Part 27 (1/2)

”Where is that card?” asked the chief.

”It's here in this envelope,” answered the landlady, who seemed to be much more alert and much sharper of intellect than her husband. ”I took care of it when we found out what had happened. I suppose you'll take charge of it?”

”If you please,” answered the chief. He took the envelope, looked inside it to make sure that the card was there, and turned to the landlady again.

”Yes?” he said. ”When you found out what had happened. Now, who did find out what had happened?”

”Well,” answered the landlady, ”the chambermaid came down soon after eleven, and said she couldn't get 27 to answer her knock. Of course, I understood that he wanted to catch the Rotterdam boat which sailed about noon, so I sent my husband up. And as he couldn't get any answer--”

”I went in with the chambermaid's key,” broke in the landlord, ”and there he was--just as you've seen him--dead. And if you ask me, he was cold, too--been dead some time, in my opinion.”

”The surgeon said several hours--six or seven,” remarked the inspector in an aside to the chief. ”Thought he'd been dead since four o'clock.”

”No signs of anything in the room, I suppose?” asked the chief. ”Nothing disturbed, eh?”

”Nothing!” replied the landlord stolidly. ”The room was as you'd expect to find it; tidy enough. And nothing touched--as the police that were called in at first can testify. They can swear as his money was all right and his watch and chain all right--there'd been no robbery. And,” he added with resentful emphasis, ”I don't care what you nor n.o.body says!--'tain't no case of murder, this! It's suicide, that's what it is.

I don't want my house to get the name and character of a murder place! I can't help it if a quiet-looking, apparently respectable young fellow comes and suicides himself in my house--there's n.o.body can avoid that, as I know of, but when it comes to murder--”

”No one has said anything about murder so far,” interrupted the chief quietly. ”But since you suggest it, perhaps we'd better ask who you'd got in the house last night.” He opened the register at the page in which he had kept his finger, and looked at the last entries. ”I see that three--no, four--people came in after this young man who called himself Frank Herman. You booked them, I suppose?” he went on, turning to the landlady. ”Were they known to you?”

”Only one--that one, Mr. Peter Donaldson, Dundee,” answered the landlady. ”He's the representative of a jute firm--he often comes here.

He's in the house now, or he was, an hour ago--he'll be here for two or three days. Those two, Mr. and Mrs. Nielsen--they appeared to be foreigners. They were here for the night, had breakfast early, and went away by some boat--our porter carried their things to it. Quiet, elderly folks, they were.”

”And the fourth--John Barcombe, Manchester--you didn't know him?” asked the chief, pointing to the last entry. ”I see you gave him Number 29--two doors from Herman.”

”Yes,” said the landlady. ”No--I didn't know him. He came in about nine o'clock and had some supper before he went up. He'd his breakfast at eight o'clock this morning, and went away at once. Lots of our customers do that--they're just in for bed and breakfast, and we scarcely notice them.”

”Did you notice this man--Barcombe?” asked the chief.

”Well, not particularly. But I've a fair recollection of him. A rather pale, stiffish-built man, lightish brown hair and moustache, dressed in a dark suit. He'd no luggage, and he paid me for supper, bed, and breakfast when he booked his room,” replied the landlady. ”Quite a quiet, respectable man--he said something about being unexpectedly obliged to stop for the night, but I didn't pay any great attention.”

The chief looked attentively at the open page of the register. Then he drew the attention of those around him to the signature of John Barcombe.

It was a big, sprawling signature, all the letters sloping downward from left to right, and being of an unusual size for a man.

”That looks to me like a feigned handwriting,” he said. ”However, note this. You see that entry of Frank Herman? Observe his handwriting. Now compare it with the writing on the card which was fixed on the door of 27--Herman's room. Look!”

He drew the card out of its envelope as he spoke and laid it beside the entry in the register. And Marshall Allerd.y.k.e, bending over his shoulder to look, almost cried out with astonishment, for the writing on the card was certainly the same as that which Chettle had shown him on the post-card found on Lydenberg, and on the back of the photograph of James Allerd.y.k.e discovered in Lydenberg's watch. It was only by a big effort that he checked the exclamation which was springing to his lips, and stopped himself from s.n.a.t.c.hing up the card from the table.

”You observe,” said the chief quietly, ”you can't fail to observe that the writing in the register, is not the writing of the card pinned on the door of Number 27. They are quite different. The writing of Frank Herman in the register is in thick, stunted strokes; the writing on the card is in thin, angular, what are commonly called crabbed strokes. Yet it is supposed that Herman put that card outside his bedroom door. How is it, then, that Herman's handwriting was thick and stunted when he registered at seven o'clock and slender and a bit shaky when he wrote this card at, say, half-past ten or eleven? Of course, Herman, or whatever his real name is, never wrote the line on that card, and never pinned that card on his door!”

The landlord opened his heavy lips and gasped: the landlady sighed with a gradually awakening interest. Amidst a dead silence the chief went on with his critical inspection of the handwriting.

”But now look at the signature of the man who called himself John Barcombe, of Manchester. You will observe that he signed that name in a great, sprawling hand across the page, and that the letters slope from left to right, downward, instead of in the usually accepted fas.h.i.+on of left to right, upward. Now at first sight there is no great similarity in the writing of that entry in the register and that on the card--one is rounded and sprawling, and the other is thin and precise. But there is one remarkable and striking similarity. In the entry in the register there are two a's--the a in Barcombe, the a in Manchester. On the one line on the card found pinned to the door there are also two a's--the a in please; the a in call. Now observe--whether the writing is big, sprawling, thin, precise; feigned, obviously, in one case, natural, I think, in the other, all those four a's are the same! This man has grown so accustomed to making his a's after the Greek fas.h.i.+on--a--done in one turn of the pen--that he has made them even in his feigned handwriting!

There's not a doubt, to my mind, that the card found on Herman's door was written, and put on that door, by the man who registered as John Barcombe. And,” he added in an undertone to Allerd.y.k.e, ”I've no doubt, either, that he's the man of the Eastbourne Terrace affair.”

The landlord had risen to his feet, and was scowling gloomily at everybody.