The Mysterious Three

Voices were murmuring – men’s voices. The sight upon which my gaze rested made me recoil.

Stretched out on the floor, right below me, was a human body – shrivelled, dry, quite brown, but undoubtedly a body. It looked exactly like a mummy, a mummy five feet or more in length. Beside it knelt two figures. As I looked, I saw them slowly lift the body from the floor, one man holding either end of it. In a moment or two they had carried it out of sight. And the men who had taken it away were Sir Charles Thorold and the man I had known as Davies, but whose name I now knew to be Whichelo.

This was more, a great deal more than I had expected or even dreamt I should see when I entered the house of mystery.

What could it all mean? Had there been foul play? And if so, had Thorold had a hand in it? I could not think this possible. And yet what other construction could I possibly place upon what I had just witnessed?

I did not know what to think, much less had I any idea of what I ought now to do. And then, all at once, an inspiration came to me.

I took several long breaths. Then, setting my voice at a low, unnatural pitch, I gave vent to a deep, long-drawn-out wail, gradually raising my voice until it ended in a weird shriek.

The stillness below became intense. I paused for perhaps half-a-minute. Then I slowly repeated the wail, ending this time in a kind of unearthly yell.

I knew I had achieved my purpose – knew that the men below were terrified, panic-stricken. I could picture them kneeling beside the shrivelled corpse, literally petrified by horror, their eyes starting from their sockets, their faces bloodless.

Then I walked with measured tread about the floor, the dull “plunk plunk” of my rubber soles sounding, in the depth of the night, and in the stillness of that unoccupied house – ghostly even to me. Next I began to push the furniture about, and a moment later I slammed the door.

There was a wild, a frantic stampede. Both men had sprung to their feet and were dashing headlong down the stairs. I pursued them in the darkness! They heard the quick patter of my rubber shoes upon the stairs behind them, and it seemed to give them wings. Furniture was knocked spinning in the darkness. A terrific crash echoed through the house as, in their blind rush, they hurled on to the stone floor of the hall a big china vase the height of a man which had stood upon a pedestal. A door slammed. Then another, more faintly, a long way down some corridor.

Then once more all was still.

Chuckling at the grim humour of the situation, I went slowly up the stairs again. There was still a light in the first-floor room. I pushed the door open and walked boldly in.

I halted, surprise had petrified me.

The sight that my eyes rested upon I shall not forget as long as ever I live!

Chapter Twenty Three

Contains Another Revelation

I stood still in horror, my eyes riveted upon the shrivelled human body. It was stretched out upon several chairs placed side by side. The sight was most gruesome.

Near it, upon the floor, was an ordinary packing-case, in the bottom of which a quantity of wood shavings had been pressed down, to form a sort of bed. At once I realised that this box had been prepared for the reception of the body.

It was about to be smuggled out of the house!

But how did it come to be there? Whose body was it? How long had it been dead? And how had the man – for I saw it was the body of a man, apparently a man of middle-age – come by his death?

It was not the sight of the Thing that had startled me, however, for I had expected to see it there.

What had taken my breath away had been the sight of great heaps of coin upon the floor, gold coin which had evidently just been emptied out of the little sacks close by. Near by were some glass bottles containing powdered metal, some bottles of coloured fluid, and various implements – a couple of metal moulds, a ladle, a miniature hand-lathe, several files, and some curiously-fashioned tools which I judged must be finishing tools used in the manufacture of coin.

The truth was plain – a ghastly unexpected truth.

Thorold and Whichelo were, or had been, in some way concerned in issuing base coin, though to me it seemed hardly possible that Sir Charles could actually be implicated. I picked up a handful of the shining coins, and let them fall between my fingers in a golden stream. If they were not golden French louis they were certainly fine imitations. All the coins were French twenty and ten-franc pieces, I noticed. There were no British coins among them, nor were there coins of any other nation. In all, there must have been several thousands of them.

When I had recovered from my surprise, I began to examine the body more closely. With my electric torch I ran a flash all along it and to and fro. It was the body of a man about thirty, I definitely decided, and it was swathed in brown rags. I had seen bodies in the catacombs in Rome and in Paris that looked like this, and also in South America I had seen some.

South America! My thought of that continent set up a fresh train of thought in my mind. It made me think of Mexico, and the thought of Mexico, though not in South America, brought the tall, dark man, Whichelo, back to me vividly. He had been in Mexico a great deal at one time, Vera had told me. And this mummified body lying in front of me – yes, it singularly resembled the mummified bodies I had seen in Mexico when on my travels about the world.

What had caused death? Critical inspection with my electric torch showed distinctly a fracture at the base of the skull, as though it had been struck with some blunt implement, such as a hammer.

Yes, there could be no doubt that the skull had been severely fractured. I should have held the theory that the poor fellow had been attacked from behind, felled to the ground with some iron weapon. I wondered greatly how long the man had been dead. No expert knowledge was needed to decide that he must have been dead a number of years. And where had the body been hidden all this time?

Instinctively I glanced at the ceiling – at the gaping hole in it – and instantly I knew. This mummified body had been hidden away, buried between the ceiling and floor! It had been in that corner, where the hole now was. And the brown stain I had noticed in the corner of the ceiling…

But the money? Why, of course, the money must have been there, too. A thought struck me. I picked up some of the coins again, and glanced at the dates. Twenty-five or thirty years ago they were dated, yet they looked quite new. Clearly, then, they had not been in circulation. Paulton’s significant remark returned to me – the remark he had made that night in the room in Château d’Uzerche, when I had said something about not revealing Sir Charles Thorold’s secret.

Could there be some hidden connexion between this discovery I had made, Thorold’s secret, and the charge upon which Paulton was “wanted?”

I spent some time in examining the room and its contents. Then I explored other parts of the house.

Was I now gradually approaching the solution of Sir Charles Thorold’s secret?

I believed it more than likely that I might now at last be well on my way to solving the mystery of Houghton Park and the Thorolds’ sudden flight. That Sir Charles and his big friend would not return that night I fully believed. They might, or might not, be superstitious, but there could be no doubt I had terrified them thoroughly. If they returned at all it would be in the daytime, I conjectured.

What was to be done? How should I act?

I decided that the only thing to do would be to go out into the street and inform the constable of all that had happened. I had told him I would not stay long in the house in any case, and my prolonged absence might be making him feel uneasy.

I left by the front door – which I found securely bolted and chained on the inside – and there found the constable flashing his bull’s-eye lantern upon the door, and with his truncheon ready drawn.

“Hush!” I whispered, and he smiled upon seeing me, and at once replaced his truncheon.

“I was beginning to feel very anxious on your account, sir,” he said. “I ’arf wondered who might be a-comin’ out. Well, sir, did you see anything?”

“I should say so,” I answered, and then, as briefly as I could, I told him nearly everything.

I persuaded him to come in then and there.

“Well, look at that, now!” he said, as I showed him first the mummified body, then the sacks of gold, and pointed out to him the great hole cut in the ceiling. “Well, look at that, now!” he repeated.

“The awkward part of the affair is this,” I said at last. “Who is going to lodge information? I don’t care to, for, if I do, inquiries will be made as to how I came to be on the premises at all, and how I managed to get in, and it won’t look well if I am proved, on my own showing, to have entered the place secretly in the middle of the night. Again, I don’t want to lodge information against Sir Charles Thorold. Why should I? He has always been my friend. Nor, for that matter, do I want to prefer any sort of charge against Whichelo. So far as the body is concerned, we may be quite wrong in conjecturing that there has been foul play. Indeed, there is no actual proof that the mummy was hidden in the ceiling of the room, though personally I think it must have been. Everything points to it. And you, Bennett, can’t very well give information either without compromising yourself as well as me. Your inspector would want to know how you managed to get into the house, and what right you had to enter it.”

I paused, considering, while he removed his helmet and scratched his head.

“I’ll tell you what I think we had better do,” I said at last.

“Well, sir, what?” he inquired eagerly.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Go back to your beat. I’ll bolt and chain the front door when you’re gone. Then I’ll put out the light in this room, and make my way out of the house by the way I entered it.”

“But the two men,” the policeman said quickly. “Where can they have got to? They can’t have left the premises.”

“You may depend upon it they have,” I answered. “I feel pretty sure there must be some secret entrance to this house, that they alone know. The back door, too, is bolted and chained on the inside, and they can hardly have entered the way I did – ugh!” and I shuddered again at the thought of those horrible, hairy-legged spiders scampering over my bare flesh.

“Meet me 2.”