his daughter’s telegram and replied to it. Yet at the same time he was in Edinburgh he was in this very room behind two locked doors of which he alone had the key, the victim of a brutally murderous attack! These doors were locked, and to enter here both he and the assassin must have passed through the boudoir within a yard or so of his daughter.”

“Is there no other means of access except through the boudoir?” I asked. “Have the windows been examined?”

“Yes; all the windows were screwed down on the inside. To-morrow, in the light, you shall satisfy yourself. I must come here to search for any finger-prints,” was his hasty reply. “When I caused these doors to be opened, I was careful not to allow the locksmith to see that any tragedy had occurred. The man was paid, and went away in ignorance. Yet when Miss Ethelwynn realised the truth she was as one demented. At first she refused to leave the place, but I persuaded her, and she went with her maid to her aunt’s. I impressed upon her the value of silence, and she gave me her word that she would say nothing of what had occurred.”

“What about her maid Morgan?”

“She is ignorant of the truth,” he said, with a grim smile. “Well, this evening, it appears, the dead man’s daughter returns in secret, enters with her latch-key the house where her father is lying, removes her hat carefully, and then – ”

“Yes,” I said. “And then? What do you believe occurred?”

He was silent, his deep-set eyes downcast in thought.

“Well, I – I hardly know what to think,” he declared. “It almost seems as though she shared the same fate as her father. That horrible disfiguration is most remarkable.”

“Her entry here in secret and the strange fate that has overtaken her increases the mystery tenfold!” I declared. “Why didn’t she call Antonio?”

“Perhaps that was her intention, but she was prevented,” suggested my friend. And I saw that his glance was fixed upon me curiously, as though he were deliberately gauging my character and intelligence.

“But to me it appears as though her intention might have been to reach the laboratory unobserved,” I said. “She may, indeed, have been up here for aught we know to the contrary.”

“I hardly think so. She was far too horrified at sight of the body of her father, to whom she was so devoted. The scene when she saw him dead was very painful.”

“But might she not have been induced to return by morbid curiosity?” I suggested.

“You’ve already told me that she was beside herself with grief.”

“Well,” he replied, with a sigh and a final glance across to where the dark object was huddled in the opposite corner, “no purpose, I think, can be served by remaining here longer to-night. We must return in the morning. I only brought you here in order that you might fully understand the exact problem now before us. Come along.”

“But I don’t see, Mr Kirk, how it is possible for me to help you. I’m quite a novice in this kind of thing,” I said.

“You are not a detective. If you were, I should not seek your aid,” he snapped, as he led the way to the door and switched off the lights. “I know you think it rather strange that I have not called a doctor and the police, and had a post-mortem, and allowed the newspaper reporters to ‘work up’ a big sensation; but, as I’ve already told you, our success depends upon absolute secrecy. The affair is a startling one to you, no doubt; but if you were aware of what the tragedy really means you would be dumbfounded. Why, the newspapers could make a worldwide sensation of it if only they got at the true facts; but they never will, I assure you – never.”

“Then even I may not know the true facts?” I asked, as I stood with him again in the boudoir.

“As far as the tragedy is concerned, you already know them. They are just as I have told you. But there are other facts – facts concerning myself and also the Professor – which I am not permitted to divulge. They must,” he added, “remain a secret.”

“Well – if you are not perfectly frank with me, Mr Kirk,” I protested, “I cannot see how I can regard you as a sincere friend. This is a serious and complicated problem, in which you require my assistance in an endeavour to seek a solution. How can I form any conclusions or help you if you deliberately hold back from me some of the circumstances?”

“I have held back none,” was his hasty response – “at least, none which have any bearing whatever upon the tragedy. It is of myself and my own connection with Greer that I am speaking. I was the first person called, before there was even a suspicion of anything wrong. The fact is, the dead man trusted me implicitly.”

“And, according to your showing, certain enemies of yours suspected the truth – that your friendship for the Professor was only feigned.”

My companion looked me straight in the face with his narrow-set eyes, and replied:

“My dear Mr Holford, what my enemies say was, I admit, perfectly correct. I have sought to conceal nothing. Greer believed that I was his friend, but I hated him. I had good cause to do so!”

The man’s crafty eyes again met mine, and I saw in them an expression which I had never noticed before. Was it possible that he was the unknown assassin, and was only misleading me by clever and cunning devices?

I recollected that he had told me that the Professor had stolen from him some valuable secret. Well, if he did not fear the crime of retaliation being brought home to him, why did he not go openly and lay the facts before the police? His evasive replies and thin excuses appeared to be utterly ridiculous. In my foolish ignorance I still believed Kershaw Kirk to be an ordinary individual, much like myself. The remarkable truth had not then been revealed to me – as it was later.

We descended to the dining-room, where Antonio and his brother Pietro were still watching beside the couch whereon lay the poor girl who had met with such a strange and inexplicable fate.

Kirk again knelt beside her, and for a long time searched for any wound she might bear. But he found none.

“Remember, Antonio, no person must enter this house under any pretext whatever,” my companion ordered. “You are responsible.”

“No one shall know anything, signore,” replied the man. “Morgan and the maids are all in ignorance – for you, signore, kept it so cleverly from them.”

“A woman never can keep a secret,” Kirk answered sharply, “and if we are to fathom the mystery of your master’s death not a word must leak out. You know what I have told you.”

“I recollect, signore,” the man replied. And, using the Italian oath, he said, “I have promised you, upon the tomb of my sainted mother.”

“Then close this room, and with your brother keep a watchful vigil until to-morrow.”

And we both went out, and were soon running in the car back towards Bedford Park.

Arrived at his house, he insisted that I should enter for a “night-cap,” it being then just past three o’clock. Therefore, reluctantly, I accompanied him within.

In his study a tantalus-stand and glasses were upon the table. He had thrown off his overcoat, and was about to pour me out some whisky, when the telephone bell suddenly rang. He put down the glass, and, walking to the instrument, answered the summons.

“Hulloa? Yes?” he said.

Then, as he listened intently, his face blanched. He spoke some quick words in German, which, unfortunately, I could not follow. They seemed like instructions.

Again he listened, but suddenly whatever he heard so appalled him that the receiver dropped from his thin, nerveless fingers, and with a low, hoarse cry he staggered across to his big grandfather chair, near which I was standing, and sank into it, rigid, staring, open-mouthed.

If ever guilt were written upon a man’s face, it assuredly was written upon that of Kershaw Kirk at that moment.