The Clue of the Twisted Candle

“God forbid that I should do anything so low,” said he hastily; “what made you think that?”

“Because I was putting my tongue out at you,” she admitted, and the taxi driver heard the shrieks of laughter in the cab behind him above the wheezing of his asthmatic engine.

At twelve that night in a certain suburb of London an overcoated man moved stealthily through a garden. He felt his way carefully along the wall of the house and groped with hope, but with no great certainty, along the window sill. He found an envelope which his fingers, somewhat sensitive from long employment in nefarious uses, told him contained nothing more substantial than a letter.

He went back through the garden and rejoined his companion, who was waiting under an adjacent lamp-post.

“Did she drop?” asked the other eagerly.

“I don’t know yet,” growled the man from the garden.

He opened the envelope and read the few lines.

“She hasn’t got the money,” he said, “but she’s going to get it. I must meet her to-morrow afternoon at the corner of Oxford Street and Regent Street.”

“What time!” asked the other.

“Six o’clock,” said the first man. “The chap who takes the money must carry a copy of the Westminster Gazette in his hand.”

“Oh, then it’s a plant,” said the other with conviction.

The other laughed.

“She won’t work any plants. I bet she’s scared out of her life.”

The second man bit his nails and looked up and down the road, apprehensively.

“It’s come to something,” he said bitterly; “we went out to make our thousands and we’ve come down to ‘chanting’ for 20 pounds.”

“It’s the luck,” said the other philosophically, “and I haven’t done with her by any means. Besides we’ve still got a chance of pulling of the big thing, Harry. I reckon she’s good for a hundred or two, anyway.”

At six o’clock on the following afternoon, a man dressed in a dark overcoat, with a soft felt hat pulled down over his eyes stood nonchalantly by the curb near where the buses stop at Regent Street slapping his hand gently with a folded copy of the Westminster Gazette.

That none should mistake his Liberal reading, he stood as near as possible to a street lamp and so arranged himself and his attitude that the minimum of light should fall upon his face and the maximum upon that respectable organ of public opinion. Soon after six he saw the girl approaching, out of the tail of his eye, and strolled off to meet her. To his surprise she passed him by and he was turning to follow when an unfriendly hand gripped him by the arm.

“Mr. Fisher, I believe,” said a pleasant voice.

“What do you mean?” said the man, struggling backward.

“Are you going quietly!” asked the pleasant Superintendent Mansus, “or shall I take my stick to you’?”

Mr. Fisher thought awhile.

“It’s a cop,” he confessed, and allowed himself to be hustled into the waiting cab.

He made his appearance in T. X.‘s office and that urbane gentleman greeted him as a friend.

“And how’s Mr. Fisher!” he asked; “I suppose you are Mr. Fisher still and not Mr. Harry Gilcott, or Mr. George Porten.”

Fisher smiled his old, deferential, deprecating smile.

“You will always have your joke, sir. I suppose the young lady gave me away.”

“You gave yourself away, my poor Fisher,” said T. X., and put a strip of paper before him; “you may disguise your hand, and in your extreme modesty pretend to an ignorance of the British language, which is not creditable to your many attainments, but what you must be awfully careful in doing in future when you write such epistles,” he said, “is to wash your hands.”

“Wash my hands!” repeated the puzzled Fisher.

T. X. nodded.

“You see you left a little thumb print, and we are rather whales on thumb prints at Scotland Yard, Fisher.”

“I see. What is the charge now, sir!”

“I shall make no charge against you except the conventional one of being a convict under license and failing to report.”

Fisher heaved a sigh.

“That’ll only mean twelve months. Are you going to charge me with this business?” he nodded to the paper.

T. X. shook his head.

“I bear you no ill-will although you tried to frighten Miss Bartholomew. Oh yes, I know it is Miss Bartholomew, and have known all the time. The lady is there for a reason which is no business of yours or of mine. I shall not charge you with attempt to blackmail and in reward for my leniency I hope you are going to tell me all you know about the Kara murder. You wouldn’t like me to charge you with that, would you by any chance!”

Fisher drew a long breath.

“No, sir, but if you did I could prove my innocence,” he said earnestly. “I spent the whole of the evening in the kitchen.”

“Except a quarter of an hour,” said T. X.

The man nodded.

“That’s true, sir, I went out to see a pal of mine.”

“The man who is in this!” asked T. X.

Fisher hesitated.

“Yes, sir. He was with me in this but there was nothing wrong about the business—as far as we went. I don’t mind admitting that I was planning a Big Thing. I’m not going to blow on it, if it’s going to get me into trouble, but if you’ll promise me that it won’t, I’ll tell you the whole story.”

“Against whom was this coup of yours planned?”

“Against Mr. Kara, sir,” said Fisher.

“Go on with your story,” nodded T. X.

The story was a short and commonplace one. Fisher had met a man who knew another man who was either a Turk or an Albanian. They had learnt that Kara was in the habit of keeping large sums of money in the house and they had planned to rob him. That was the story in a nutshell. Somewhere the plan miscarried. It was when he came to the incidents that occurred on the night of the murder that T. X. followed him with the greatest interest.

“The old gentleman came in,” said Fisher, “and I saw him up to the room. I heard him coming out and I went up and spoke to him while he was having a chat with Mr. Kara at the open door.”